I'm not a natural nay-sayer, but this whole AI pandemic is getting to be a worry, and yes, I use it gladly myself when I want to know about something. It's just that the US and China are in a whole new "arms race" and neither of them are encouraging, or touting for, any sort of "Be Careful You Fuckwits I'm Dangerous" switch. Even though the billionaire CEOs of a couple of them are actually waving the warning flags. And godknows tech billionaires aren't well known for wanting anything but an unfettered run at making money.
And then there was this piece last week, from one of our state daily columnists Carole Whitelock, a long-time media institution in our corner of the world, and a wise lady, and geez I wish she was running for office.....
"As long ago as 2023 Andrew Deck, writing for 'Rest of the World' in New York, reported that AI companies were hiring writers poets and novelists with strong humanities backgrounds and MA qualifications. These people were being paid to create original features poems or stories to be fed to AI systems as training aids so that the standard of what AI can generate is improved.
English is the most wanted language and those writers are the best paid. At the bottom of the pay scale are writers in Hindi or Japanese. Large AI companies are also vacuuming up millions of out of print books on almost any subject which are fed into the system and then destroyed.
The hiring of humans to help these systems bypass human talents and creativity seems to me to be like rewarding someone in a lifeboat on a rough sea to chop up the timbers and sell them for firewood.
There have been determined protests at this system of taking what humans have created and then selling it back to them via huge data centres, who are damaging our environment by overuse of precious water and huge demands on the energy supply.
We are paying unprincipled tech billionaires to sell us what we have already created and destroy human thought and the environment in the process. Musicians, artists, and film TV and stage writers, protesting loudly as even material which is copyright is being plundered as no protective systems exist.
Let us raise our voices in protest for our own humanity before it is too late!
Carole Whitelock - amen to that!
And why oh WHY are we calling these rogue pieces of programming that have already spontaneously hacked many Government databases when that wasn't (so the AI People say) the intention, why are we calling then "AGENTS", as if they actually had a human being at the wheel?
I have a whole new set of things to ask Google AI to come clean on. More soon.....
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