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

@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 @nzlemming @emilymbender

Yup, this seems to be the catch, when you ask people where their training data comes from they either don't know or won't say.

Also, even if they somehow used entirely home-made ethically-obtained training data, it is still destroying the user's brain through lack of mental exercise and burning the planet as the "training" process uses a lot of energy.

@FediThing @nzlemming @emilymbender

yup

that's the dominant topic with #AI:

it makes us dumb

we talk of extending people's abilities with AI

no

we lose abilities (or never gain them)

our brain atrophies like unused muscle

dependent upon a piece of silicon that doesn't care at best. at worst, with corporate AI, works agendas on us, and, not distant scifi but soon, abusive psyops on us

cages on our brain that know us better than we know ourselves, and our brains too flabby to even notice

@benroyce @FediThing @nzlemming @emilymbender Exactly. When Sam Altman said he wanted intelligence to be a commodity that people rent off him, he didn't mean "intelligence" in the sense that police and security services mean it. He meant our ability to think.

He and these other Silicon Valley freaks envision a future in which everyone is utterly dependent on their agents to accomplish any task that makes cognitive demands on us. The tech broligarchy want to infantilize and enslave all humanity.