I'm beginning to wonder what kind of training journalists receive regarding covering technology. Surely there are some best practices being taught in journalism programs to avoid falling for this bs?
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Either it's a version of ChatGPT OR it's a search system where people can find the actual sources of the information. Both of those things can't be true at the same time. /2
Also: the output of "generative AI", synthetic text, is NOT information. So, UK friends, if your government is actually using it to respond to freedom of information requests, they are presumably violating their own laws about freedom of information requests. /3
It is depressing how often Bender & Koller 2020 is cited incorrectly. My best guess is that ppl writing abt whether or not LLMs 'understand' or 'are agents' have such strongly held beliefs abt what they want to be true that this impedes their ability to understand what we wrote.
Or maybe they aren't actually reading the paper --- just summarizing based on what other people (with similar beliefs) have mistakenly said about the paper.
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Today's case in point is a new arXiv posting, "Are Language Models More Like Libraries or Like Librarians? Bibliotechnism, the Novel Reference Problem, and the Attitudes of LLMs" by Lederman & Mahowald, posted Jan 10, 2024.
A quick thread on #AIhype and other issues in yesterday's Gemini release: 1/
#1 -- What an utter lack of transparency. Researchers form multiple groups, including @mmitchell_ai and @timnitgebru when they were at Google, have been calling for clear and thorough documentation of training data & trained models since 2017. 2/
In Bender & Friedman 2018, we put it like this: /3
With the OpenAI clownshow, there's been renewed media attention on the xrisk/"AI safety" nonsense. Personally, I've had a fresh wave of reporters asking me naive questions (+ some contacts from old hands who know how to handle ultra-rich man-children with god complexes). 🧵1/
As a quick reminder: AI doomerism is also #AIhype. The idea that synthetic text extruding machines are harbingers of AGI that is on the verge of combusting into consciousness and then turning on humanity is unscientific nonsense. 2/
t the same time, it serves to suggest that the software is powerful, even magically so: if the "AI" could take over the world, it must be something amazing. 3/
"[False arrests w/face rec tech] should be at the heart of one of the most urgent contemporary debates: that of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses. That it is not, and that so few recognise it as significant, shows how warped has become the discussion of AI,"
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"We have stumbled into a digital panopticon almost without realising it. Yet to suggest we live in a world shaped by AI is to misplace the problem. There is no machine without a human, and nor is there likely to be."
I'm so tired of this argument. The "AI doomers" are not natural allies of the folks who have been documenting the real-world harms of so-called AI systems: discrimination, surveillance, pollution of the information ecosystem, data theft, labor exploitation.
Those harms are real, they're being done by people to people using technology.
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When we push back against the ridiculous distraction tactics of the AI doomers on their media tour and then get told to "be nice" it's like telling folks working on addressing climate change to allocate time & resources to oil companies raising concerns about contrails.