Is A(G|S)I Denial the COVID/Climate Denial of the Left?

People are losing their shit over the Seattle Worldcon using AI to vet people. I am not really how much people should be being vetted, historically whoever was organising the programme would just assign people they knew or trusted to appropriate items. That seemed to work fine for decades. I guess there are a lot more programme items these days that at, say, Conspiracy in 1987, which probably had three programme streams plus stuff. I think it was the one that had the Third Programme (boom, boom!). Definitely had a film programme, which you don't seem to get these days. Paul and I went to see The Right Stuff. I mean given that a lot of fans are (a) profoundly irksome; (b) right-wing, it's hard to know what you are vetting for. Some people might be persona non grata, for some reason (Dave McCarthy), but what about the puppies, say? I suppose you could argue they launched a direct attack on the Hugos, but then they are hardly the only ones in recent years. There's the case of people being fraudulent and you might want to avoid having worst enemies on the same panel. A difficulty in 2025 is that there are several polarising issues about which things could kick off.

One of those is AI. So, people want the convention to pledge not to use "LLMs". Of course, it would be extremely silly to specify "LLM" specifically. Or even AI. As David out, how would you even know you weren't using AI? And that's going to be even more true in 2 years and then in four. It's like saying in the early 1990s, don't use email or the web. But the real problem is that a lot of dislike AI. Of course, I am booster. But we are not going to have a Banksian post-scarcity Culture-style society without A(G|S)I or even Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So, AI is Bad because it is stealing jobs or stealing my job or corrupting the youth or being developed by rapacious high tech companies that are destroying the world or is merely a stochastic parrot that can't do anything useful and is forever necessarily prone to hallucinations or can't do basic algebra or work out how many "r"s there are in "strawberry" or based on stolen IP or memorising the internet or is environmentally damaging or will go the way of the Zuck's metaverse in another few weeks or months or enable deep fakes or make relationships with other humans even more difficult for a lot of vulnerable people or end up destroying the planet through creating mirror life or gray goo or weaponised microbes.

The thing is that a lot of those things are actually true. The world is in a very bad state and a lot of the companies pumping resource into AI or also responsible for contributing to the awfulness of the world. AI enables some definitely bad things as well as some potentially good ones. A lot of people don't have access to the latest frontier models and don't realise how powerful they have become. For a lot of people, they don't need or want to use them right now, so they seem extraneous. Like the web for most people in the mid-1990s. The A(G|S)I Derangement Syndrome arises though when opposition to AI becomes a ideological shibboleth, just as COVID or climate denial is for many on the right. But we should mark the world of Thomas Pynchon from 1984, which I mist have quoted before 

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. 

It is 2025 now and Thomas Pynchon is still alive about to publish a new novel and we have finally arrived at an epoch at which the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics are all about to converge. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and let us devoutly hope even the biggest of brass are going to be caught flat-footed. Because if we want something like our Banksian inheritance, the Left is going to have seize what might be its Last, Best Chance. It will be no easy ride, but the alternatives are all too easily imaginably unimaginable.

 

Comments

[Daveon]

I do, honestly, get and agree with some of the complaints - they have stolen a lot of IP. OTOH the venn diagram of people who are very 'IP should not exist' and 'how dare AI use other people's IP' appears to be a complete circle to me...

The companies boosting AI are shitty too and a LOT of the money being spent on it is going to literally vanish into the pockets of a handful of people milking the system.

It's not great for the climate, but then neither is streaming video which we apparently give an automatic by to because it's handy.

What is getting to me about this specific debate is the use of the phrase AI to cover essentially a half dozen separate things that just happen to all be powered by variations on LLMs. It is not a single monolithic thing - chat, generative AI, LLM textual analysis are all separate (but share some common bits) and work in different ways in different models.

The reality is we are already ALL using it all the time if we interact with anything on line, it's just _there_ already.

It's good at some stuff and not as good at others. The fact is the early stuff 18 months ago was cool in a gimmicky way and now much better - but prone to some errors. But stuff like doing a massive contextual trawl of a lot of text based data and summarizing that context in relation to a question is something it is REALLY good at.

It's not without the risk of going wrong, but humans, in the 6th hour of doing something like that aren't great either.

[Daveon]

I do, honestly, get and agree with some of the complaints - they have stolen a lot of IP. OTOH the venn diagram of people who are very 'IP should not exist' and 'how dare AI use other people's IP' appears to be a complete circle to me...

The companies boosting AI are shitty too and a LOT of the money being spent on it is going to literally vanish into the pockets of a handful of people milking the system.

It's not great for the climate, but then neither is streaming video which we apparently give an automatic by to because it's handy.

What is getting to me about this specific debate is the use of the phrase AI to cover essentially a half dozen separate things that just happen to all be powered by variations on LLMs. It is not a single monolithic thing - chat, generative AI, LLM textual analysis are all separate (but share some common bits) and work in different ways in different models.

The reality is we are already ALL using it all the time if we interact with anything on line, it's just _there_ already.

It's good at some stuff and not as good at others. The fact is the early stuff 18 months ago was cool in a gimmicky way and now much better - but prone to some errors. But stuff like doing a massive contextual trawl of a lot of text based data and summarizing that context in relation to a question is something it is REALLY good at.

It's not without the risk of going wrong, but humans, in the 6th hour of doing something like that aren't great either.