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On AI

Just a collection of great opinion pieces that shaped my own view of the currently overhyped generative AI. Here I will shortly outline the central aspects mentioned.

Speech by Meredith Whittaker

(english)

  • AI is a marketing term
  • AI grew out of the toxic surveillance buisiness model and is now used to justify and cement the dominance of big tech companies over all of our lives
  • AI is highly unreliable
  • Therefore, deploying it in war to decide who will be killed is horrible

Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

By Drew DeVault (english)

  • AI web scrapers put enormous load onto every webserver and their sysadmins
  • As a response to this, the Web is now more closed than ever with cloudflare CAPTHA's or instances of Anubis in more and more places.

„Viele Menschen haben für Metas Profit gelitten“

By Ingo Dachwitz on netzpollitik.org (german)

  • Big tech is neocolonialistically outsourcing labelling of AI training data to the global south
  • this includes being exposed to e.g. sexual abuse content the whole day without getting any psychological support or even an appropriate salary

How much electricity does AI consume?

By James Vincent on TheVerge (english)

  • Generating four images uses as much energy as fully charging a smartphone
  • Data center energy usage is estimated to roughly double from 2022 to 2026 with a total energy consumption comparable to that of germany. Before the AI hype, data center energy usage was relatively stable.

These are not the same

By Tante (english)

  • AI does not scale and running it does not financially make sense
  • The current AI hype is a bubble which will burst eventually
  • The interesting question is "What does the bubble leave behind after its burst?"
  • With the AI bubble, this will be the massive infrastructure in terms of massive data centers filled with graphics cards. The most likely outcome seems to be that it will be used by companies like Palantir for doing mass surveillance for governments which is not something that will benefit society.
  • Another article by tante, Are "AI" systems really tools? is also worth reading. Spoiler: They are not, at least in their currently hyped form
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