I think it is fair to say that such destruction of cultural artifacts, such reduction of items that had meaning and significance to people is a type of violence in and of itself, regardless of how these items were acquired.

But of course those who created these works of art and these religious items in the first place, and others for whom they had significance — maybe they were family heirlooms? — were never asked for consent.

Conquistadors took it all because nobody could stop them.

🧵/2

When #AI techbros train their #LLMs on people's works, these works are similarly removed from their individual context, "melted down" into the raw material — training data. Just disembodied words and phrases and sentences for the model to parrot later.

Historical and cultural and social context of these works is destroyed, melted away.

And it also happens without consent.
And it also happens on a gigantic scale.
And it also happens because techbros can sell the output.

#Writing

🧵/3

And it also happens because nobody can stop them from crawling the open web and slurping all these cultural artifacts into their training raw materials.

After all, "this was all out there in the open; by publishing it online, authors asked for it to be crawled."

And it also, I dare say, is a form of violence.

And we will also be poorer for it.

#AI

🧵/4/end