ChatGPT: What Lies Beneath the Surface
Another big rush of attention around OpenAI, so I thought it an opportune moment to put together some thoughts on this enterprise more broadly, and how we can think about artificial intelligence or at least some groundwork that’s not getting covered in the “takes” (which, about tech, are increasingly, 100% wrong).
It’s a big topic, so, we’ll try to stick to the points that are most salient to current events.
+ First of all, let’s be perfectly clear that OpenAI is founded and funded by the worst of the worst that tech has to offer. Actual fascists. Peter Thiel in lead; and behind him, yet more members of the PayPal mafia: Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman. I’m going to keep saying it: it does not make sense to think about Elon, Thiel, or Andreessen (a violent, warmongering imperialist from a16z), who is also involved, as separate entities as opposed to co-conspirators in crypto, AI and weapons. Sam Altman, who leads the project, is former head of YCombinator, a seed stage investor that was founded by just an absolute piece of shit, Paul Grammer. Oh and you have Bill Gates who threw down for this, this is one of a vast number of things that these cronies co-invest/co-develop together over the course of decades. In summary, these are venture capitalists: they are war hawks, they steal wealth, they destroy cities, they want to rule the world under technofascism, they have unending and depraved appetite for power, they will hurt you. They aim only to bring the world to its knees before them.
That is what we are dealing with here. Not a chat app. Fascists.
This is very much a venture capitalist project — this is the startup that VCs would found themselves… it represents their highest aspirations. Unsurprisingly, trying to ensure a monopoly on AI, which is exactly what this is, and of course, it reflects distinct negative traits of the venture capitalist class, such as they are trying to take over the world. They have a number of goals with this project, but it very much fits into their general business model, which is that VCs create a monopoly by extracting and centralizing data and controlling access to it.
This project is parading as a non-profit with a “for profit arm” or some other convoluted bullshit: they will be making money off of this, of course, lots of it. It also gives them the ability to selectively sell, control, supervise AI technology globally and become the necessary platform (monopoly) for AI development. They and only a few others will have useful AI technology; that is because it requires giant amounts of data, and only venture capitalists and tech elite have that (monopoly).
+ The primary use cases that these people are trying to develop for AI, do not involve what WE want or would like from AI, do not take input from us, and the consumer vertical, is a very small portion of the use cases here. OpenAI is essentially developing a technology stack that can be used to power an unlimited number of applications: use cases for this include the supply chain, healthcare, financial management and services, transport… never-endingly. These are building blocks that allow their customers to get AI technology without having to develop it themselves. So, corporations, and the military and intelligence apparatus, will be primary customers outside of the industry itself, which is itself betting on using AI technology as a massive accelerant of its efforts, not to be shared with any other industry, even though these technologies are literally built off the fruits of entire generations of human production — trained on our “content”, our shopping, our sex lives, our books and music and films, our relationships, dreams, lifespans, diaries, messages; what makes AI possible now is the profound amount of data (that we have created, that represents our contributions as humanity), and now they are building on top of all of that, a whole bunch of shit that we have no input into and control over; they exert power over us using things we have made. Sick people.
+ Technologists will quote any number of innovations that made GPT-3 possible — large scale data storage and analysis, machine learning techniques, neural networks, various training models. But the fact of the matter is that the real innovation of AI is that we, as a human civilization, have created the massive body of work that is needed to produce AI; in fact, the AI technical development itself, has nothing on the human development that is being used here, without permission or pay, our entire lives just turned into data for VCs to use. GPT-3 uses Wikipedia (that we populated), books (written by us), and huge numbers of websites (we created or populated) — one of these datasets, from Common Crawl, has aggregated SEVEN YEARS of internet data, billions of pages, trillions of links …(they say, bragging; the sheer volume of *us-ness* they have is a marketing point for them). They have finally captured and centralized enough of our data that they are able to produce AI, and all of this is happening without any of us giving permission to be used as a collective data set for the projects of billionaires.
+ These people are slick as fuck. Never under estimate the amount of PR and propaganda and finesse that goes into how these technologies are presented to the public. Chatbot is a major debut for them; it is yieldingly a lot for them as it spreads across the “mainstream.” And again, this isn’t “AI” monolithically; which how the mainstream is being taught to think of it; this is again, *one* application built around ONE of the tools OpenAI is producing, in this case, GPT-3. So it’s essentially just an app that lets you play around with some of this tooling.
You should not draw any conclusions from the fact that this is what they have put out there for you to see. This does not represent their technology’s primary capabilities, its primary use cases, nor does it reflect the “cutting edge” of what is available, nor does it guarantee that this is the type of app that we can expect out of AI; which again, is itself going to be threading through eventually, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of applications (for context, the Apple App Store has 1.4 million apps, and that is just apps on that platform, to say nothing of the millions of apps that corporations in general have, and the apps that will be developed by the military and the police, etc).
You see what they want you to see. This thing is a fucking toy, OK. The use cases we’ve seen be publicly exposed to general users, is a friendly little chat bot that can help you with your homework, and an AI that can transform selfies of girls into different styles from fantasy and sci-fi. AI *is already in use in combat scenarios by the US military* and policing, for face recognition, for crime prediction, autonomous warfare vehicles, for threat detection, for battlefield surveillance, and more. You get a chat toy and semi-decent research assistant, a layer of abstraction over Google Search. Great!
