podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 It's a busy week—Cool Zone Media is at the Consumer Electronics Show, which means that I get hours and hours of my favourite kind of content—not-sober people making fun of AI. God I love it. There's so much of it, though, and it'll take me awhile to wade through.

In the meantime, here is an older episode from Tech Won't Save Us: "Maybe We Should Destroy AI with Ali Alkhatib." It's based on a post Alkhatib made last June that you can read if you're not a podcast person. He makes a very clear cost-benefit analysis.

1) No one asked for this
2) No one wants it
3) In cases where the harm outweighs the good, we should destroy this technology rather than learn to adapt it or try to somehow force it to be ethical.

He offers the parallel of a restaurant that poisons its customers. Such a restaurant would be shut down. We have legal mechanisms for shutting it down. When we have a lot of clear harm being done by technology, we should be able to do the same.

Comments

[greylock]

hours of my favourite kind of content—not-sober people making fun of AI

Niche.


1) No one asked for this
2) No one wants it

Relatable.

[sabotabby]

Is that niche? I guess.

[greylock]

I'm down for anyone making fun of AI.
Moreso less-than-sober people.

[ioplokon]

I genuinely get so mad that if you autodownload a bunch of JSTOR articles, you get legally harassed into suicide, but if you torrent a bunch of stuff to train your for-profit generative AI, apparently that's fine.

[frandroid]

:(

[sabotabby]

That's one of my biggest beefs. Just because you can do a crime at scale doesn't mean it's not a fucking crime. It should be a bigger crime.

[ioplokon]

It's also like. We're getting a version of the early internet techno-utopian ideal (information wants to be free, hack the planet, etc)... But a blistered and corroded version of it.

[sabotabby]

I'm working up to an essay about how it's the dark doppelganger of fanfic.

[greylock]

When you're a big crime lord, they let you do it.

[frandroid]

I went to two tech conferences this fall, including Amazon's local extravaganza, and it was just AI everywhere, to the point that these conferences, which were previously good places to learn new things, became nearly useless (for me as a developer anyway, which AI is trying to replace, even though AI is also genuinely useful in my job).

[sabotabby]

The bubble will burst. May the cynics and haters be the ones left standing.

[yarrowkat]

seriously. someone please make these things stop, they're awful, and the environmental impact is absolutely untenable.

[sabotabby]

Agreed.

[minoanmiss]

OMg I must say this here or BURST. I keep seeing people on Tumblr defend AI in vague terms, often snottily wielding the difference between cancer detecting software and Chat GTP and such, and I keep wanting to ask them specifics. What about deadly inaccurate mushroom guides and completely nonfactual facts and all that water???

I will not. I will not challenge them. But I Want To.

[sabotabby]

I challenge them all the time. AI is a branding term. It suits the techbros to act as though the Plagiarism Machine and cancer-detecting software are the same thing but they obviously aren't.

[frandroid]

I didn't know what to think of the CES extravaganza but after listening to the first episode, I'm sold, it sounds unhinged. EZ is quickly becoming Robert Evans 2.0... The only thing I note is how it's a big sausage fest, even Sophie isn't there.

[sabotabby]

It's extremely unhinged. There are women in some of the later episodes but even they note that there aren't a lot of women.