Tag: AI

Not Inevitable

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The only thing inevitable about so-called AI is that it’s creating a huge investment bubble that is going to crash. I don’t know if that’s going to bring down everything or just cause the typical problems caused by crashing of investment bubbles, but there will be a crash.

Nothing grows forever. Sometimes folks say that the only thing that grows forever is cancer, but of course cancer that continues unchecked kills its host.

Use of so-called AI in a multitude of fields is not inevitable. That’s just marketing hype. The whole field is built on hype, starting with the name, because it is in no way intelligent.

What they’re calling AI is software. It’s been developed by several different processes, but the one that most of us are familiar with comes from large language models. That’s what’s behind the various chatbots.

And what that software does is predict words or patterns or images based on all the stolen material that’s been packed into it. It is incapable of thinking or analyzing, which is why it frequently makes up citations or books or other references – it is programmed to recognize what those things look like but since it doesn’t know what they mean or why they’re important, it imitates them.

Which is to say, even when doing what it’s programmed to do, it’s unreliable at best.

There are forms of so-called AI that are useful in the hands of people who know how to use it as an effective tool. But it is not useful for many, maybe most, of the purposes for which it is being sold.

It is particularly not useful for writing or creating art because it has no capacity to think or bring anything new to the process.

I am moved to write all this because of the recent SFWA kerfuffle over whether any fiction produced with even a modicum of “AI” should be considered for awards. SFWA issued one set of rules that indicated that some uses might be OK for purposes of the Nebula awards, and then swiftly backtracked after a number of writers expressed their outrage on social media.

As part of all of this, a writer named Erin Underwood put an essay up on File 770 defending many uses of AI. Many other people have effectively criticized her arguments – Jason Sanford’s overview is an excellent one – so I won’t bother here even though I found her arguments appalling.

Rather I want to focus on the argument that we have to use this error-prone software because it’s part of the progress of tech and inevitable. Continue reading “Not Inevitable”…

Becoming an “AI Vegan”

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Arwa Mahdawi introduced me to a new term, or maybe a new concept: “AI vegans,” which is to say, people whose attitude and actions in relationship to so-called “AI” parallels the way vegans deal with animal products.

Mahdawi cited an article by a professor who directs online education at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, David Joyner – someone who’s clearly not a tech-phobe.

I like this concept quite a lot. While I am not vegan, I respect the vegan approach, and often think that they’re likely right on all points, especially with respect to the effect on the environment.

The criticisms by the “AI vegans” go like this:

  • “AI” is immoral and unethical – particularly because the materials used to develop it were stolen from people (including me and others here in the Treehouse).
  • Using “AI” is bad for your health – recent studies have shown harm to the critical thinking faculties of those who use a lot of chatbots to do their intellectual work for them.
  • The “AI” industry is very destructive to the environment, requiring massive amounts of water and electricity – which includes building new coal and other fossil fuel powered power plants despite the fact that we’re at the tipping point for renewables.

Those ideas directly parallel the vegan attitude toward animal products. I’d add a fourth one: Most “AI” products being sold don’t work very well. This is particularly true of writing programs, but also true of many of the ones aimed at employers who want to fire their workers.

I do my damnedest to avoid any use of “AI.” I try to disable it in writing programs – it gets in my way – and I’ve reached the point where I assume any feel-good story on social media is “AI” generated. I suspect it’s in the spell-check programs now, because they don’t work as well as they used to. I’m sure it’s in the grammar programs, but since I don’t use that crap – my command of grammar is certainly better than any fucking programmer’s, much less “AI’s” – I don’t worry about those.

I hope the “AI vegan” movement catches on, because this slop is out of control.

We keep being told that some chatbot can pass the multiple guess part of the bar exam with flying colors. As someone who has taken that exam, I don’t find that difficult to believe. A bot that has incorporated previous tests and other prep materials for that exam or any similar exam can probably do a great job on it, especially since the bots can’t think and are only making the statistical best guess in any situation.

