Anthony on Nostr: Having followed the public conversation on #AI since the explosion of #ChatGPT on the ...

Having followed the public conversation on #AI since the explosion of #ChatGPT on the scene last year, the overwhelming characteristic I experience is ugliness. The conversation around AI, the reactions to it, the pronouncements about it, all feel ugly to me. It's ugly to imagine artists being put out of work by computer programs. It's ugly that artists have to defend themselves and use tools like Glaze to protect their work from these things (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu). It's ugly to imagine people reading AI-extruded text and thinking what they're reading was written by a human author. It's ugly to see business-minded people seeking ways to replace workers with AI programs. What NEDA did was ugly (https://www.thecut.com/2023/06/neda-has-disabled-tessa-its-harmful-helpline-chatbot.html). Replacing information retrieval systems with chatbots is ugly. Deploying AI-enabled drones and robots onto city streets is ugly.

How so many of these tools are made, on a foundation of theft and exploitation, is extremely ugly.

This technology could uplift people and yet here we are with one ugly episode after another unfolding like a dystopian science fiction plot generated by a chatbot. It's deeply unsettling and unpleasant to be a part of.