I’ve read a few things fueled by hatred for AI recently. I think it can basically be summed up by this Mr Rogers quote that’s been making the rounds.
The first one is from a blog with only post, which is about the most punk thing I think you can do and it’s called I am an AI Hater.
There’s no hemming and hawing here. The author gets right to the point in a really masterful way. I pulled this line out:
What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.
Then there’s “Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too” by Marcus frikkin Hutchins of all people. And it’s far more elaborate. There’s a lot to glean from it too, and Hutchins waves away the hype to get to the core of what the issues really are.
But Hutchins ultimately comes around to a really similar point, though his is backed by a lot more study and considered research in the field. Still, the big problem with AI? It’s not human, and it can’t be human, because only humans are human.
In reality, all we’ve created is a bot which is almost perfect at mimicking human-like natural language use, and the rest is people just projecting other human qualities on to it. Quite simply, “LLMs are doing reasoning” is the “look, my dog is smiling” of technology. In exactly the same way that dogs don’t convey their emotions via human-like facial expressions, there’s no reason to believe that even if computer could think, it’d perfectly mirror what looks like human reasoning
I don’t have any nuance to introduce, or hedging to do. I just, kind of… agree. At the very least, we should stop an anthropomorphizing the technology. But I’m perfectly willing to consider never using it again too.