Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
[lament about ill effect of AI, here’s why it’s terrible]
this is critihype
Hey, it could happen.
Overall, I think it was a bit cookie cutter for an article of this type, but maybe It’s just the preaching to the choir effect. Even the fact that he ostensibly quit his job over this stuff doesn’t hit as hard as it should, it comes off as if he could have done so at any time but this way he gets to grandstand about it.
Also stuff like this:
sounds like it should be in a how do you do, fellow workers copypasta.
“I use AI sparingly for” is the new “I only do meth before my hookups for unprotected sex with strangers”.
I can’t tell if this is serious.
If that’s really how we react to someone who admits AI use although they know why AI is bad, we need to listen to Dr. Fatima some more.
i generally like Dr. Fatima, so i was curious about this video, but it was pretty disappointing. I have several more thoughts but i wanted to keep this reasonably short.
The first section about “back end harms” is the best part. Unfortunately, section 2, the “Front End Harms” section names valid problems but falls flat when it comes to solutions. She rolls out a lot of lib tropes about “education” and gestures at companies self-regulating the sycophancy of their own models despite evidence (a massive amount of it if we consider corporate “self-regulation” more broadly) to the contrary. Remember “media literacy” discourse about social media misinformation? it went nowhere, because it’s not a problem that can be solved with education, it’s imperative to actually learn lessons from history and bring this technology under political control. You cannot do this effectively when your government is 3 monopolistic corporations in a trenchcoat.
She says that anthropic are “better than the competition” which is trivially true but extremely credulous. If faced with the choice, I would prefer that Claude beats out Grok and chatGPT but this is ultimately a marginal difference due to the nature of the industry and ultimately of capitalism itself.
Section 3 is fine for what it is, but it’s really about the psychology of persuasion and not AI as such. Some of the discourse on this site would benefit from the reminder that moral absolutism isn’t very persuasive, but this section is way too long, we can just dispense with the moralizing and “harm reduction” anyways, because just like plastic recycling, personal reduction in AI use for harm reduction reasons is a fake solution to a systemic problem.
The harms of AI are intimately linked with the nature of monopoly & platform capital. You cannot defeat this enemy if you cannot actually describe it properly, and no amount of leveraging NIMBYism to defeat your local datacenter project will fix it.
Maybe Dr. Fatima isn’t the right person to be delivering that message, or simply doesn’t view the problem through a materialist lens. It’s not enough to be against AI, you need to be for something. This is the disease of liberal technocratic managerialism and it manifests in myriad ways including AI critique. We need to move beyond it.
I find it hard to get mad at someone who uses AI sometimes on account of all the bozos who went full Gas Town.
There is enough of this shit that appeasement has no reason except making well meaning moderate centrists more comfortable, and they were never the audience. (despite their unshakable conviction they are the only audience.) dr. fatima’s video is good advice on comforting the comforted and nothing else.
i commend to you my masto post with the more detailed version, and the responses thereto, e.g.
I don’t have much sympathy for the “let’s wait and see” moderates, but I do think there’s a coherent difference between people who have tried AI tools and found some use for them in some limited context and people who go full Howard Hughes with it like John McGasTown or whatever that idiot’s name is. To me it feels like an extension of the argument that these so-called AI systems are a normal trchnology. They aren’t a harbinger of the end times, whether you interpret that as the singularity or the biblical Armageddon. It’s a normal technology that is breaking in normal ways and is breaking society and the economy in the ways we would expect late capitalism to break. If it wasn’t this it would probably be something else. Hell, there’s still a chance that the wheel turns to “Quantum” or something else after this and we stretch another few years out of that before the music stops.
AI is a bad tool for any given job, and is fundamentally not worth the price that we as a society are paying to let it exist at this scale. If it wasn’t being subsidized by capitalists chasing ridiculous returns and bouyed by an economic system structured entirely around giving it to them then there’s no way in hell it would have hit this point. But that’s not incompatible with people being able to find utility in it in some cases, and I think we lose credibility by treating any admission that someone has found any value in AI products as a confession of unseriousness. That doesn’t mean their use isn’t still part of the problem, but I’d we frame the critique in terms of “how much would you actually be willing to pay for you ‘occasional’ use?” It would redirect the discussion away from the subjective “well I found it useful for X” to the more objective question of just how expensive and destructive these things are to operate and how much of those costs are going to have to be subsidized forever if these things are going to stick around.
Welp, thanks for clarifying.