[Orig to FB]
Today’s Imma-up-this goes out to AH and AK, in response to the AI bot on the AoIR list:
I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that critiques of AI originating from the ~humanities are intellectually bankrupt, for the most part — basically reactionary special pleading “on stilts,” as the saying goes. That’s not to say they’re substantively wrong or morally misdirected; it is to say that a stopped clock (or maybe slopped clock) can be right twice a day. I just don’t believe that they’re deeply rooted in principle rather than in, say, fear, frustration, or ressentiment. More specifically, while I sympathize with people’s frustration at reply-all meltdowns (though was it actually one of those? seems unlikely), it kinda boggles the mind that INTERNET RESEARCHERS would react to such a novel phenomenon — and, at least on its face, surprisingly candid — with histrionic pearl-clutching, tantrums, “fandom flounces,” and misc internet drama nonsense. And I don’t say that from some airy-fairy abstraction, I moderated nettime for 25 F-NG YEARS, which is the equivalent of having survived the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, and Ypres. 😹 And nor are these issues in past. When the wave of AI bots requesting accounts on our mastodon instance became a tsunami and the other mods started to lose it, I suggested simply de-automating the process and actually, you know, talking with people — which turned out to be win-win-win. AoIR is a different kettle of fish, because nettime was, from the beginning, reflexively and critically concerned with the power relations of open/closed/moderated/etc. But imagine for a moment if the list had been able to say “hold off on your reactions, and let’s try to have a civil chat with this thing to see what good might come of it,” that would have been so much more interesting. And more in keeping with what we’ll all need to learn to do, like it or not.