OpenAI just admitted it can’t identify AI-generated text. That’s bad for the internet and it could be really bad for AI models.::In January, OpenAI launched a system for identifying AI-generated text. This month, the company scrapped it.
Probably because LLMs threaten to (and has already started to) shittify a truly incredible number of things like journalism, customer service, books, scriptwriting etc all in the name of increased profits for a tiny few.
again, the issue isn’t the technology, but the system that forces every technological development into functioning “in the name of increased profits for a tiny few.”
that has been an issue for the fifty years prior to LLMs, and will continue to be the main issue after.
removing LLMs or other AI will not fix the issue. why is it constantly framed as if it would?
we should be demanding the system adjust for the productivity increases we’ve already seen, as well to what we expect in the near future. the system should make every advancement a boon for the general populace, not the obscenely wealthy few.
even the fears of propaganda. the wealthy can already afford to manipulate public discourse beyond the general public’s ability to keep up. the bigger issue is in plain sight, but is still being largely ignored for the slant that “AI is the problem.”
Yep, the problem was never LLMs, but billionaires and the rich. The problems have always been the rich for thousands of years, and yet they are immensely successful at deflecting their attacks to other groups for those thousands of years. They will claim it’s Chinese immigrants, or blacks, or Mexicans, or gays, or trans people. Now LLMs and AI are the new boogieman.
We should be talking about UBI, not LLMs.
Sure but lets say you try to solve this problem. What’s the first thing you think a coordinated group could do, get sensible regulations about AI, or overthrow global capitalism. Its framed the way it is because unless you want ro revolt that’s the framework we’re gonna have to use to deal with it. I suppose we could alwyas do nothing to AI specifically and focus on just overthrowing capitalism, but during that time lots of harm will come to lots of workers because of AI use. I dont think anticapitalism has reached a critical mass (we need this for any real sustem wide attacks on and alternatives to capitalism) so I think dealing with this AI problem and trying to let everyone else know about how it’s really a capitalism thing would do more to build support and avert harm to workers. I hate that its like that too but those choices are basically the real options we have moving forward from my pov.
This isn’t a technological issue, it’s a human one
I totally agree with everything you said, and I know that it will never ever happen. Power is used to get more power. Those in power will never give it up, only seek more. They intentionally frame the narrative to make the more ignorant among us believe that the tech is the issue rather than the people that own the tech.
The only way out of this loop is for the working class to rise up and murder these cunts en masse
Viva la revolucion!
I completely agree with you, ai should be seen as a great thing, but we all know that the society we live in will not pass those benefits to the average person, in fact it’ll probably be used to make life worse. From a leftist perspective it’s very easy to see this, but from the Norman position, atleast in the US, people aren’t thinking about how our society slants ai towards being evil and scary, they just think ai is evil and scary. Again I completely agree with what you’ve said it’s just important to remember how reactionary the average person is.
Exactly. I work in AI (although not the LLM kind, just applying smaller computer vision models), and my belief is that AI can be a great liberator for humanity if we have the right political and economic apparatus. The question is what that apparatus is. Some will say it’s an inherent feature of capitalism, but that’s not terribly specific, nor does it explain the relatively high wealth equality that existed briefly during the middle of the 20th century in America. I think some historical context is important here.
Historical Precedent
During the Industrial Revolution, we had an unprecedented growth in average labor productivity due to automation. From a naïve perspective, we might expect increasing labor productivity to result in improved quality of life and less working hours. I.e., the spoils of that productivity being felt by all.
But what we saw instead was the workers lived in squalor and abject poverty, while the mega-rich captured those productivity gains and became stupidly wealthy.
Many people at the time took note of this and sought to answer this question: why, in an era over greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? Clearly all that extra wealth is going somewhere, and if it’s not going to the working class, then it’s evidently going to the top.