I mean, the biggest problem with multiple guess exams – yeah, I know they’re technically called multiple choice and probably have some fancy new name these days that I’m not familiar with since thank all that’s holy I haven’t had to take one in years, but you know what I mean by multiple guess – is that they don’t reward thinking.

Despite the fact that every time I’m faced with four choices for an answer I always want to go with a fifth one, I used to be pretty good at those tests. I had a gut understanding of them. I do not think this is one of my best traits, though it was useful. Continue reading “Becoming an “AI Vegan””…

A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The latest scandal to hit the science fiction community is the revelation that the people putting on WorldCon in Seattle are using ChatGPT to vet proposed panelists. Given that a large number of people who want to be on panels are published authors who are part of the class actions against the companies making these over-hyped LLM products, the amount of outrage was completely predictable.

A number of us also pointed out that the information produced by these programs is very often wrong, since they make things up because they are basically word prediction devices. As a person who is not famous and who has a common Anglo name, I shudder to think what so-called “AI” would produce about me.

But the biggest problem I see with “AI” – outside of the environmental costs, the error rate, and the use of materials without permission to create it – is that they keep trying to sell it to do things it doesn’t do well, instead of keeping it for the few things it actually can do. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made from those few things, especially when you factor in the costs.

We’re at the point in tech where new things are not going to change the product that much, no matter what the hype says. Exponential growth cannot last forever. If you don’t believe me, look up the grains of rice on a chessboard story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways people are trying to use “AI” or even older forms of tech to get rid of workers and the more I think about it, the more disastrous it looks.

We don’t need more tech doing stuff; we need more people doing stuff.

It’s not just “AI”. Just try to call your bank or your doctor, or, god help us all, Social Security or the IRS (now made worse by the Dodgy Minions). When we have issues, we need people – real people, who understand what we’re calling about and can solve our problems.

The “chat” feature on a website doesn’t cut it and an “AI” enabled chat feature is probably worse in that it might well make up an answer instead of just not knowing what to do.

I’ve been thinking of health care in particular. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how LLMs can read radiology films better than radiologists, in that they don’t get bored or distracted, so they can point to any things that look out of the ordinary in reference to the kind of films they were trained on.

But of course, what they’re really doing is flagging the problems for a radiologist to look at. They don’t replace the expert; they help them do their job. It’s probably useful, but it isn’t going to make radiology any cheaper, because you still need the person to look carefully at the films.

I don’t believe for a moment that LLMs will be better at diagnosing patients. Continue reading “A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again”…

Time to Change the Stories

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Cory Doctorow, writing about the idiocy of homo economicus, points out (not for the first time) that corporations are the real AI.

It’s a reasonable metaphor. Corporations, after all, are “persons” – at least legally – and they do have a mindset and way of doing things that is unique to them. People who work for corporations do things in a certain way because it is the corporation’s way, not because they think it’s a good thing to do.

And those who are trying to convince us that so-called AI is the next big thing are continually hinting that if it’s not quite a person yet, it’s going to be.

The problem, I think, is not with corporations per se – there are reasons to form an organization when you need a large group of people to produce something – but rather with our idea that corporations must sacrifice ethical principles in favor of almighty profit.

We could do corporations differently, just as we could develop and use technology differently. The problem is the myths that surround them, stories someone made up that we’re now stuck with.

Those myths and bad models aren’t just limited to corporations or to tech. Here are a few that come to mind:

  • Homo economicus, the myth that individuals always make the rational decision for their own self interest.
  • Survival of the fittest, especially as applied in a cultural context.
  • The myths around gender and sex that assume – in ways small and large – that men are superior and that there’s a distinct binary difference between men and women.
  • The particularly egregious myth of the “tragedy of the commons,” which was invented by a right-wing extremist and which, though it has been thoroughly disproven, is still cited constantly.
  • The belief that AI can think and that it is life-changing tech that can change our lives instead of an improvement in certain digital capabilities useful for a few things.
  • The multiple myths around corporations, including such things as fiduciary duty.
  • American exceptionalism, a myth that is so strong that even those of us who have strong criticisms of our country tend to buy into it.

Which is to say, bad stories. The bad stories that underlie all our cultures are a big part of the problem. Continue reading “Time to Change the Stories”…

It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.

