TechTakes

1429 readers

110 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo (nanowrimo.zendesk.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.

Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help.

General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don't always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.

Presented without comment.

top 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't even mention the one use case I have a moderate amount of respect for, automatically generating image descriptions for blind people.

And even those should always be labeled, since AI is categorically inferior to intentional communication.

They seem focused on the use case "I don't have the ability to communicate with intention, but I want to pretend I do."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AI and ML (and I'm not talking about LLM, but more about those techniques in general) have many actual uses, often when the need is "you have to make a decision quickly, and there's a high tolerance for errors or imprecision".

Your example is a perfect example: it's not as good as a human-generated caption, it can lack context, or be wrong. But it's better than the alternative of having nothing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But it’s better than the alternative of having nothing.

I’d take nothing over trillions of dollars dedicated to igniting the atmosphere for an incorrectly captioned video

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Oh yeah I'm not arguing with you on that. AI has become synonymous with LLM, and doing the most generic models possible, which means syphoning (well stealing actually) stupid amounts of data, and wasting a quantity of energy second only to cryptocurrencies.

Simpler models that are specialized in one domain instead do not cost as much, and are more reliable. Hell, spam filters have been partially based on some ML for years.

But all of that is irrelevant at the moment, because IA/ML is not one possible solution among other solutions that are not based on ML. Currently they are something that must be pushed as much as possible because it's a bubble that gets investors, and I'm so waiting forward for it to burst.