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This article is truly garbage, I would believe it's a cherrypicked AI generated article tbh. Here's the summary: [4 Paragraphs to say that AI exists and it

This article is truly garbage, I would believe it's a cherrypicked AI generated article tbh. Here's the summary: [4 Paragraphs to say that AI exists and it sucks] [4 Paragraph of random references as though it proves the author's big brain] Some digital artist name Jason Allen said “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” Whether or not he was in some way or other joking, the comment is dead serious as an embodiment of the conceptual underpinnings of Generative AI: the point of these projects is to produce nihilism and despair about what humans do and can do. Also, nihilism is reasonably understood by many political theorists to be the real heart of what we call fascism. [Cherrypicked Silicon Valley citations "proving" that tech leadership also believes AI causes despair] [Last paragraph of jumping to opinion-based conclusions unsupported by the actual "citations" in the article] I feel like we need to raise the bar on the AI debates.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
> But fun is not a compelling reason to produce something that is intended to harm us, and has a proven record of being able to harm us. Just to add fuel to the dumpster fire, it raised my eyebrows that the author simply asserted conspiratorial knowledge of the intentions for its creation. This is the kind of r/confidentlyincorrect you see if you play with the chat bot for a little while.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >it raised my eyebrows that the author simply asserted conspiratorial knowledge of the intentions for its creation. it's not describing a conspiracy, it's describing a mindset/culture. check the twitter feeds of the AI boosters. they're revelling in making people feel afraid and worthless. example: this whole thread: https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1601786712715251712 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160178671271525171...
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    It sounds like a conspiracy to me. There's no way GPT was created with the intention of harming people. That's obviously nonsense. Twitter only lets me read the first Tweet in that thread without logging in but I didn't see any of what you describe there.
    - willnonya 4y ago
      I don't really have a take on the specifics here but there have been many similar threads where the intent wasn't to cause harm but the steps taken to 'help' inevitably led to harm instead. It's easy for people to get their through a mixture of hubris and short sightedness. What I'm getting at here is to not be too hard on the conspiracy types. Just because they can't articulate these things in ways we take seriously doesn't mean there isn't something to watch for.
      - IshKebab 4y ago
        Sure but there's an enormous fundamental difference between doing something with the primary intent to cause harm, and doing something that happens to cause unintended harm as a side effect. They're completely different and mixing them up is typical conspiracy nonsense.
AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
It's funny because you express exactly what the author said: > As Abeba Birhane and Deb Raji documented recently, the responses of members of the Generative AI communities to criticism are, to put it mildly, less than generous. Your view is as simplistic as you make his to be. When you are unable to take the author's point of view, and read between the lines, and take things into context - then you do exactly what the author is worried about : you emulate AI, and lose your human nature. When the author talks about "nihilism" I think he refers to the dangers that Ian McGilchrist has been talking about at lenghts, in "The Divided Brain". Very roughly, that we are dangerously going out of balance, over-using the left-hemisphere's view on reality, as a collection of "things". Generative AI amplifies exactly all the issues Gilchrist has been talking in his books and numerous interviews you can find on YouTube. AI produces content that has no purpose, no meaning. It IS nihilist if you think about it in the sense that it will soon feed on its own output, and therefore simply produce more and more extremist / "highlly specific" content. Again, the exact kind of issues Gilchrist has talked about : a view of the world as a collection of "things", and looking at things without sufficient context. Art has always been something that engages the right hemisphere, and these more unconscious parts of us. For example, music affects us in way words can't. But that content is produced by humans for other humans to resonate with. The real delusion here, is when you elevate AI's output as something equal or someday "equal or even better" to what humans can do, completely forgetting that AI would produce ZERO interesting results if it were not for the input. How is that not obvious at all? THe author also has every right to call the attention on how, just like with Bezos and Elon and Bill Gates, etc. it is the richest people, with a certain kind of a view on the world, that pulls the strings. It IS really dangerous and concerning that software engineers tell the world how to see the world, since they already themselves have a great propensity to reduce the world to a collection of "things" that can be exploited... eg. Zuckerberg and all the Facebook shenanigans. AI has some real and useful applications in helping code generation and whatnot, but it also has a ton of destructive potential unless people really see it for what it is and your initial reaction is not helping.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

> But fun is not a compelling reason to produce something that is intended to harm us, and has a proven record of being able to harm us. Just to add fuel to the dumpster fire, it raised my eyebrows that the author simply asserted conspiratorial knowledge of the intentions for its creation. This is the kind of r/confidentlyincorrect you see if you play with the chat bot for a little while.

_dain_ 4y ago
>it raised my eyebrows that the author simply asserted conspiratorial knowledge of the intentions for its creation. it's not describing a conspiracy, it's describing a mindset/culture. check the twitter feeds of the AI boosters. they're revelling in making people feel afraid and worthless. example: this whole thread: https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1601786712715251712 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160178671271525171...
- IshKebab 4y ago
  It sounds like a conspiracy to me. There's no way GPT was created with the intention of harming people. That's obviously nonsense. Twitter only lets me read the first Tweet in that thread without logging in but I didn't see any of what you describe there.
  - willnonya 4y ago
    I don't really have a take on the specifics here but there have been many similar threads where the intent wasn't to cause harm but the steps taken to 'help' inevitably led to harm instead. It's easy for people to get their through a mixture of hubris and short sightedness. What I'm getting at here is to not be too hard on the conspiracy types. Just because they can't articulate these things in ways we take seriously doesn't mean there isn't something to watch for.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      Sure but there's an enormous fundamental difference between doing something with the primary intent to cause harm, and doing something that happens to cause unintended harm as a side effect. They're completely different and mixing them up is typical conspiracy nonsense.

AltruisticGapHN 4y ago

It's funny because you express exactly what the author said: > As Abeba Birhane and Deb Raji documented recently, the responses of members of the Generative AI communities to criticism are, to put it mildly, less than generous. Your view is as simplistic as you make his to be. When you are unable to take the author's point of view, and read between the lines, and take things into context - then you do exactly what the author is worried about : you emulate AI, and lose your human nature. When the author talks about "nihilism" I think he refers to the dangers that Ian McGilchrist has been talking about at lenghts, in "The Divided Brain". Very roughly, that we are dangerously going out of balance, over-using the left-hemisphere's view on reality, as a collection of "things". Generative AI amplifies exactly all the issues Gilchrist has been talking in his books and numerous interviews you can find on YouTube. AI produces content that has no purpose, no meaning. It IS nihilist if you think about it in the sense that it will soon feed on its own output, and therefore simply produce more and more extremist / "highlly specific" content. Again, the exact kind of issues Gilchrist has talked about : a view of the world as a collection of "things", and looking at things without sufficient context. Art has always been something that engages the right hemisphere, and these more unconscious parts of us. For example, music affects us in way words can't. But that content is produced by humans for other humans to resonate with. The real delusion here, is when you elevate AI's output as something equal or someday "equal or even better" to what humans can do, completely forgetting that AI would produce ZERO interesting results if it were not for the input. How is that not obvious at all? THe author also has every right to call the attention on how, just like with Bezos and Elon and Bill Gates, etc. it is the richest people, with a certain kind of a view on the world, that pulls the strings. It IS really dangerous and concerning that software engineers tell the world how to see the world, since they already themselves have a great propensity to reduce the world to a collection of "things" that can be exploited... eg. Zuckerberg and all the Facebook shenanigans. AI has some real and useful applications in helping code generation and whatnot, but it also has a ton of destructive potential unless people really see it for what it is and your initial reaction is not helping.