But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.

If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).

But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:

Tech Enshittification:

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.

Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.

I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.

The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.

“AI”:

AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.

The Network State:

This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.

I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.

This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning. Continue reading “It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government”…

Free-Range Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The only good thing about NaNoWriMo’s absurd defense of so-called “AI” writing devices is that it was announced at the same time as Ted Chiang explained in the New Yorker why large language models are incapable of producing good fiction: “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art”

Ted is as brilliant a writer of essays as he is of fiction, so that piece is full of excellent observations. I recommend reading the whole thing. One key point he makes is that writing requires making thousands of choices – maybe ten thousand for a short story – while the prompts for the writing bots don’t allow anything like that many. As he says:

The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

A bot that allowed you to make all the possible choices wouldn’t save you any time, but that’s the only kind that could even conceivably create art. All you can really put in a bot prompt box is your basic idea, and as Ted says about writing:

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium.

For those who missed it, NaNoWriMo issued a statement saying that it’s OK for people to use AI when participating in the program where everyone tries to write a novel in the month of November. They even claimed that it is “ableist” and “classist” to prevent people from using AI to write their novels.

The organization – which is apparently a 501(c)(3) – was taken to task on social media by a large number of writers, including some who are disabled and others who don’t come from money. There are, after all, a number of useful tools not powered by LLMs that are useful to the disabled and, as more than one person has pointed out, all you really need to write is a pencil and some paper.

It’s worth noting that NaNoWriMo’s supporters include ProWritingAid, an “AI” writing “toolkit” that costs money.

Well-known writers have stepped down from any involvement in the organization and, given the fallout, I wonder if NaNoWriMo will survive.

Just as an aside, most publishers don’t want anything generated by “AI,” so I’m not sure there’s much point in participating using AI if you want to actually publish what you write.

Plenty of smart people have responded to this nonsense effectively, so I won’t repeat all the things they said. But here’s the thing that gets me that doesn’t directly involve the controversy: Why did people make NaNoWriMo into an organization? Why couldn’t it just be an informal project? Continue reading “Free-Range Writing”…

SFWA’s Statement on Artificial Intelligence

personby Deborah J. Ross
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On October 30, the SFWA Board and the SFWA Legal Affairs Committee sent the following letter to the US Copyright Office in response to their August 2023 Notice of Inquiry regarding copyright law and policy issues in artificial intelligence, which is part of their AI Initiative.

We are aware that there is a wide range of opinion on the subject within our community, but the issues of known damage to fiction marketplaces and threats to original IP copyrights that these new AI tools pose must be made known to bureaucrats and lawmakers recommending and making policy. By doing so, when consensus emerges about the proper use of generative AI in art, we can ensure that such AI is created and utilized in a way that respects the rights of creative workers.

In the near future, we’ll have the opportunity to read other letters submitted to this call for comments, and both SFWA and individuals will be able to review them and respond. We invite all our members, but especially those writers working in gaming and comics, to make known the effects you are seeing of artificial intelligence on your careers, for good or ill.

We will continue to study this issue and speak up where we feel we can do good. The more we learn from our membership, the more effective we will be.

The SFWA Board

 

 

TEXT OF LETTER

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), formerly Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is, in part, to support, defend, and advocate for writers of science fiction, fantasy and related genres. Formed in 1965, SFWA currently has over 2,500 commercially published writers in those genres across various types of media. Its membership includes writers of both stand-alone works and short fiction published in anthologies, magazines, and in other media. SFWA is not a subsidiary of any other entity. SFWA has no subsidiaries or other ownership interest in any other organization that may be affected by the Copyright Office’s policies on AI.

It is in that capacity that we write this letter in response to the Copyright Office’s call for comment on issues raised by artificial intelligence systems. As creative writers who have long had an eye on the future, we are no strangers to the concept of artificial intelligence; indeed, the work of our members is frequently mentioned by the people who over the years have made progress in that field. We have long anticipated these developments and have thought deeply over the years about its promise and pitfalls. With this in mind, it is with much regret that we cannot yet speak in favor of using AI technology in the business of creating art.

