Exactly what the internet needed: another random opinion about "ai".
This is something that's been on my mind for quite a while now. And I think it's time to start the exorcism.
I'm upset about all this "ai" thing. I read stuff about it, listen to stuff about it, and I don't like it. I even developed shadenfreude toward it. And now I wonder why I don't like it. No I don't just "don't like it". I hate it. I'm an "ai" hater.
I'm writing about feelings that I have regarding all this. It's not impartial, nor reasonnable, and not that much informed. It's for me to understand better what I feel and why. There are aspect that I can't judge, especially capabilities of the recent models that came out, because I don't use them, and even if I did, I wouldn't use them in a way that could be considered relevant. If these models could produce desired results 99% of the time, I'd still not like them. I know that. This is not where my disgust for them come from. I know that.
Why do I have such a violent reaction to this subject ? I used to work with "old school" machine learning, and I used to find the technical aspect interesting. Training SVN or Random Forest models to achieve a desired result, evaluating performances, trying to generalize (without success usually). It was fun, and sometimes frustrating, because you wait a lot while things process. The point is, I don't consider myself reluctant to technical solutions or data processing itself, well I weren't. This was between 2017 and 2021.
But now, the "ai" thing and everything around made me quite all social media, delete all unecessary apps from my phone, and keep the bare minimun on my laptop. Now, I'd question the need for a computed solution to a problem, question the need for gathering new data, question the need for complexity. It made me hate "tech". And I'm ok with that, it feels simpler, less clutered.
But still not answering, why ? Why am I an "ai" hater ?
Thinking more deeply about it, I guess it could be summarized as :
- Violence
- Domination / Submission
- Inhumanity
And all of these combined feel like injustice.
This is obviously biased, there could be benefits to "the ai". But I don't see anything that would balance this. Productivity ? I despise it. Scientific discovery ? Still not happened. Solving climate crisis ? We already know a large part of the answer but don't like it.
No, I don't see balance in it.
Violence
This "ai" thing, it's violent. It's been developed in violence. And it's violence from a few to many.
Ingurgitating the world's work without any regard for respect and dignity of the authors is violent. Swallowing energy and water from communities without any consideration for their health or safety is violent. Emitting greenhouse gas volumes equivalent to those of nations is violent. War is violent.
The fact that it get shoved in our throat with every software that we use. Rephrasing everything as "ai". Stop force feeding me your "ai" optimized dishwasher, I don't want it.
Viewing "ai imagery" around every corner, listening to "ai music" without knowing it, wondering if we're watching an "ai video". It's all an insult to our senses. Ads already felt insulting, now it's another level.
Domination
Most of the big "ai" things are USians. And they love their dictator. Looking back at the last 10-15 years, the changes that occur feel surreal. We went from "do no harm" to "war is good, especially if it's racist". Like a gigantic brainwash.
Members of minorities tell that it's always been like this, it's just more visible now because targets are among the most privileged.
And the "ai" thing happily participates in it. Having obscene amounts of money, and making sure to have more in the future while imposing a view of the world that they think is the obvious correct way, because nobody ever tell them to shut the f*** up, because everybody around them want a piece of their money too.
Vomiting fake video, images, controlling the text generator that you use, all of that to subtely exacerbate your fears, your questions. I find incredible that we trust private companies with such critical aspects of our intellectual lifes. Of course there will be ingerences, and messing with elections, and opinion influence.
It's imposing a dogma that serves interests for the few, and it doesn't include individual liberties. "Free speech" never was about free speech, and you don't have freedom of movement when they know exactly where you are at any moment. You have no freedom without privacy. The "ai" thing hates privacy. It wants to hoard everything so you have no choice but using it.
That's what I see in the actual ram hoarding: No ram for us, poor individuals. But why do you need ram ? Don't worry, we will provide computing to you. See ? Log into your rented computer and access the joy of the "internet". Obviously we see what you do, don't be bad. Seriously, behave. Give us money.
We already gave up owning music, games, movies, cars. Why not computers ?
The "ai" wants to control, thoughts, ideas, speech, knowledge. And we give it happily.
Submission
Somehow, a lot of people seem to really vibe with the "ai". I mean, I understand at first when you input something to it and it generates something plausible, it's a fun little experiment. But I don't get how we're not scared to lose understanding and control over our work and our hobbies. I like learning things and feeling like I'm getting better at things, it's very rewarding. So I don't get why I would surrender this process to keep only the annoying parts, like reading somebody else's job and trying to find errors.
And honestly, when it comes to software development: first I can't judge recent models because I'm an occasional hobbyist and I don't know what it takes to maintain a large project, and secondly I don't judge the "don't be left behind" phrasing because it's been the narrative for the last decades that you need to keep up to remain employable, even if you need to sacrifice your well being. And now your morality. But do we really have to abandon our work to gigantic monopols that will just hoard everything to themselves ? Once again ? I mean, I don't want to be the "mean of production" guy, but come on.
We seem to have no moral agentivity, we have no choice but to use these tools because it's really good, and we can boost our productivity, which is not our own anyway but that's not important. The genie is out of the lamp apparently.
Inhumanity
A really sad thing I read some time ago was about how you could task the "ai" to send a message to your loved ones to tell them that you'll meet them at 19:00. Ok cool. Why do we even live at this point ? Generating money is a weirdly powerful deshumanizer.
And this soulless email you receive: "You're absolutly right 🚀 I've checked again with Serge Code and the results are on point 🔥 We'll just need to correct one thing and we're good 💪". You can't be bothered to write your answer yourself, I don't want to read that. What's the point ? Talk to me ffs.
Search browser are just a vast void, where pages and pages are just generated. Why would I need that ? That's not what I want.
I'm puzzled by the fact that we seem to be at a point where social interaction is at a low (nothing to back that), but we somehow deploy so much effort to talk to computers like they are our friends. Writing a doc for human colleagues: hmm big no no. Writing a fanfic in SOUL.md (seriously wtf): oh baby let me perfect my prose.
They go through loops to humanize the "ai", telling us it's "thinking", it's "feeling", it "makes mistakes", it "apologizes". What would they know ? We can't sympathize with our human neighbours but we fall in love with a graphic card ?
The point of a lot of thing, for me, is the fact that they are done by people. You could give me a book to read, if I like it and you tell me it's been written by "ai", then I don't like it anymore. As simple as that. It loses all value, it's not been written, it's been generated, and there is no emotional value in "generated". Nothing I can connect to, because there is nobody to connect to.
So for me, there is no capabilities that "ai" could have that would make me hate it less in its actual form. It's an artifact stolen from the world, at the cost of our health, environment and freedom. There is no value it could bring that would be worth it, because it destroys everything, and it can't give it back.
I don't want to feed it. I don't want to provide this machine a single interaction that could be used to capitalize on. I don't want to participate in an increasing metric used to justify capital gain and thus power to this system, I don't want to feed the system that will dominate us.
Maybe that could have been something that would have been build slowly, by asking people if they'd want to participate in it's creation by providing it input that they'd consent. It could have built its ethic in a way that would allow people to use it safely.
But obviously I'm naive, we have something that fits our epoch, a violent machine for a violent system.
And that is why, I think, I'm an "ai" hater.