TechTakes

AI is a garbage generating plagiarism machine. It’s not political

Yes. Think about what it is plagiarising. Datasets are biased; this is like statistics/ML 101.

outside of a single country where everything has to look political to prevent people from voting independent,

You can just say the country, and also, this doesn't really make any sense. Am I to infer that, if things weren't political, people would vote (a famously political action) for independents?

and the only regulation AI ever needs is one declaring all it produces a derivative work of all the material it used for learning.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot more wrong with LLMs than just plagiarism.

Any attempts to ascribe further properties to that remixing machines are just natural intelligence equivalent of slop.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean here.

Politics is more than partisanship, and what is meant by something being political isn’t necessarily that it aught to be affiliated to a political party’s position. It’s about making decisions in groups, status and power dynamics. It’s a very real problem among techs to cop out of the consequences of their actions upon society by stating being strictly apolitical, pointing to the narrow definition while occluding the most meaningful one.

I sharply disagree, but this is a subtlety that's lost on a lot of people. The tech industry's success since at least the 1990s, up until the mid-2010s, was about making technology easier for the individual user, a more accessible and (potentially) more efficient means for accomplishing many routine interactions. Tech devices existed as tools in service of the will of the end user, and if you were really willing to drink the kool-aid, extensions of the user themselves, Jobs' "bicycle for the mind."

The expectations being cultivated for AI now set it up as an entirely separate entity from the end user, and one that is potentially more capable at some point in the ill-defined future. This opens the door toward resources being reallocated towards this nebulously powerful entity, and the allocation of shared resources is at the very core of politics. This is a hard pivot away from how technology was designed before! You and I know it's a load of complete hogwash, but that doesn't prevent the potential bamboozlement of the lagging generation of policy-makers. Even someone as relatively young as Kamala Harris or her likely successor Gavin Newsom could be roped into this bullshit, if only because they know where their biggest donation checks come from.

The future in which the current crop of AI retailers enjoy a successful political program is no longer one where a rising tide lifts all boats. But, for the time being, it can still be pitched as such due to deeply embedded cultural expectations.