I have been giving some thought as to why Western societies (I cannot speak for others) who put so much store in individuality and self expression and identity are so willing to let an #LLM in the form of an #AI chat bot speak for them.
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Interesting perspective. At the same time someone who has lost a leg, or was born without one after a while learns to walk with a prosthetic leg to help with their physical deficit.
We would probably see that as morally justified, and we would applaud modern medicine for helping those who are now able to perform physically in ways they couldn't before. But many people don't see an intellectual aid as the same kind of thing, and many find it morally compromised.
Similarly, if someone uses software to read out loud what's on screen, most often nowadays that involves machine learning, and trained models that "learned" to "imitate" the human voice. Also not morally compromised, and also socially perceived as something morally acceptable, and something most of us would probably encourage.
And that's very much a real world application of artificial intelligence, identical technical foundations. -
I have been giving some thought as to why Western societies (I cannot speak for others) who put so much store in individuality and self expression and identity are so willing to let an #LLM in the form of an #AI chat bot speak for them. Because essentially, when you ask AI to write something for you, that is what you're doing.
Why are we so eager to have our own voices usurped? 1/
@Remittancegirl this is such an interesting thread.
My two cents is that its like premade cake mix. When it was just add water people didn't like it because it felt like cheating or deception. Once they switched it to requring the addition of an egg there was a psychological shift that made the process comfortable.
LLMs reqiuire a degree of personal contribution, which much like with the cake mix (or IKEA furnature) enables them to emotionally take ownership of the result without guilt.
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@Remittancegirl @mfeir Amusingly and ironically, I'm struggling to express sharply why I don't enjoy using those generative tools. I've got some threads of thought in my head, but I haven't yet pinpointed the central thought to my own satisfaction, it remains a vague emotion. And I sure as hell am not going to settle for some dull LLM output.
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@Remittancegirl @mfeir I appreciate the encouragement
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@Remittancegirl this is such an interesting thread.
My two cents is that its like premade cake mix. When it was just add water people didn't like it because it felt like cheating or deception. Once they switched it to requring the addition of an egg there was a psychological shift that made the process comfortable.
LLMs reqiuire a degree of personal contribution, which much like with the cake mix (or IKEA furnature) enables them to emotionally take ownership of the result without guilt.
@carbontwelve I think the emotional aspect of this is really quite important to consider. I like the cake mix analogy. Because, baked into it (forgive the pun) are two things: profit and the hegemonic definition of what a cake is.
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@vruz The problem is that I don't buy that they are intellectual aides. I think they masquerade as intellectual aids.
The artificial limb has no agenda. It isn't owned by oligarchs who want you to walk in a certain direction.
The prosthetic-limb corporation does exist. And Chatgpt and Claude are two prominent instances of a million other systems that everyone uses every day. If these things were declared illegal tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to use Netflix, you wouldn't be able to produce aeronautic parts, you wouldn't be able to produce text-to-speech systems, you wouldn't be able to produce instant translation.
I understand the idea that oligarchs put ideas in it, and that's true.
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My hypothesis - and I don't have training in psychology or sociology so I don't know whether this is a trivial hypothesis or is nonsense or what - is that LLMs exploit an existing loophole in human psychology, which is that people confuse doing a thing and giving an order to do the thing.
"King Offa built a great earthworks to defend his kingdom." Really. Did he wield the spade himself?
The chatbot is built so that its interactions feel like being a manager and giving orders, which then similarly makes people feel that they personally did the thing.
@passenger @Remittancegirl i think there's a lot of truth to this. I wonder if in modern times we've gone even further and have started to equate "writing about or describing the thing" as doing the thing.
So much office work now is moving boxes on PowerPoints, writing documents, saying stuff that's demonstrably not related to reality. And now CoPilot can help "execute" a plan. Not because it can do things in the real world, but because it can create the digital simulacrum of work.
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The prosthetic-limb corporation does exist. And Chatgpt and Claude are two prominent instances of a million other systems that everyone uses every day. If these things were declared illegal tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to use Netflix, you wouldn't be able to produce aeronautic parts, you wouldn't be able to produce text-to-speech systems, you wouldn't be able to produce instant translation.
I understand the idea that oligarchs put ideas in it, and that's true.
@vruz @passenger Voice recognition existed long before AI
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The prosthetic-limb corporation does exist. And Chatgpt and Claude are two prominent instances of a million other systems that everyone uses every day. If these things were declared illegal tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to use Netflix, you wouldn't be able to produce aeronautic parts, you wouldn't be able to produce text-to-speech systems, you wouldn't be able to produce instant translation.
I understand the idea that oligarchs put ideas in it, and that's true.
At the same time the generic anti-AI sentiment is born out of fear of the unknown, and extreme conservatism. It's something that flips in people's minds as some kind of defence mechanism.
Not saying that it is bad or wrong. It just is. Everybody is pushing buttons, and not all of them very well informed.
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At the same time the generic anti-AI sentiment is born out of fear of the unknown, and extreme conservatism. It's something that flips in people's minds as some kind of defence mechanism.
Not saying that it is bad or wrong. It just is. Everybody is pushing buttons, and not all of them very well informed.
" the generic anti-AI sentiment is born out of fear of the unknown, and extreme conservatism"
wow. Okay, we disagree profoundly.
"It's something that flips in people's minds as some kind of defence mechanism."
