They be tripping

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

This is a must read different take on modern AI systems. “Hallucinations” humanize the system. My readers, they be tripping no doubt. And there are more hallucinations and hallucinogenics out there in the ethersphere.

And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.

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The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.