Writing this up again so I can pin it: AI is literally a fascist project.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

Writing this up again so I can pin it: AI is literally a fascist project. Friends don't let friends use it.

Before I go into this, there are two types of responses to this that I have taken seriously so far.

One I'll call HashTagNotAllAI, which yields the obligatory "sure", but has the same smell. I'll leave it at that.

The other is that an anti AI stance also throws some assistive technology under the bus, making such a stance intrinsically ableistic. The easy thing to do is to refer...

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

... to HashTagNotAllAI above, sans the smell, but I don't think that is fair. To be clear, I don't want those tools to disappear.

My anti AI stance isn't about tech, or not primarily about tech.

I don't like that it swallows up rainforests and produces unreliable results. Those are valid criticisms, but I actually agree that those are - in principle at least - solvable problems.

A knife is technology. I can use a knife to cut out a cancer, or to disembowel someone. This makes a knife...

[nielsa@mas.to]

@jens I'm strongly in the "yes, but..." camp here. You're right about the current hype cycle, funding, how it is used to affect people largely around the world.

I probably end up pedantic because of my technical perspective on it. I think there are even good uses for LLMs (text related work), but it's not anythink like the chatbots, agents, general code generators today...

For the general population, AI means those things today, and in that I agree.

Is this reasonable, in your view, or no?

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

... neither good nor bad; it's the usage of the tool that counts.

That same argument cannot be transferred to a gun. The entire point of a gun is to hurt and kill; its intrinsic purpose is evil. That it can be used to hurt, kill, and potentially deter "baddies" doesn't change that. It may justify the use in highly select circumstances, but doesn't magically absolve it.

Generally, tools are neutral. A weapon is a kind of tool that is intrinsically evil.

Back to AI.

AI is a tool. Even...

[nielsa@mas.to]

@jens *hovering my finger over the boost button, holding my breath, seeing where this is going*

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

... so, the balance of cost vs. benefit must be considered. Clearly the benefit of AI used in assistive tech is worth a much higher cost than when applied in many other areas.

But even a high cost doesn't make a tool evil. It just raises the importance of asking questions about the cost/benefit tradeoff.

The thing that bothers me is that some AI is a weapon, and it's a weapon of fascism.

I suppose it's much fairer to restrict this to generative AI/GenAI, but I resist such a restriction,...

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

... because I just don't know what other AI use will come around the corner with the same issues. At the same time, it's the pattern that matters more than the tech, so it should be more broadly applied than just to AI.

"AI is evil" and "AI is a fascist project", things you'll see me write, are shorthands for this.

What makes GenAI evil?

The intent of GenAI, both implicitly and explicitly, is to replace humans.

Implicitly, because anything that automates does so. This is the more complex...

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@jens thanks for the excellent write-up. The last time I tried to make this argument with @davidgerard he blocked me. I'm guessing I didn't make my position clear enough to not be confused with a genAi apologist (me, LOL)

[gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org]

@oblomov @jens

I added to the nuts&bolts database I wrote for my workshop some features like suggesting alternatives if a screw is not available, but I don't think the pages of if…then makes it "intelligent", even if a lot of people I know wouldn't be able to think to that.