The very same thing could be said for people who avidly use chat bots and do not want to stop doing so.
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@vruz @passenger Voice recognition existed long before AI
I am aware. Just like the idea of the perceptron has been around since the 1960s. The idea of AI has existed since the 1950s. Mind you, there was a famous movie in the 1960s whose whole point was AI that kills you, hardly a novel concept.
What we are discussing is a very large change of architectural capability.
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" the generic anti-AI sentiment is born out of fear of the unknown, and extreme conservatism"
wow. Okay, we disagree profoundly.
"It's something that flips in people's minds as some kind of defence mechanism."
The very same thing could be said for people who avidly use chat bots and do not want to stop doing so.
Notice "generic", and I didn't say that all criticism is generic.
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@EvelineSulman @holsta
Personally, I have found that laziness is almost always a symptom of something else. Usually a sense that speaking or acting will not make a difference. Or fear of acting, fear of speaking - low level but persistent. Or experiencing no positive feedback when one does speak or act.When people feel their voices aren't heard or respected, then it isn't that surprising they get lazy about using them.
@Remittancegirl @holsta that would be a positive reason to me, but I also see negative ones: wanting to be a leading voice without really doing the work (of thinking and formulating). In that case, LLMs are new ways to brag and to bully.
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" the generic anti-AI sentiment is born out of fear of the unknown, and extreme conservatism"
wow. Okay, we disagree profoundly.
"It's something that flips in people's minds as some kind of defence mechanism."
The very same thing could be said for people who avidly use chat bots and do not want to stop doing so.
@Remittancegirl @vruz @passenger
I've sat through enough ANN Phd vivas to recognise that there are a lot of people currently with an almost religious zeal for GenAI.
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@mfeir Here's what haunts me about this: there are two issues here.
Some people do have a struggle expressing their ideas clearly because they lack eloquence. And our society used to, at least, reward eloquence over substance often.
But often people's ideas aren't very clear. And they have not been taught how to hone them, or pin them down. In that case, the machine literally puts words in their mouth and they settle for that.
I don't like the implication that people who struggle for words need an LLM to express themselves. Disabled folks like myself struggle with expressing ourselves, but we don't need the plagiarism machine to steal our voices and colonize our minds. We just need people to be more accessible and give us time and space to find a way to communicate.
LLMs teach the wrong lesson. And it's just the tech companies way of gentrifing our minds, the last place they've yet to do.
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I don't like the implication that people who struggle for words need an LLM to express themselves. Disabled folks like myself struggle with expressing ourselves, but we don't need the plagiarism machine to steal our voices and colonize our minds. We just need people to be more accessible and give us time and space to find a way to communicate.
LLMs teach the wrong lesson. And it's just the tech companies way of gentrifing our minds, the last place they've yet to do.
I agree that what we need is NOT climate destroying LLMs, but time and space to teach one another how to express oneself and how there's many techniques to try and ways to approach. Literacy is dropping, and fixing that will help with expressing one self. An LLM is not capable of ever teaching that skill. Instead it makes the problem worse.
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@carbontwelve I think the emotional aspect of this is really quite important to consider. I like the cake mix analogy. Because, baked into it (forgive the pun) are two things: profit and the hegemonic definition of what a cake is.
@Remittancegirl I think if I were doing a PhD in Sociology today (I got so far as a Masters before running out of money) this might make for an interesting subject.
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I am aware. Just like the idea of the perceptron has been around since the 1960s. The idea of AI has existed since the 1950s. Mind you, there was a famous movie in the 1960s whose whole point was AI that kills you, hardly a novel concept.
What we are discussing is a very large change of architectural capability.
@vruz @Remittancegirl @passenger LLMs aren’t the whole of machine learning. Going back to an earlier example you threw out, if ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest went away tomorrow, we’d still have exactly the same Netflix we do today, because the Netflix recommendation engine isn’t an LLM.
Netflix isn’t built on the large scale theft of people’s work, while all commercial LLMs are. Netflix isn’t being pushed as a tool to replace human creativity, while LLMs are. And while companies like OpenAI would love to group their product with other, less problematic, more useful applications of ML in order to blunt criticism, their product isn’t central to most of the applications you named.
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That's not what i said. I'm disabled too. If i can find it again, I'll share a great essay by a blind author about the problems of LLMs.
Accessible tools for these sorts of things do exist but are being drowned by LLMs that have major flaws and dangerous impact to the environment.
And we know they are causing harm to many as studies are showing sharp drops in literacy, increase in LLM fueled delusions, and sometimes LLM output is not accurate or outright wrong.
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@mfeir Here's what haunts me about this: there are two issues here.
Some people do have a struggle expressing their ideas clearly because they lack eloquence. And our society used to, at least, reward eloquence over substance often.
But often people's ideas aren't very clear. And they have not been taught how to hone them, or pin them down. In that case, the machine literally puts words in their mouth and they settle for that.
@Remittancegirl @mfeir I think that our society may be changing on the eloquence vs substance thing, thanks to AI slop.
Now, more and more, flawed prose is seen as a sign of quality, whereas LLM generated text is seen as a sign of not caring about quality.
It's better to express yourself by posting your (human written) prompt, than the more lengthy but less contentful LLM output. The prompt may have more obvious flaws, but it will convey your actual ideas, and more succinctly.
