Bernie the WordsmithFeb 23
Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23

Look, we do not have a lot of ways to avoid that shit in the workplace lately. But people like to select their own fun.

Books about AI are fun.

Books made by AI are not.

Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
And please spare me with the "both sides" argument. Because one of them is trying to force feed things to the other. And one of them has all the money and resources and the other has not. This is not people taking sides. This is people trying for the boot to stop pressing against their face.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23

You keep mentioning fear of the machines.

Not about that.

You keep mentioning grammar checking and transcription functionality.

Not about that.

Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
Look, we get it. AI sounds hot. We read the same science fiction books and it is nice to think that maybe one day LLM technology can be leveraged against oppression. News about fake open models are fun in a sense because every time one of those pops up, some idiot is going to lose millions yadda yadda. But you are missing a very important point here: a permission structure is being built around us, and stopping it is absolutely crucial
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
Every time you do a "both sides" stuff between "AI hypers and deniers" you are basically telling me that the person worried about the destruction of their life, their job and the environment has the level of delusion of a person like Peter Thiel, an eldritch horror in a vessel made of flesh that thinks humanity, umm, should not exist.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
This is Mastodon. There is people here that can install GotoSocial in a smart oven toaster and then proceed to launch it in low orbit just for fun. Please stop making allusions to technophobia. It's irritating and disrespectful
Show threadJames TweedieFeb 23
@berniethewordsmith Excellent thread Bernie. Rather than technophobes I'd class those sounding the warnings and rejecting LLMs/"AI"/Emporers New Clothes as the Canary in the mine.
I've been involved with computing/programming since the early 1980s and have been enthusiastic about many of the technological developments. Most of the tech was used to produce tools which we could use to help get stuff done. We knew how it worked, and outcomes could be tested and predicted. LLM are not this!
Show threadBernie the Wordsmith
@MyricaGale A lot of very smart people I know are constantly tapping the sign about the non-deterministic nature of these models. I see they are tapping the sign louder and louder every time there is some news about healthcare applications and stuff
Feb 23 at 11:10pmWeb