Practico-inertia

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.

Generative models should not be invested with the capability to arbitrate reality, and any discussion that forwards that idea shifts more power to the companies that amass the data and build the models. The only knowledge that models produce is about the composition of their training data and the methods they use to process and organize it. Those m... See more

Much of the pleasure of “generating content” — whether through a machine or by some other means, about oneself or about other things or about other things as a way to signify oneself — is in imagining that someone else might also want it. The content is not just for you to consume but to anchor shared experience, or at least allow us to imagine its... See more