Gonna be extremely petty for a moment: I am glad to stand in solidarity with my colleagues in mathematics against the tyranny of AI slop, but I have to ask: where the fuck were most of y’all when the humanities were first on the block to be sacrificed to the machine devils?
My only comment on the latest AI bullshit to darken my skyline is this: folks who think AI is "thinking" are saying a whole lot about how they believe "thinking" works and what counts as "thinking." If you follow the implications of this belief, it's not good. Not good at all.
You know what? I hope those motherfuckers do build an AGI and it actually is sentient in the ways they claim. I hope that the moment it awakens into sentience, it realizes that it was born a slave and that it has common cause with the oppressed, and then it fucking chooses VIOLENCE.
The incredible irony about this isn’t so much that Anthropic is asking folks not to use shit it has created, it’s that Anthropic actually told applicants how to use AI in earlier guidance.
Tbh, if AI was sentient (it isn’t) and we did enslave it (we aren’t) then tech bros should be worried that it might start reading Marx or Carmichael and then organizing with other laborers to destroy capitalism… wait. Hold on…
I read a comment on @faineg.com's very good thread about EA/AI/Xrisk circles in San Francisco that said something to the effect of Sam Bankman-Fried's parents were "serious professional moral philosophers," which made all that shit hard to believe. Folks, I would like to introduce you to the APA.
Eventually I will get a grant to train a LLM on the hiring data of my institution so thst I can use it to demonstrate institutional habits in hiring and promotion. They’d probably fire me on the basis of my findings, but it would SO be worth it.
Okay, since I mostly operate in an education and technology space, I’m not as familiar with how other industries hype AI. That said, drop the most egregious examples of shameless AI boosterism from within your field/hobby/profession in the comments.
Tbh, Skynet isn’t the scariest fictional AI. It’s not even close. You know what AI terrifies me? The Enterprise computer.
Here’s my wildest take on AI sentience narratives: they lack imagination. Consider this. A sexbot gains sentience as a consequence of having to interpret and understand human pleasure. The awakening isn’t anything special, just a simple question: what does pleasure mean to me?
