A phenomenon I've noticed recently is people trying to occupy some untenable middleground wrt to the use of systems sold as "AI" -- this is a position where people try to recognize the harms of this tech but also hold space for "responsible" or "ethical" use.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
Human beings have a genius for mean-spirited subtle insults.
In a recent meeting, a coworker was profusely praised for using CoPilot to summarize some very dry & voluminous documentation. It was kind of over the top.
Soon my puzzled coworker clued that they were obliquely putting her down. They were implying she was lazy and insufficiently bright enough to accomplish the task without a crutch like AI.
What's concerning was Copilot praising her in a similar fashion
Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)
Irenes (many)
Nicole Parsons