I hate the AI Industry and I love Ted Chiang https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
people who have known me for a while will probably also know that i used to do research in the field of natural language processing and AI — up until about 2017, actually, just as so-called "deep learning" started to gain a lot more traction. most discourse around AI and especially language models these days frustrates and pisses me off, not because it's all inherently bad, but because i have some deep psychological wounds and scar tissue around, like, spending the entirety of my early 20s in such a morally dubious bankrupt field, and how long it took me to cut through my own cognitive dissonance enough to finally recognize that. years later, i'm still working through and coming to terms with a lot of complicated feelings about it — this paragraph is proof of that.
anyway, this article is so so so so good. it did not piss me off but helped me actually feel some damn... hope? clarity? inner peace? like something has tugged at and loosened my grad school trauma knot just a little bit? the "blurry JPEG" metaphor is *chef's kiss* and i'm absolutely going use it if i ever find myself roped into a conversation about ChatGPT.