The “Stochastic Parrots” authors responded to the Future of Life Institute’s “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter:
It is dangerous to distract ourselves with a fantasized AI-enabled utopia or apocalypse which promises either a “flourishing” or “potentially catastrophic” future. Such language that inflates the capabilities of automated systems and anthropomorphizes them, as we note in Stochastic Parrots, deceives people into thinking that there is a sentient being behind the synthetic media. This not only lures people into uncritically trusting the outputs of systems like ChatGPT, but also misattributes agency. Accountability properly lies not with the artifacts but with their builders. […]
Contrary to the letter’s narrative that we must “adapt” to a seemingly pre-determined technological future and cope “with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause,” we do not agree that our role is to adjust to the priorities of a few privileged individuals and what they decide to build and proliferate.
Read the whole thing. Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell are positively on fire.
(The post-preview image of a delivery robot traveling into an uncertain future is here. Also, for a better understanding of the Future of Life Institute and their open letter’s background, here’s an introduction to longtermism by Émile P. Torres at Salon.com, which I had belatedly added to my initial post on “Pause AI” two days ago.)
