Your point about technology enabling people is well made. While I think it’s pretty clear that AI can have positive effects, your point about it’s use in propaganda and misinformation is legitimate. Even if I don’t think it’s the underlying issue, I can’t deny that it enables it. That said, this comment chain is long enough that I’m losing the plot. I tried to read back, but I don’t know what your stance in all this is.
Screaming regulate AI
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
I don’t know what “a third AI winter” means. I can’t tell if you’re saying you want AI to die out or if you’re sarcastically saying you want an AI nuclear apocalypse or maybe both. If you genuinely aren’t calling for regulation, I don’t know what you’re calling for.
Like for regulation – like gun control – I sympathize with your concerns; however, there’s not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going to advocate for only the government (have you seen governments these days?) to choose who does or doesn’t get AI.
If you genuinely don’t want regulation, are you just saying it shouldn’t have been made in the first place because it enables the evil people more than the good people? I’m not sure that’s true in regards to what the actual technology does and I’m not comfortable blaming the technology for the grifts associated with it. Propaganda and misinformation have always been an aspect of class warfare and typically the rich and elite have had bigger budgets and a greater effect. Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda - I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills. Misinformation is clearly a bit more built into the technology, but even with that it gives people access to a lot more information a lot more easily (e.g. finding algorithms or new terms to search). The tech itself seems to favor the people.
You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it, but I actually think that’d be a great idea in some second year coding course or something both to build their resistance to the negatives and to give them more capabilities once people get over the nonsense drama with it.
OK, so thus far we’ve had two major AI winters, where after some excitement over new developments in AI, funding ended up more or less drying up for decades, because it didn’t manage to go anywhere. I think a third such an event would go a long way in mitigating the harms from AI, because the AI space is currently very centralised, i.e. most users are very dependent on a handful of companies, and those companies are very dependent on continued investment. Also, running less capable open weights/source models locally has a fairly high barrier to entry and those models would become less relevant over time without the funding to keep up their training.
Thankfully for me, things appear to be moving in that direction.
As for regulation, I don’t think I mentioned or alluded to it at all. If anything, that seems more your thing, since you think holding people doing bad things with AI accountable is sufficient. Personally, I do very much think that the world would be better off without these forms of AI. But if there is to be regulation, I would argue it should focus mostly on the suppliers and not so much on the users. Not only because otherwise you end up in an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole, but also because there’s not always a user to hold to account. Like, if an AI chatbot encourages someone’s suicidal thoughts and they end up doing it because of that, what AI user is to be held to account?
Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda
It’s the opposite, this is very much a power-consolidating technology. It’s not like, say, reading and writing, where nobody can just change the alphabet to become incapable of describing subversive notions or something. With AI, what it’s capable of and what its biases are, is very much dependent on decisions of the people training and managing it. And because the cost of training a model the size of an LLM is so high, there are only a few entities that can afford to do that.
On top of that, people with good intentions cannot use AI at scale, because they need to verify all of its output. People with bad intentions, who don’t care about the details, only that the waters are sufficiently muddied, can use it at scale. And if they are or are backed by the elite, then they have the funding to use it even more at scale.
I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills.
Only because the elite are currently subsidising it for you. Because they want you to accept this technology. Because they know it empowers them more than it does you.
You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it
I’m pro-education, but to teach someone, there needs to be something that can be taught first.
Truth always moves slower than lies and always for the same reason. Were newspapers a terrible invention for the people because they came with yellow papers or did the good outweigh the bad?
I think we think of AI differently at least in part because I don’t treat it as something owned by someone else. It doesn’t matter if the rich stop subsidizing it, I can and do run it on my own machine. Sure, I can’t train it, but I can’t code an entire operating system either and I still think of my computer as mine. There is certainly something to your point about biased training and the costs related to it, but that just seems like reason to favor open source local AIs. It’s the same reason I don’t use Windows or Apple operating systems – it’s terrible to have that sort of dependency and bias built into your tools. Of-course, I have to admit Linux users are a minority (for reasons I don’t really understand), and if all the AI hate basically amounts to an inability to run linux / local LLMs… well, I understand it a little more.
Honestly, good conversation. Don’t agree with you, but you definitely widened my perspective.