+ So realize that we are the LAST ones to be getting the technology, we are the LAST ones being consulted on it, we are the last in the line of those who will ultimately benefit; but because it is a novelty to us, and because we don’t have the background, we FEEL like we are the cutting edge of what is going on, we feel like we are living the future or part of the future, and we feel like we are participating in it; when that participation is fully limited to them STUDYING what we do with the technology to find better ways to exploit us and get things out of us for the people who really make them money, their corporate, imperial and military base, and their own use cases for their empire.
Even though they don’t value us as people, its doesn’t mean that we aren’t part of their plan. AI is built entirely on the output of the Peoples of the world and the things that they make. Reduced to being “data” for crunching by a machine. So, they will need us to adopt this shit, so that we can be a captive audience being continuously tenderized by algorithms and sentiment experiments, manipulated and invaded, so that they can deliver to corporations and the CIA — and advertisers, financial institutions, health care centers — YOU as their product. Chatbot isn’t out there because they want to provide you with a more seamless way to use the internet; it is out there as a marketing exercise AND because they need to get even MORE data out of you: how you interact with it, what you say to it, what you confess to it, how you talk to it, how you “treat it”, how you respond to its responses, what you tell it about, what you seem to want back. What makes you happy. What makes you frustrated. What they can make you do with this thing.
People see AI as providing them with something; but like all of tech, this is a data extraction vehicle, it is applying artificial intelligence to get more data out of you; not YOU applying AI to get information from it, from the world, from humanity. Always look for the ways that tech consumer products are actually big data traps and data funnels. Tech knows that its riches, power, “innovation”, sovereignty, is tied directly to how much data it collects. Very literally, whoever has the most data, can make the best AI; and AI in general, threatens to HARVEST even more data from us than ever before. So that is one of the main things you should be looking at in this: data extraction. Where AI appears to give you something, it is taking from you in two ways: behind your back and to your face.
+ Which brings me to the point that the OTHER AI tool that is in hot discussion right now, is the selfie/art AI generator Lensa; it is powered by something very similar to an OpenAI product “DALL-E”. This has gone viral at the same time at the chat bot project. So the public is currently getting its first taste of AI, through a chatbot that usefully answers questions, and through an app that literally beautifies us. We are being incalculated into AI, they are giving us, purposefully, first experiences with AI that are fun, playful, flattering, indulgent, humorous, interesting, social.
The degree to which this is a venture capitalist psy-op to make you feel comfortable with AI…. this is something they’ve been doing for a LONGGGG time. Think of the logos for major tech companies being big and rounded and colorful and bright, like something you would see on a toy. Think of the “young boy genius” trope they feed us literally constantly, which normalizes to us the idea of psychopathic tech titans who crush people in 50 different ways, and have so much wealth that they are literally pulling from your pocket every cent they make. And here too, we are being manipulated into accepting something that we should be very skeptical of; are being manipulated to see this as something that is being GIVEN to us rather than provided, as a new platform they created out of us, and are going to use to build an empire off of us.
Tech serves, more or less in order, venture capitalists, the CIA, corporations, militaries, and the police; it does not serve you, it does not serve us. But chat bots that wait on us, and apps that beautify us, make us feel like this is going to be for us and that it is going to benefit us, be helpful to us. This is all delusion. And again, they have DRONES. They have AI that can fight wars and shit, run entire fleets of drones and submarines, AI that police can use to “predict” crimes (in Black and brown neighborhoods), they have AI to surveil and make decisions about employment, to track down and bust union organization, to automate programming and other trades workers rely on. They are giving you the equivalent of a puffed up search engine; there are plenty of dating SIMS out there that actually let you have more complex interactions with them; this just feels like being able to address Wikipedia from a more useful interface. Just the thought alone that we are “doing AI”, is a thrill for people, even when the chat app is not exhibiting any functionality that feels discontinuous; that is because they will slowly, slowly, slowly, start to make AI more and more a part of our lives. They have a plan for how to roll this out to the mainstream public; many plans, in fact. Everything you are seeing has a massive machine behind it; everything you see or hear about it is being manipulated and massaged.
+ Just to zoom in on one factor before signing off: it’s notable that these early consumer experiences are oriented towards what demographic…. Teens. The most obvious mainstream use case for the chatbot is essentially help with homework or research, which means, students, high school and college age mostly. That was many people’s first reactions when they saw it: I wish I had this when I was in school, this is going to make writing papers so much easier, school’s out for summer, etc. It was the first thing I thought of as well.
And then you have the image app, that takes your photos and makes stylized images of them — and guess whose primary audience for that is? Teen girls, of course. I’ve spoken extensively on this elsewhere, but for our purposes, much of the internet you see around you, came to being through girls and women, and especially, through photos of them — they are the ones who create adoption on these platforms, populate them with “data” (all manners of beautiful unique output), draw other users to them, etc.
In Silicon Valley, gaining an audience of young girls is considered absolutely vital for the most common internet experiences, social media of various forms; this is what built Facebook (which it cannot be said enough, started out as a “hot or not” for college students), Instagram, even Tinder, and so on. Facebook is the data core of the industry; it is one of the primary engines that brought us to the technology future we see today, and so it is no surprise that AI is also being floated in this way; one of the biggest things I will be looking out for as more AI toys are rolled out for us to play with in their panopticon, is how these products are targeting teen girls and using them to normalize AI, to drive adoption of AI apps, and as a data engine. These people are very aware that huge parts of their data stores, come from girls and in association with girls. They say it out loud. All the time.
Which means the next thing I am going to be looking out for is pedophiles: the price too many teen girls have paid so adult men in Silicon Valley can become rich as fuck off them; and now this AI that was built on them too.