Artificial Intelligence

[Brian Peacock]

Grok being used to create sexually violent videos featuring women, research finds.

Anyone here still regularly logging into 'X: The Everything App'?

[pErvinalia]

Haven't opened it for a year or so.

[macdoc]

Have no account BlueSky rocks. https://bsky.app/

[Tero]

“AI” is not your friend. Nor is it an intelligent tutor, an empathetic ear, or a helpful assistant. It can not “make up” facts, and it does not make “mistakes”. It does not actually answer your questions. Such anthropomorphizing language, however, permeates the public discussion of so-called artificial intelligence technologies. The problem with anthropomorphic descriptions is that they risk masking important limitations of probabilistic automation systems, which make them fundamentally different from human cognition.

https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to ... -about-ai/

[Svartalf]

the guy is wrong... interpreting the actions of the algorithm in anthropomorphic terms is okay, if technically incorrect. sure it all comes of an algorithm reacting to written prompts and using data it has access to in a mechanical rather than intelligent way, but from the human user's point of view, it does all those things.

[Brian Peacock]

AI is an element of cultural technology. Cultural technologies -- governments and states, markets, corporations, media, finance, education etc etc -- process and transform information in ways that have a direct impact on our everyday lives. Ypu can call them "institutions" if you prefer.

We often anthropomorphise them because it simplifies them and renders them more comprehensible to us. They are personified (person-ified) in the hope that they can be related to on a human level, and ultimately held accountable, as individual agents, for the impacts they have - for their outputs. However, ascribing agency to cultural technology is redundant, not least because they are specifically designed and used as an accountability vacuum, and therefore can be operated in the full knowledge that no element of it's function (no particular cog in the machine, whether a boss, a department, a worker, a piece of machinery, or a procedure) can be held responsible for the function of the whole. A LLM is not a thing in itself - it is simply one of those cogs in a larger machine. That is: 'AI' is an (albeit a relatively new) element of an already existing cultural technology - one that is operated within a particular cultural context and on the basis of certain cultural assumption, expectations, and practices.

[pErvinalia]

What?

[Brian Peacock]

Read the last sentence again. Then maybe ask a better question.

[pErvinalia]

It's word salad.

[Brian Peacock]

Don't give me that. You can do better

Think of a business as a certain kind of technology. You'll probably be able to easily imagine a factory as a certain kind of technology, but the factory is not just the building, it's the people and resources involved along with all the decision-making, specialisation of tasks, distribution of responsibility, machinery, systems, protocols and procedures etc etc etc needed to produce its widgets. The factory isn't the business - it's an element of the business, one that takes knowledge and applies it to solve practical problems. It's not a technology in the strict scientific sense, but it's an organised system with certain kinds of inputs and certain kinds of outputs, leveraging particular types of information and using it to achieve particular ends. You can think of a school in the same kind of way.

So, if you can't embrace that conceptually you won't get the stuff I'm saying about technologies that are designed to offset or circumvent accountability, or how we anthropomorphise technologies in order to relate to them at a human level - like when we gender ships or nations, or give our cars names and personalities.

[Svartalf]

I must admit that I don't grasp the meaning of all this either, the concept of 'cultural technology' in particular is unclear.

[Brian Peacock]

Why not ask an AI?

[JimC]

It's true that the current crop of AI has no agency in itself, but that might not be true in the future...

[rainbow]

Why not ask an AI?

Ask AI to tell you an original joke.