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.)
Found an interesting take on YouTube, of all places. Her argument can be summarized (with high compression losses) as "AI companies and technologies are bad for basically all the reasons that non-cultist critics say, but trying to shame and argue people out of using them entirely is less effective than treating them as a normal tool with limitations and teaching people how to limit the harm." She makes the analogy to drug policy.
I think she makes a very compelling argument, and I'm still digesting it a bit because I definitely had the knee-jerk rejection as an insider shill, but especially towards the end as she talks about how the AI industry targets low-literacy users as ideal customers (because the more you know about it the less you're likely to actually use them) I found myself agreeing more than not. I do wish she had addressed the dangers of cognitive offloading more, since being mindful of which tasks you're letting the computer do for you is pretty significant part of minimizing those harms, especially for students and some professionals who face a strong incentive to just coast by on slop if they can get away with it.
I feel like there's a difference between alcohol and drugs, something people can make in their back yard and AI which requires a first world country's entire economy to be oriented towards it to function... a difference in what we should be required to accept.
I don't buy the general argument about shame either. We teach children to shit in toilets and not sidewalks. I see rampant AI use as just another form of disgusting public indecency and the faster we bring shame in to remedy it the better.
Shame alone isn't enough though, especially not for the stuff people do in private, like ask LLMs for advice. Push too much shame and people might just end up simply doing it without telling anyone.
I think rephrasing the main point of the essay "Teach people enough, and they will understand that any use is misuse" can be a very powerful idea.
Teach people about germs, contaminants and proper technique, before shaming them into washing their hands.
If they understand that AI is like germs I do not care if sometimes people eat food off the floor following the ten second rule. But we aren't even there yet, people think it's like gold or mana from heaven or something.