Cory Doctorow
boosted
here in this piece @Cory Doctorow is describing the relation between human workers and ai. in particular what he calls "reverse centaurs" or other authors have named "accountability sinks".
there are lots of great insights in this article but one stood out for me: working with ai is not easy. people often think that having ai create texts for them is an innocuous thing. like OCR just more modern. but it isn't. errors made by ai can be very hard to spot. and doctorow here describes, why:
And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs).
[...]
And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code.
as john oliver recently said:
welcome to the demise of our mutually shared reality! isn't it fun?!
# computer # CoryDoctorow # JohnOliver # ReverseCentaur # AccountabilitySink # AI # KI
#^Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was...
