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I enjoyed this lovely rant by Timnit Gebru today. It's titled something like "AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs


How cynical. What if the fears of extinction are _rational_? Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise.

People will go to great lengths to avoid believing truths that dramatically challenge their worldviews. Consider the case of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz and were initially met with disbelief when they described the atrocities they'd witnessed.


> Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise.

No we're not. The seventh day adventists also believe that the world is about to end, why are we not obligated to treat that threat as real?


Nobody ever gives a real reason why extinction is a plausible threat from current model development, and Chinese researchers don't seem to agree that it's plausible either.

I agree. AI skeptics are widely met with disbelief when describing the atrocities that LLM operators are inflicting on society right now.

At one point in my graduate college studies, I tutored qualified (DEI) undergrads 'for free' (for them) as part of a work-study program which paid me a bit for that work.

OTOH, an AI could not have qualified as such a student. But even if it did, before we began I would certainly bargain for considerably more than work-study tutoring paid.


The question's not new. In the early 1900s, women could not become PhD astronomers. Yet two women (Payne with stellar composition and Leavitt with cosmic distances) made fundamental, essential contributions to the science. Credit mostly went to male astronomers. The same might be said of Franklin and DNA.

It was nearly a century before the stories of all of them were revealed to public history. That the discoverers were not all equally rewarded is unjustifiable.


With regards to Franklin and DNA: the credit went to Watson and Crick because they had the fundamental insight: that DNA is an antiparallel double helix (Franklin knew it was a helix, but not an antiparallel double helix, which is key to the function of DNA). That data was shared in a departmental seminar. Further, she is explicitly acknowledged in W&C '53, and further, is the author of the paper immediately following W&C. She was never qualified to win the prize.

>using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours.

WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author."

Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.


When I zoom in, the right half of the page becomes invisible.


"Safe, clean, too cheap to meter"

More?

> We Almost Lost Detroit"- Wikipedia

> a 1975 Reader's Digest book by John G. Fuller,[1] presents a history of Fermi 1, America's first commercial breeder reactor, with emphasis on the 1966 partial nuclear meltdown. ISBN 0883490706


Bril riposte


A thoughtful and detailed history of the early decades of machine 'intelligence' and contemporary reactions - by American historian Jill Lepore

KQED interview with Alexis Madrigal:

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915026/historian-jill-lepo...


It's indeed very annoying.

I've only seen 1 or 2 that know what they're doing. One's at lemmy.world ... just hovering over it is verified ...


A book of that stature being published cutailed in any way should be carefully avoided by all readers.

The 'Canadian Gutenburg' PD version [0] mentioned in another comment here contains all 16 chapters. ('Star Maker' is also there, as is 'Last Men in London', 'Odd John', and more.

[0] https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20200531


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