Your point about technology enabling people is well made. While I think it’s pretty clear that AI can have positive effects, your point about it’s use in propaganda and misinformation is legitimate. Even if I don’t think it’s the underlying issue, I can’t deny that it enables it. That said, this comment chain is long enough that I’m losing the plot. I tried to read back, but I don’t know what your stance in all this is.
I don’t know what “a third AI winter” means. I can’t tell if you’re saying you want AI to die out or if you’re sarcastically saying you want an AI nuclear apocalypse or maybe both. If you genuinely aren’t calling for regulation, I don’t know what you’re calling for. Like for regulation – like gun control – I sympathize with your concerns; however, there’s not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going to advocate for only the government (have you seen governments these days?) to choose who does or doesn’t get AI.
If you genuinely don’t want regulation, are you just saying it shouldn’t have been made in the first place because it enables the evil people more than the good people? I’m not sure that’s true in regards to what the actual technology does and I’m not comfortable blaming the technology for the grifts associated with it. Propaganda and misinformation have always been an aspect of class warfare and typically the rich and elite have had bigger budgets and a greater effect. Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda - I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills. Misinformation is clearly a bit more built into the technology, but even with that it gives people access to a lot more information a lot more easily (e.g. finding algorithms or new terms to search). The tech itself seems to favor the people.
You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it, but I actually think that’d be a great idea in some second year coding course or something both to build their resistance to the negatives and to give them more capabilities once people get over the nonsense drama with it.
What do you think we should do about it?
OK, so thus far we’ve had two major AI winters, where after some excitement over new developments in AI, funding ended up more or less drying up for decades, because it didn’t manage to go anywhere. I think a third such an event would go a long way in mitigating the harms from AI, because the AI space is currently very centralised, i.e. most users are very dependent on a handful of companies, and those companies are very dependent on continued investment. Also, running less capable open weights/source models locally has a fairly high barrier to entry and those models would become less relevant over time without the funding to keep up their training.
Thankfully for me, things appear to be moving in that direction.
As for regulation, I don’t think I mentioned or alluded to it at all. If anything, that seems more your thing, since you think holding people doing bad things with AI accountable is sufficient. Personally, I do very much think that the world would be better off without these forms of AI. But if there is to be regulation, I would argue it should focus mostly on the suppliers and not so much on the users. Not only because otherwise you end up in an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole, but also because there’s not always a user to hold to account. Like, if an AI chatbot encourages someone’s suicidal thoughts and they end up doing it because of that, what AI user is to be held to account?
It’s the opposite, this is very much a power-consolidating technology. It’s not like, say, reading and writing, where nobody can just change the alphabet to become incapable of describing subversive notions or something. With AI, what it’s capable of and what its biases are, is very much dependent on decisions of the people training and managing it. And because the cost of training a model the size of an LLM is so high, there are only a few entities that can afford to do that.
On top of that, people with good intentions cannot use AI at scale, because they need to verify all of its output. People with bad intentions, who don’t care about the details, only that the waters are sufficiently muddied, can use it at scale. And if they are or are backed by the elite, then they have the funding to use it even more at scale.
Only because the elite are currently subsidising it for you. Because they want you to accept this technology. Because they know it empowers them more than it does you.
I’m pro-education, but to teach someone, there needs to be something that can be taught first.
Truth always moves slower than lies and always for the same reason. Were newspapers a terrible invention for the people because they came with yellow papers or did the good outweigh the bad?
I think we think of AI differently at least in part because I don’t treat it as something owned by someone else. It doesn’t matter if the rich stop subsidizing it, I can and do run it on my own machine. Sure, I can’t train it, but I can’t code an entire operating system either and I still think of my computer as mine. There is certainly something to your point about biased training and the costs related to it, but that just seems like reason to favor open source local AIs. It’s the same reason I don’t use Windows or Apple operating systems – it’s terrible to have that sort of dependency and bias built into your tools. Of-course, I have to admit Linux users are a minority (for reasons I don’t really understand), and if all the AI hate basically amounts to an inability to run linux / local LLMs… well, I understand it a little more.
Honestly, good conversation. Don’t agree with you, but you definitely widened my perspective.