Post #3000942

Quoting @munificent@mastodon.social on utility without meaning, or how #AI drains meaning from creator's own work [...] Today, with the help of ChatGPT, I could probably put together a feature-length screenplay in a tenth of the time. It might even be an objectively better screenplay for a better movie. But because I made the screenplay in a tenth of the time thanks to ChatGPT’s help, it would hold only a tenth of the meaning for my brother. If my hypothesis that meaning comes from time sacrifice is true, then by making us more productive, AI eliminates meaning. The claim that AI can "put together a feature-length screenplay in a tenth of the time" is internalized #AIHype - a myth AI companies peddle because their valuations depend on it. As The AI Con documents, "this promise is highly exaggerated." What matters to corporations isn't whether it works, but that the threat can "devalue labor" and make "jobs of huge swaths of labor redundant and unnecessary." Hollywood studios wanted to force writers "to rewrite scripts created (typically, by producers) with AI tools," paying them less "even when the rewriting is so extensive it might as well be a new script." AI is "meant to be a labor-breaking" device that relegates "humans to babysitting scriptwriting...algorithms, available on call but only paid when the media synthesis machines glitch out." But AI remains a promise, not a reality - a glorified Mechanical Turk (to use the orientalist phrasing...) in many fields its being introduced. Modern AI "plays the function of hiding the massive amount of labor needed to make any modern AI infrastructure work." The AI Con documents that Kenyan workers making less than $2/day filter toxic content for ChatGPT, often ending up with #PTSD. "It's not an exaggeration to say that we wouldn't have the current wave of 'AI' if it weren't for the availability of on-demand laborers" performing tasks like data labeling, content moderation, and "red-teaming." The hyped cost savings are impossible to deliver when you account for the massive, underpaid, traumatized workforce required to make AI function at all. See https://kolektiva.social/@oatmeal/115820713773172781 #TheAICon #genai