One economist and philosopher, Henry George, wrote a book exploring this very question, Progress and Poverty. His answer, in short, was rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Rent-seeking takes many forms. To list a few examples:
- Land speculation
- Monopolization of finite natural resources (e.g., oil, minerals)
- Offloading negative externalities (e.g., pollution)
- Monopolization of intellectual property
- Regulatory capture
- Monopolistic or oligopolistic control of entire markets
George’s argument, essentially, was that the privatization of the economic rents borne of god-given things — be it land, minerals, or ideas — allowed the rich and powerful to extract all that new wealth and funnel it into their own portfolios. George was not the only one to blame these factors as the primary drivers of sky-high inequality; Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has stated:
Specifically, I suggest that much of the increase in inequality is associated with the growth in rents — including land and exploitation rents (e.g., arising from monopoly power and political influence).
George’s proposed remedies were a series of taxes and reforms to return the economic rents of those god-given things to society at large. These include:
- Implementation of land value taxes:
Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.
- Implementation of Pigouvian (aka externality) taxes, e.g., carbon tax:
A Pigouvian tax (also spelled Pigovian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (i.e., external costs incurred by the producer that are not included in the market price). The tax is normally set by the government to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure) and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, social cost includes private cost and external cost caused by negative externalities. This means the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of negative externalities are environmental pollution and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption.[2]
- Implementation of severance taxes,
Severance taxes are taxes imposed on the removal of natural resources within a taxing jurisdiction. Severance taxes are most commonly imposed in oil producing states within the United States. Resources that typically incur severance taxes when extracted include oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, and timber. Some jurisdictions use other terms like gross production tax.
such as in the Norwegian model:
The key to Norway’s success in oil exploitation has been the special regime of ownership rights which apply to extraction: the severance tax takes most of those rents, meaning that the people of Norway are the primary beneficiaries of the country’s petroleum wealth. Instead of privatizing the resource rents provided by access to oil, companies make their returns off of the extraction and transportation of the oil, incentivizing them to develop the most efficient technologies and processes rather than simply collecting the resource rents. Exploration and development is subsidized by the Norwegian government in order to maximize the amount of resource rents that can be taxed by the state, while also promoting a highly competitive environment free of the corruption and stagnation that afflicts state-controlled oil companies.
- Intellectual property reform, e.g., abolishing patents and instead subsidizing open R&D, similar to a Pigouvian anti-tax (research has positive externalities) or Norway’s subsidization of oil exploration
- Implementation of a citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, e.g., the Alaska permanent fund or carbon tax-and-dividend:
Citizen’s dividend is a proposed policy based upon the Georgist principle that the natural world is the common property of all people. It is proposed that all citizens receive regular payments (dividends) from revenue raised by leasing or taxing the monopoly of valuable land and other natural resources.
…
This concept is a form of universal basic income (UBI), where the citizen’s dividend depends upon the value of natural resources or what could be titled as common goods like location values, seignorage, the electromagnetic spectrum, the industrial use of air (CO2 production), etc.[4]
- Funding public goods via the Henry George Theorem:
In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, beneficial investments in public goods will increase aggregate land rents by at least as much as the investments’ cost.[1] This proposition was dubbed the “Henry George theorem”, as it characterizes a situation where Henry George’s ‘single tax’ on land values, is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.[2] Henry George had famously advocated for the replacement of all other taxes with a land value tax, arguing that as the location value of land was improved by public works, its economic rent was the most logical source of public revenue.[3]
…
Subsequent studies generalized the principle and found that the theorem holds even after relaxing assumptions.[4] Studies indicate that even existing land prices, which are depressed due to the existing burden of taxation on labor and investment, are great enough to replace taxes at all levels of government.[5][6][7]
(continued)
Present Day
Okay, so that’s enough about the past. What about now?
Well, monopolization of land and housing via the housing crisis has done tremendous harm:
In 2015, two talented professors, Enrico Moretti at Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh at Chicago Booth, decided to estimate the effect of shortage of housing on US productivity. They concluded that lack of housing had impaired US GDP by between 9.5 per cent and 13.5 per cent.
In a follow-up paper, based on surveying 220 metropolitan areas, they revised the figure upwards – claiming that housing constraints lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50 per cent between 1964 and 2009. In other words, they estimate that the US economy would have been 74 per cent larger in 2009, if enough housing had been built in the right places.
