https://aftermath.site/anthropic-claude-ai-leftist-technology/
"Over the past week, I’ve watched left wing commentators on Bluesky, the niche
short form blogging site that serves as an asylum for the millennials driven
insane by unfettered internet access, discuss the idea that “the left hates
technology.” This conversation has centered around a few high profile news
events in the world of AI. A guy who works at an AI startup wrote a blog
claiming that AI can already do your job. Anthropic, the company behind the AI
assistant Claude, has raised $30 billion in funding. Someone claimed an AI
agent wrote a mean blog post about them, and then a news website was found to
have used AI to write about this incident and included AI-hallucinated quotes.
Somewhere in this milieu of AI hype the idea that being for or against
“technology” is something that can be determined along political lines,
following a blog on Monday that declared that “the left is missing out on AI.”
As a hard leftist and gadget lover, the idea that my political ideology is
synonymous with hating technology is confusing. Every leftist I know has a
hard-on for high speed rail or mRNA vaccines. But the “left is missing out”
blog positions generative AI as the only technology that matters.
I will spare you some misery: you do not have to read this blog. It is fucking
stupid as hell, constantly creating ideas to shadowbox with then losing to
them. It appears to be an analysis of anti-AI thought primarily from academics
and specifically from the professor Emily Bender, who dubbed generative AI
“stochastic parrots,” but it is unable to actually refute her argument.
“[Bender’s] view takes next-token prediction, the technical process at the
heart of large-language models, and makes it sound like a simple thing — so
simple it’s deflating. And taken in isolation, next-token prediction is a
relatively simple process: do some math to predict and then output what word is
likely to come next, given everything that’s come before it, based on the huge
amounts of human writing the system has trained on,” the blog reads. “But when
that operation is done millions, and billions, and trillions of times, as it is
when these models are trained? Suddenly the simple next token isn’t so simple
anymore.”
Yes it is. It is still exactly as simple as it sounds. If I’m doing math
billions of times that doesn’t make the base process somehow more substantial.
It’s still math, still a machine designed to predict the next token without
being able to reason, meaning that yes, they are just fancy pattern-matching
machines."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
