Barberousse @barberousse_bin@todon.eu
Public

I'm so sick of LLMs and AI. Let me try and organize my thoughts into something vaguely coherent.

I don't have any real qualifications to discuss this; I'm just a random anarchist, social science nerd working in tech. This isn't trying to be objective or the truth™.
Just giving voice to some ideas and hurling them into the not-quite-void of my Mastodon community.

Obviously, there's the slop of it all. That has been discussed extensively (and still is), but doesn't fully explain the ick.

Smarter and more qualified people have already covered the environmental catastrophe of the massive datacenters this technology relies on.

I'm not even getting into how the scale of current LLMs is made possible by massive non-consensual data extraction and the quasi-monopolization of the internet by a few giant corporations.

My main issue is the vision of the world and values implicit in this push for AI.

Some people have found LLM tools to be empowering (as Cory Doctorow is fond of saying: centaurs). Good on them. But I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that this isn't why bosses and tech companies are cramming AI into everything.

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Barberousse @barberousse_bin@todon.eu
Public

Replacing human support with crappy AI chatbots, threatening to fire people unless they embrace AI, using exploited labor to train models: This all points to a worldview in which humans are sometimes necessary, always inconvenient; the least-worst option to fulfill some economic roles.

Hence, they should be replaced whenever it can be done profitably, and optimized when it can't. That's what reverse-centaurs are: inconvenient humans optimized for a task.

And fuck if that doesn't rhyme with a lot of current and historical systems of exploitation: "Scientific management", offshoring, gig work, Amazon warehouses, two-tier contracts, etc.

I don't claim that those are all equally bad, but they have something in common. They're ways to wield power in order to create one or more underclasses that can then be treated like tools.

Maybe this makes me a radical, but I feel like human rights and dignity are more important than profit. So forgive me if I don't give a shit that your agent can write code, poetry, or a recipe.

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