How does that damage happen? It’s simple. The parts of the country with the highest productivity, like New York and San Francisco, also had stringent restrictions on building more homes. That limited the number of homes and workers who could move to the best job opportunities; it limited their output and the growth of the companies who would have employed them. Plus, the same restrictions meant that it was more expensive to run an office or open a factory, because the land and buildings cost more.
And that is just one form of rent-seeking. Imagine the collective toll of externalities (e.g., the climate crisis), monopolistic/oligopolistic markets such as energy and communications, monopolization of valuable intellectual property, etc.
So I would tend to say that — unless we change our policies to eliminate the housing crisis, properly price in externalities, eliminate monopolies, encourage the growth of free and open IP (e.g., free and open-source software, open research, etc.), and provide critical public goods/services such as healthcare and education and public transit — we are on a trajectory for AI to be Gilded Age 2: Electric Boogaloo. AI merely represents yet another source of productivity growth, and its economic spoils will continue to be captured by the already-wealthy.
I say this as someone who works as an AI and machine learning research engineer: AI alone will not fix our problems; it must be paired with major policy reform so that the economic spoils of progress are felt by all, not just the rich.
Joseph Stiglitz, in the same essay I referred to earlier, has this to say:
My analysis of market models suggests that there is no inherent reason that there should be the high level of inequality that is observed in the United States and many other advanced countries. It is not a necessary feature of the market economy. It is politics in the 21st century, not capitalism, which is at fault. Market and political forces have, of course, always been interwined. Especially in America, where our politics is so money-driven, economic inequalities translate into political inequality.
There is nevertheless considerable hope. For if the growth of inequality was largely the result of inexorable economic laws, public policy could do little more than lean against the wind. But if the growth of inequality is the result of public policy, a change in those policies could lead to an economy with less inequality, and even stronger growth.
It is a completely understandable stance in the face of the economic model, though. Your argument could be fitted to explain why firearms shouldn’t be regulated at all. It isn’t the technology, so we should allow the sale of actual machine guns (outside of weird loopholes) and grenade launchers.
The reality is that the technology is targeted by the people affected by it because we are hopeless in changing the broader system which exists to serve a handful of parasitic non-working vampires at the top of our societies.
Edit: not to suggest that I’m against AI and LLM. I want my fully automated luxury communism and I want it now. However, I get why people are turning against this stuff. They’ve been fucked six ways from Sunday and they know how this is going to end for them.
Plus, a huge amount of AI doomerism is being pushed by the entrenched monied AI players, like OpenAI and Meta, in order to used a captured government to regulate potential competition out of existence.
Journalism and customer service can’t possibly get worse than they already are.
Books and movies are not at risk - there will always be lots of people willing to write good content for both, and the best content will be published. And “the best” will be a hybrid of humans and AI working together - which is what has some people in that industry so scared. Just like factory workers were scared when machines entered that industry.
It’s an irrational fear - there are still factory workers today. Probably more than ever. And there will still be human writers - it’s an industry that will never go away.
If, however, you refuse to work with AI… then yeah, you’re fucked. Pretty soon you’ll be unemployable and nobody will publish your work, which is why the movie publishers aren’t going to budge. They recognise a day is coming where they can’t sell movies and tv shows that were made exclusively by humans and they are never going to sign a contract locking them into a dead and path.
You make it sound like the quality is what will increase with human/AI partnership. What will realistically happen is an expected rate of output. Why can’t you deliver a book every year with an AI ghost writing? People who work slowly or meticulously will be phased out by those that can quickly throw together a collage of their own words and their guided filler. It’s amazing and futuristic. It can be very useful and inspirational. But I do not share your optimism that it will make creative industries better. It will allow a single person to put together a script that would’ve taken a team… But the better content will now be drowning in this sea. Unfortunately, I expect an equivalent of the media explosion that happened when the reality tv format became an ok thing, eventually leading to shows half filmed on phones. The end result will be double the marvel movies every year.
