Inspired by a recent talk from Richard Stallman.
From Slashdot:
Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that “nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all…” He makes a point of calling large language models “generators” because “They generate text and they don’t understand really what that text means.” (And they also make mistakes “without batting a virtual eyelash. So you can’t trust anything that they generate.”) Stallman says “Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that.”
Sometimes I think that even though we are in a “FuckAI” community, we’re still helping the “AI” companies by tacitly agreeing that their LLMs and image generators are in fact “AI” when they’re not. It’s similar to how the people saying “AI will destroy humanity” give an outsized aura to LLMs that they don’t deserve.
Personally I like the term “generators” and will make an effort to use it, but I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
It’s just a word. It’s more important to let people know what this is about and any terms that may be more “accurate” won’t do that.
I never liked the “just a word” defense. If any word can be made to mean anything else just because a government or corporation says so, what does that say for our shared reality?
Sure, I don’t disagree. But what use is any of that if people don’t know what exactly you are protesting? At what point do you abandon idealism in favour of pragmatism?
It seems most people don’t know what exactly is being protested now. And it seems to me that perpetuating a false narrative for the sake of convenience is helping those we claim to be against.
And this is based on what exactly?
Based on historical examples of situations when a false narrative was perpetuated for the sake of convenience, and it assisted the person or group who benefited from the perpetuation of the false narrative.
Right, but what examples?
Nobody likes a sealion.
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It’s based on the fact that a false narrative is the dominant narrative… and y’all seem to approve.
Gaming NPC behaviour decision trees that are even the slightest bit sophisticated have been called “AI” for decades. Nobody complained about a “false narrative” and nobody thought NPCs in games were like Data. It’s just a word.
I thought we left all that purity testing bullshit in the 2010s. We all hate AI. We haven’t been convinced this issue in particular is the hill worth dying on.
There’s nothing “pragmatic” about mass delusion.
I get where you are coming from, but ultimately words and their meanings are social constructs. Words mean what society determine they mean.
If you need to distinguish them, we can use the already coined name of LLMs as that’s what they actually are. Maybe let’s use Large Image Models for those non-text ones? I feel like “generators” is too generic a term to work.
But I do agree that calling them AI gives them more power than they have.
“generators” is too generic but “AI” isn’t?
It’s just a lie. What’s the point of telling the truth? It’s more important for people to be immersed in grifter disinformation than to accurately use words. \s
It’s the word we use for that technology. A “meme” in today’s sense has little to nothing to do with “memes” in the early internet sense and certainly the original concept as defined by Dawkins and I could cry and yell about that injustice all day long or I could use words that other people understand if I want to convey anything.
Once they are interested in what you have to say, because they were curious about “why would anyone be anti-AI?”, you can then very easily educate them as to more precise terminology. You won’t get even to that point if they’re thinking “anti-large-language-model-generated slop? never heard of that before, don’t care.”