"It's already here, what do you mean you think you can refuse?" is just another variation of the agency-stealing inevitability narrative. The future is not yet written, and we can shape it, starting with rejecting inevitability and claiming our agency.
/fin
To the second, I say not accepting it isn't the same as denying that people are using the janky tech sold as "AI", some by choice, others because it is forced on them in their job.
Not accepting it means not normalizing it, refusing everywhere I can refuse, pushing for holding the companies producing this accountable with existing & new regulation, working to protect the environment & important social infrastruture.
>>
To the first, I say: Fine, I don't want to go where that bandwagon is headed.
"Left behind" is an interesting phrase, it indexes a notion of a race towards a desirable/shining "future" that only some can access, and which we should all hope to participate in.
But the TESCREAList/tech bro future is not one I want any part in and in fact one that I actively resist --- and I hope others will too.
>>
One of the key messages I carry is that we don't have to accept any of this. Sometimes I see opposition in the form of "Get in loser, you'll be left behind" and other times it's in the form of "It's all over the place, what do you mean you think you can opt out?"
[Note to the mansplainers of Mastodon: This is a thread, meaning you should read the whole thing and then even still think twice before replying.]
>>
I jumped in with the first response and said, "It's a cult." Everyone laughed, and then I said, "I'm serious. It's actually a cult." and elaborated some on TESCEALists, their shared mythology, and how bananas it all is.
My co-panelist then picked up their mic and said, "It's a cult." ... and elaborated further.
>>
Did an event last night that was a discussion format with a moderator + one other panelist, with whom I had some points of agreement and some of disagreement.
Turns out, the disagreement was useful:
>>
It was actually very satisfying & I think effective to have our clear points of disagreement in the background when both pushing back so clearly on the TESCREAList nonsense.
I'm grateful to the organizers for not pairing me with someone who in fact is an adherent (though that population is less dense outside the US & UK, I think) and also to my co-panelist for also being willing to speak clearly on this point.
/fin
I jumped in with the first response and said, "It's a cult." Everyone laughed, and then I said, "I'm serious. It's actually a cult." and elaborated some on TESCEALists, their shared mythology, and how bananas it all is.
My co-panelist then picked up their mic and said, "It's a cult." ... and elaborated further.
>>
The asker elaborated to say he was wondering what was behind all of the Doomers, not just the CEOs who obviously profit from the existential risk narrative (as already discussed in the panel) but in particular the employees & self-styled "whistle-blowers" w/o the same apparent incentives.
>>
The topic of the discussion was "AI", narratives and the future of truth, and we hit on the themes you might expect.
The last ~15min were for audience questions, of which the last question was:
"What's up with California?"
>>
Did an event last night that was a discussion format with a moderator + one other panelist, with whom I had some points of agreement and some of disagreement.
Turns out, the disagreement was useful:
>>
Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or being able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment.
I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this:
[Note to the mansplainers of Mastodon: This is a thread, so please read the whole thing before replying. Please also know that I am aware of things beyond what's in this thread...]
>>
The notion of "second-hand surveillance" (on analogy to second-smoke) seems powerful -- and more generally I really appreciate the idea of zones where one can be free of this.
https://www.offrecordzones.org/
(via @ajlunited )
That said, it feels off/sad that we have to start by creating zones where people are expected NOT to use the pervert glasses, or Apple watch always-listening tech, etc etc.
OTOH, let's start somewhere!
Tech media: "A cult claimed that in three weeks they will be transported to the mothership. How large is this mothership, and is the prediction of 3 weeks accurate?"
RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/117412877326355268
This, from Emily Bender, is the lesson we REALLY have to learn. This is part of a larger thread, which you should read.
In other words, it is the job of scientists to devise experiments that can test their claims, to always be cautious about what they are claiming, and to critically evaluate the claims of other scientists. By these well-established standards, no serious science is happening behind Anthropic's claims.
/fin
Thus, any evaluation of LLMs that involves looking at either language produced by some software, or language input into the system for that matter, needs to be done with extreme care to avoid projecting our interpretation of the language onto the system.
>>
I will point out, however, that serious scientists are cautious with their claims. Furthermore, as we wrote in 2021 (in "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜"), p.616:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922
>>
![Screencap from linked article, highlighted portion:
This can seem counter-intuitive given the
increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we
have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language
text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own
linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether
or not they do [89, 140].](https://cdn.masto.host/daircommunitysocial/media_attachments/files/117/412/874/169/799/363/original/2a6cf567d7f4bf09.png)
3. Okay, so what would convince you that a piece of software (often phrased here as "an AI", gah) is conscious/can feel pain/etc?
Honestly, I'm really tired of this extremely silly question, but here is my answer:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I am not the one making the extraordinary claim, so it is not my job to specify what the evidence should be.
>>
2. But Anthropic researchers say they see patterns that suggest that Claude can.
The employees at Anthropic are telling themselves stories based on the words they input into the software and the words that come back out.
It's the job of the media to scrutinize such statements and decide whether there's a story here at all (maybe the story is Anthropic researchers have fallen into a fantasy-land and brought many policymakers with them), not to just platform them.
>>