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So the whole thread that emerged after the cats and bears video I posted yesterday got me thinking about the philosophical and ethical issues surrounding #AI.
As a technology, no matter how much I hate it, it’s not going away.
It’s what gets done with it - the intention behind its use - that becomes disturbing, right? As with any technology.
And sadly, our collective experience is that new technologies usually get employed, one was or another, to harm us.
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@Remittancegirl One of the best threads I've seen. Fascinating.
I hate it for all the usual reasons, but I also think the technology has some application if we could separate it from the hype, and use a model based on the Common Corpus training data.
The most upsetting parts for me are twofold: the fact nobody was consulted, and now a bunch of machines get to iterate endlessly on the entirety of human endeavour forever. It's incredibly demoralizing seeing people dismiss that aspect.
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@Remittancegirl That, and the fact that friends of mine are being forced from the jobs they chose and turned into AI babysitters where they try endlessly to get it to behave predictably, and all the while they're training their own replacement.
@Remittancegirl I think my biggest fear here is that AI makes our "real" world smaller.
Like, you post videos of cats chasing bears, and there's this "oh wow!" reaction. But then someone points out that it's AI, and then the consequence is that our conception of the real world grows smaller. "Of course a cat can't really chase a bear away, it's all fake, the world doesn't work like that."
Except no. I saw an actual video of a cat chasing a bear away back in the noughties.
AI chases the astounding and the artistic out of the real world. Everything that would have provoked wonder before is now met with "eh, that's AI". The world gets more humdrum, and we dream a little less.
@Remittancegirl Speaking as someone involved in the big AI expansion of the late 1980s, I suspect this one *is* going away, just as that one did. In the 1980s we had some genuinely good new tech -- non-monotonic inference engines -- that was ludicrously oversold.
Now, we have some genuinely interesting new tech -- #LLMs -- but whether they're actually useful for anything is unproven. They're hugely resource hungry, and ludicrously oversold.
I expect a crash, and another #AI winter.
I hate that AI is being employed to take jobs away from people in the creative industries. Because these jobs tend to be jobs that are very fulfilling to the people who do them. And that’s a rare thing.
I hate that AI requires immense amounts of power to process and that hurts the planet.
I hate the fact that it can be used to generate what look like real accounts of politically or socially important things that have occurred when they haven’t.
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While I have heard the argument for the ‘democratisation' of creative projects - I find it unpersuasive.
Because there is something truly life enhancing in learning how to play an instrument well, in learning how to draw well, or write well, or make a film well.
That journey of acquiring know how, expertise and skill… is, I think, profoundly life-enhancing for the human psyche.
Of course, I must acknowledge there is a super-egoic aspect to this belief in needing to ’suffer’ for art.
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What I think many people find offensive is this sense of being deceived. Intentionally deceived. Deceived for the purpose of emotional manipulation. At a very basic level, we do not like knowing we’ve been deceived.
For me, this has very little to do with AI. There have always been ways to ‘deceive’ us - from Stalin’s disappearing people from photographs, to the re-writing of history for political purposes, to the use of CGI in film to create a scene that can’t be filmed in live action.
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So, it turns out that intention matters, that artistry and passion matter to us. That a creation isn’t just the thing we see or hear or read, but also the intention of its creator.
And yet that is so hard to know. Isn’t it? And even when we know it, does it take away or enhance the worth of a creative act? Some say yes, some say no.
Clearly, in the face of machine made creative product, we are challenged to pin down what this ephemeral thing that humans bring to their creations? 5/
For some people, the knowledge that TS Eliot was a bastard completely kills the sense of worth of his poetry.
By all accounts, Kafka was not a pleasant human being: so deeply narcissistic, he couldn’t bear to be in a room with more than two other people. Does it make his writing less valuable?
For me, this always becomes a journey in learning to contain more than one truth - that the creator was a flawed human being and that their creation is still sublime.
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