Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
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Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
The AI Bubble Is An Information War
Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
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P Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary shared this topic
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott Oh, the products won't be cheaper. Only the quality. The savings, if there will be any - which there won't - will go to shareholders and CEO payments.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
You get what you pay for but instead of a cheap tshirt that shrinks the first time you wash it it’s the life threatening medical advice you get from the AI chat bot that your insurance company replaced human psychologists with or the AI financial planner that advises you to bet all your retirement savings on red at the roulette table.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic Many people won't have a choice... much like automated "call" centres, machines will be pushed into the front line, leaving people cursing into thin air when the bot 'doesn't understand ' their question...
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic Thank you. You just helped me reframe this in a useful way. I'm going to have to reconsider AI in terms of the analysis from The Innovator's Dilemma.
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Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
The AI Bubble Is An Information War
Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
@pluralistic I LOVE ED. he says everything the media refuses too. He actually tells the truth. Wish he was known worldwide.
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@fitzscott @pluralistic Many people won't have a choice... much like automated "call" centres, machines will be pushed into the front line, leaving people cursing into thin air when the bot 'doesn't understand ' their question...
@Nigel_Lake @fitzscott @pluralistic Aren't many website forms not already like that? I mean, if interactions with a human clerk would be like many forms, the clerks would be cursed at like I curse at the jejune front end designer who came up with cute looking UI roadblocks, detours, loops, deadends and other time wasters for people who instead just need something simple done.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic umm, no???
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A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality.
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@pluralistic Minor but not insignificant quibble: There *is* something wrong in the LLM/ML/AI field apart from the capitalism problem, namely the idea that intelligence is an engineering problem - e.g. manifested in trying to get from words to meaning with an algorithm, which may be literally impossible at the fundamental level & certainly isn't something we currently have a shred of evidence for. Real usefulness rests on the field's ability to move away from these assumptions.
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In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.
In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality.
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Cory Doctorow Yup. The only thing capitalists ever innovate is new ways to take other peoplems money. The efficiency they tout us always the efficency of miney transfers from us to them.
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