Thread by @emilymbender

I see lots and lots of that distraction. Every time one of you talks about LLMs, DALL-E etc as "a step towards AGI" or "reasoning" or "maybe slightly conscious" you are setting up a context in which people are led to believe that "AIs" are here that can "make decisions".
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https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1535425433818173440

And then meanwhile OpenAI/Cohere/AI2 put out a weak-sauce "best practices" document which proclaims "represent diverse voices" as a key principle ... without any evidence of engaging with the work of the Black women scholars leading this field.

https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1534630335916306432

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Without actually being in conversation (or better, if you could build those connections, in community) with the voices you said "we should represent" but then ignore/erase/avoid, you can't possibly see the things that the "gee-whiz look AGI!" discourse is distracting from.

Someone who was genuinely interested in using their $$ to protect against harms done in the name of AI would be funding orgs like @DAIRInstitute @C2i2_UCLA and @ruha9 's #IdaLab. Theirs is the work that brings us closer to justice and tech that benefits society.

I don't see any current or future problems facing humanity that are addressed by building ever larger LMs, with or without calling them AGI, with or without ethics washing, with or without claiming "for social good".