Post #2329368 · Elektrine

2026-02-21 16:44 UTC

It was particularly disappointing to see Doctorow misconstrue (and thus, if he is believed) undermine the work that many of us are doing to shine a light on the ways in which the ideology of "AI" and the specific ways in which LLMs and other "AI" products are created do real harm. >>

Replies (2)

@emilymbender@dair-community.social 2026-02-21 16:44

In this context, I feel like reminding people (again) that the stochastic parrots paper was not primarily a response to synthetic text extruding machines (not at all popular in late 2020), but an exploration of the range harms that had already been documented in the pursuit of LM scale. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 >>

Open ##2329369
@emilymbender@dair-community.social 2026-02-21 16:44

I also want to point out (again) the ways in which lumping together all uses of LMs (like the lumping of technologies into "AI") obscures the issues at hand. Language modeling is a useful component of many technologies that can be built without extractive, exploitative means. Take the automatic transcription built by and for the Māori people -- there's te reo Māori language model that's part of that. >>

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