When someone is trying to hold this untenable position, a few things tend to come up (not everytime, not everyone):

1- Defensiveness. People read criticism of the systems and proposed uses of the systems as accusations that users are "bad people". Thus a criticism of the tech lands as criticism of the user, and tensions flare.
>>

4- Tone policing. People who are trying to occupy that uncomfortable, untenable space will claim that clear statements of harms/strong principles against use of these systems will "turn others away" as if the centrists are the ones actually pushing for more ethical practice.

But this "other people won't listen" remark I think is really a way of saying "This makes me uncomfortable" while trying to claim to be on the right side of history at the same time.
>>

OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before "genAI" and will be true after.

Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn't mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of "genAI" in research.
>>

I think another important step is a values examination. What is important to you? How are those values supported or not by entering the discourse in a way that holds space for OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Meta and all the other actors in this massive push to shove "AI" into every part of our lives as "not all bad"?

What are your research goals, what do you value about participating in scholarship, how can you meet those goals/act in accordance with those values and what obstacles are in your way?
>>

Part of what makes that middle ground untenable and uncomfortable, I think, is that it requires carrying water for these clearly bad actors. You can set that bucket down and step out onto firmer ground.

This does require going against the mainstream, but that gets easier when a) you find you're not alone and b) you see how much of mainstream opinion on this is actually the result of marketing.

/fin for now

@emilymbender

i despise AI because of its energy waste, its abuse of source material it rips off without attribution, and how it concentrates power with these amoral techbros who can use it for all sorts of malicious goals

but i always wondered if AI could be a standalone thing, something you ran yourself, at home, so there is no exposure to manipulative outside agendas, if i would have the same objections. assuming sane power usage and respect for creators. and assuming complete privacy

@benroyce @hackersquirrel @emilymbender IME you need substantial computer muscle for it to run models large enough to be useful. Not that it can't be done, not at all, but it's more accessible if you already have a powerful rig for other reasons.

And then, it doesn't necessarily improve some of the issues. Since models need lots of ram, it's actually less useful to fill, say 32 gigs of ram to serve one user, times 10000 users, than it is to have 320 terabytes of ram serving 10000 users.

@renardboy @hackersquirrel @emilymbender

well distant future

like we walk around with computers in our pockets that are 10,000x what we used to send astronauts to the moon. in 50 years, we'll walk around with petabytes and petaflops in our pockets (or stuck in our heads... cyborgs)

@benroyce @hackersquirrel @emilymbender Personally, my hope for better generative "AI" involves distributed models running on home servers that channel their heat usefully.

You'd have a bunch of servers with water cooling that feeds into appliances like hot water heaters, and each would hold some focused fragment of a large language model, and when you'd prompt you'd have some kind of router language model that'd send it to whoever is likely to have an answer.