not at the top of the list of why large AI models are garbo but on the list (Weirder Earth repost)

1.

okay so the big problems with the modern wave of generative AI are that:

• it is designed to steal jobs from artists and writers
• it was manufactured using titanic amounts of stolen work from those selfsame artists and writers
• it required and requires titanic amounts of electricity and other computing infrastructure in the middle of climate crisis

...but an additional problem is that, because they are intended to be used without warning, they force people to try and find intention, worldview, meaning, all the things we expect from our fellow writers and artists, in material which contains none of that.

and that's just abusing our assumption of good faith.

2.

like, okay

imagine a friend mentioned something bad that happened to them, and we replied "oh no!"

this is as nearly an automatic and thoughtless response as we can think of ... but consider what it would mean to our friend

at the very least, they can infer that:

• we have been paying attention to their speech
• we recognize, whether we understand the details or not, that something unfortunate has happened
• we care that something unfortunate happened, and would rather it had not

if they had said the same thing to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had said, "oh no!", would it have anything like the same effect? ChatGPT doesn't know them and won't remember them, it only understands that "oh no!" is a thing that is said frequently in its corpus in this kind of context. it is simply and utterly hollow.