The current crop of artificial intelligence systems owes a great debt to the work of creative human beings. Vast amounts of copyrighted creative work, collected and processed without regard to the moral and legal rights of its creators, have been copied into and used by these systems that appear to produce new creative work. These systems would not exist without the work of creative people, and certainly would not be capable of some of their more startling successes. However, the researchers who have developed them have not paid due attention to this debt. Everyone else involved in the creation of these systems has been compensated for their contributions—the manufacturers of the hardware on which it runs, the utility companies that generate their electrical power, the owners of their data centers and offices, and of course the researchers themselves. Even where free and open source software is used, it is used according to the licenses under which the software is distributed as a reflection of the legal rights of the programmers. Creative workers alone are expected to provide the fruits of their labor for free, without even the courtesy of being asked for permission. Our rights are treated as a mere externality.

Perhaps, then, creative workers uniquely benefit from the existence of these artificial intelligence systems? Unfortunately, to date the opposite has been the case: SFWA has thus far seen mainly harm to the business of writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy as a result of the release of AI systems. Continue reading “SFWA’s Statement on Artificial Intelligence”…

Asking the Wrong Questions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Maybe when it comes to the chat bots and art bots and other such creations, we’re asking the wrong questions.

I mean, if a chat bot can pass the bar exam, the question shouldn’t be “can a chat bot practice law” but rather “does the bar exam do a good job of determining whether someone would make a good lawyer.”

Having taken a bar exam, I can assure you it’s primarily a hazing ritual. I’m sure the chat bots do very well on the multistate multiple guess portion of the exam, which requires you to memorize vast amounts of information, much of which is not relevant to actual practice.

My experience with bar exams is out of date, but when I took it, we had to learn all the old common law (based on British law) definitions of criminal behavior. These were no longer in use in Texas (where I took the bar) or in any other state that had adopted a modern penal code.

I bet a chat bot is hell on wheels at stuff like that, but I suspect a bot lawyer would not know what to do in a situation where its client was before a judge for revocation of probation (on a felony drug charge) and the judge, in the middle of ranting at its client, gave it a huge wink.

I’m not even sure how a chat bot would know about the wink, but assuming a bot could see it, I suspect it wouldn’t know it was a signal that the judge wasn’t going to revoke probation.

The time it happened to me, I knew what it meant. In fact, I knew from the moment the judge started ranting that he wasn’t going to send my client to prison. He winked at me because I was a young lawyer and he wasn’t sure I understood yet that he was yelling at my client in lieu of revoking probation.

The real practice of law is about subtleties. I suspect algorithm-driven software fueled by large language models is very useful in plowing through reams of documents and will get better, but it’s going to be crap at the negotiating table or in the courtroom where you have to read people as well as put the right information before them at the right time.

Continue reading “Asking the Wrong Questions”…

Who Counts as a Person?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Back in 2002 I wrote a story about an upper-middle-class young man who got arrested in Louisiana because his physical appearance contradicted his sex genotype: he looked male, but his genotype was XX. He ended up in a jail cell with several transwomen, some drag queens, a lesbian, and a woman who was his opposite: she appeared female but had an XY sex genotype.

This story was set in 2023.

I believed in this story, so I sent it out to every magazine and anthology I could think of. Nobody wanted it. I don’t know why they didn’t like it, but perhaps it was because it seemed too unlikely at the time. Or maybe I was just ahead of the curve in gender stories.

Fast forward to the actual 2023, where Tennessee just adopted a law restricting drag shows and many other states are in the process of following suit. My made-up Louisiana law prohibiting people from dressing or appearing in a way that contradicts their sex genotype no longer looks like science fiction.

It’s almost enough to make me send the story out again, except that these days I bet magazines would turn it down because it’s too much like the real world of today.

Thinking about it reminded me of another story of mine, one I wrote back in the 1990s. It turned on whether clones were people or property under the U.S. Constitution.

That one, called “Passing,” did get published. In fact, it won a contest sponsored by the National Law Journal. Continue reading “Who Counts as a Person?”…