Thread by @emilymbender

Today's #AIhype take-down + analysis (first crossposted to both Twitter & Mastodon): an "AI politician".
vice.com/en/article/jgp…

/1

Working from the reporting by @chloexiang at @motherboard, it appears that this is some sort of performance art, except that the project is (purports to be?) interacting with the actual Danish political system.

/2

I have no objections to performance art in general, and something that helps the general public grasp the absurdity of claims of "AI" and reframe what these systems should be used for seems valuable.

/3

However, the quotes in the article leave me very concerned that the artists either don't really understand or have expectations of the general AI literacy in Denmark that are probably way too high.

/4

The general idea seems to be "train an LM on fringe political opinions and let people add to that training corpus".

/5

Combine that with the claim that the humans in the party are "committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform" and this "art project" appears to be using the very democratic process as its material. Such a move seems disastrously anti-democratic.

/6

Side note: I'm sure Danes will really appreciate random people from "all around the globe" having input into their law-making.

/7

I'd really rather think that there are better ways to think outside the box in terms of policy making than putting fringe policy positions in a text blender (+ inviting people to play with it further) and seeing what comes out.

/8

This is non-sensical and a category error: "AIs" (mathy maths) aren't the kind of entity that can be held accountable. Accountability rests with humans, and anytime someone suggests moving it to machines they are in fact suggesting reducing accountability.

/9

Sorry, this has been tried. It was called Tay and it was a (predictable) disaster. What's missing in terms of "democratizing" "AI" is shared *governance*, not open season on training data.

/10

This paragraph seems inconsistent with the rest of the article. That is, I don't see anything in the rest of the proposals that seems like a good way to "use AI to our benefit."

/11

And this is downright creepy. I thought that "representative democracy" means that the elected representatives represent the people who elected them, not their party and surely not a text synthesis machine.

/12

Finally, I can just tell that some reading this thread are going to reply with remarks abt politicians being thoughtless text synthesizing machines. Don't. You can be disappointed in politicians without dehumanizing them, & without being nihilistic about the whole process.

/fin

#ThreeMarvins