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Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

We don't disregard all human opinions on the technical elements of writing just because word processors have spelling and grammer checking! If you have a flaw in your analysis, do you want more or less tools that might help you find it?

Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

But this makes perfect sense because Emily Bender is not a scientist. Linguistics is a science, yes, but the goal of a scientist is to better understand reality. Bender has repeatedly demonstrated she has no interest in understanding reality.

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Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

She is religiously dedicated to maintaining ignorance of any and all LLM capabilities that might contradict statements she has made. Since she has stated in the past that LLMs HAVE to be useless, this means she has shielded herself from any information about LLMs' abilities to do literally anything.

Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

This is not to say that there are not moral, ethical, social, and political problems with AI: there are many. But because she has shielded herself from essentially all information on the subject, Bender is largely incapable of addressing these issues at anything beyond the most basic level.

Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

She has, in other words, abandoned being a scientist so as to better preserve her own ego, leaving her divorced from reality and ineffective as a critic of AI. I wouldn't be quite so upset about this if I didn't see her using her credentials to ACTIVELY SPREAD MISINFORMATION all the time.

Sergio
@sergio.bsky.col.social

“This is not to say that there are not moral, ethical, social and political problems with AI” what problems? what do you have in mind when you say that?

Thoth
@thoth.ptnote.dev

I mean I think maybe concentrating wealth and power even more towards billionaires by way of a technology quite literally made possible by the collective effort of all humanity is bad, actually. AI tools also make a lot of social harms easier to perpetrate. People do bad things that are easy more.