Joshua Chalifour

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite
interesting. I've facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented
some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools
and I've been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep
coming back to and which I don't feel gets the attention that it merits,
is the potential to **consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as
tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and
society**.

Most conversations I've seen about the utility of these tools revolves
around the novelty of what they produce (text outputs, image outputs,
coding assistants, etc.) and the ramifications. That garners debate on
the ethics of how they work and how those outputs may be used,
legitimate or otherwise. It certainly deserves critical analysis. In
many ways though these systems are banal, they're essentially
instructions for identifying and repeating patterns.

What, to me, is incredible about them is not just that they're
identifying patterns in human behaviour (all the material that they're
trained on), but that once these patterns are identified, we now see
that it becomes possible to generate new content believably replicating
the patterns. That seems enormous for better studying and understanding
*ourselves*.

Yesterday, when the Center for AI Safety posted its [Statement on AI
Risk](https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk), [I
felt](https://cosocial.ca/@owlyph/110459623979640299) the underlying
premises or motivation for the statement were concerning. The statement
(signed by many business leaders, academics, and others with significant
stakes or interests in AI) says:

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
> alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
> war.

On the surface, this seems agreeable, however there's so much to unpack
in that statement. I'm not interested in attempting that now; I think AI
is murkier than it's presented there. I would like to refer to my
initial point. Human-created, AI is essentially mirroring us. The
statement's formulation is both disingenuous and abdicates
responsibility. The statement starts off in the wrong.

If AI systems produce results or get used in ways that create the real
possibility of exterminating human-kind, then we need to seriously
examine and change these patterns in human behaviour that enable that.
What is it about the hundreds of thousands of social media conversations
that were scraped to train the model, which repeats in such ways that it
is possible to predict a new utterance that humans accept as the way
we'd expect a human to talk? What is that in all the Wikipedia entries?
What is that in all the digitized magazine and newspaper advertisements?
Because who thought that human culture is so incredibly predictable that
non-living, non-thinking, non-feeling algorithms can give the appearance
of something indistinguishable from a human?

The fear expressed in the statement is not a fear of AI at all. It's a
fear of humans destroying ourselves. If the people developing AI treat
it as an object of otherness, promote it as such, and encourage
discourse of it as such--if we all adopt that discourse, we distance
ourselves from ourselves and cannot understand what we are doing. I hope
to see more serious research projects in the humanities and social
sciences, which focus on the *lens that AI is* and then *examine it for
understanding our cultures and behaviours*.


The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to
<strong>
 consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc.
</strong>

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us