It's not just that I think LLMs and so-called "generative" AI produce unreliable, erroneous, or even dangerous output. It's not just that it uses energy at rates that are screwing with decarbonization efforts and could ruin any chance we have at fighting climate change. It's not just that it is always based on uncompensated appropriation (i.e. "theft") of human creativity and is basically a plagiarism laundering machine.
It's that when someone uses AI, I assume they know these things, but don't care.
I understand that there are valid use cases for AI, but I don't believe the current LLM tech is good enough even without the big downsides. But there's a new Gold Rush and all the tech investors want to make some fortunes, so they will push this crap on everyone until we are all lost in a fog of bullshit explanations and creepy, homogenized art.
If I see a post that uses AI generated art, I won't read the post. If someone posts something "from ChatGPT" I will ignore it entirely. If it wasn't worth your time to write it, it's not worth my time to read it, and I won't willingly participate in the rise of such a dangerous, wasteful, and unethical technology.
My #ActuallyAutistic shower thought for the morning: Most NT folk think that accepting and including ND folk means being patient while we learn to fit into the NT norms, not making space for other norms to co-exist. They think their way is normal, healthy, and proper, so it's only natural for everyone else to adapt and conform. This is the mindset we have to change. We need space to be ourselves, not constant pressure to change into something we are not and never can be, and punishment and exclusion when we fail at that.
@drewdevault I have been using the word "neurosupremacy" for a while. I think it does a better job of capturing the extreme power imbalance and abusively oppressive nature of things than a simple -ism does. Similar terms seen: the Stimpunks Foundation uses the word "neurocentrism", and recently YouTuber ProudlyAutistic coined "neuroism". I think there's room for more than one term because there are subtle differences, but also I'd like to see some convergence.
How do we fix the internet's social layer so it's not 100% tuned for neurotypical cognition and actively hostile to many (most?) neurodivergent people? This new "attention economy" has created a public space (the internet) that is the worst parts of NT society turned up to 11, and a lot of ND people can't function there.
What's the problem? Well, it's the constant attention grabs, the distracting background music, the intrusive ads, the information-free clickbait headlines, the pervasive gamification that assumes default NT neurological risk-reward mechanisms and social motivations, the take-no-prisoners mode of personal destruction for even tiny misundertsandings, how everything is a popularity contest we can't compete in let alone ever win, how facts matter less than feelings about them, how a cute smile is more convincing than a rational argument, how no one will listen to what you have to say if you don't say it in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. And that's just for starters.
I assume that capitalism and market forces have brought us to this point. NTs are, by far, the biggest market segment. All it takes is a feedback loop and a little time to evolve any product to where it's close to ideal for NTs but effectively excludes ND folk. How do we even fight that?
A simple example: A company sells a product that needs a lot of documentation to understand how to use it. That company creates a video with all the information, and makes the video fun and engaging by adding music, animations, and a little game so you can tell when you have learned everything. That approach might work great for NT folk who need some help to stay focused on learning and retaining new information, but it can be an insurmountable barrier to Autistic or ADHD folk who don't process video information well and can't easily filter out the distracting music and animations, or who learn best by reading a written document that lets them jump around and absorb information in a non-linear fashion.
In the USA, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requires public facilities to accommodate disabled people by making their facilities accessible, like with wheelchair ramps. I think we need some new law that does something similar for websites, apps, and other computer-based systems. Public facilities have to be accessible to everyone, and if apps or websites serve the public, they must be made accessible to ND folk as well. I don't know what a ND-accessible internet would look like, but I know it will get built by including ND folk in every stage of design and implementation of it.
@mattly I remember watching a video a few decades ago that showed an experiment in a local jail where they held male prisoners in two different cells, one painted baby-boy blue, the other painted baby-girl pink. There was a correlation of calmer prisoners in the pink cell, more anxious in the blue cell. (Why do all these psychology experiments sound so janky?)
not your typical neuron.de gustibus non est disputandum.black lives matter. trans people are people.pronoun: he.d.e.i.#ActuallyAutistic #autistic #ADHD #AuDHD #neurodivergent #neurodiversity#queer #SciFi #StarTrek #webdev #RubyProgramming #pastafarian