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Phil Tanny's avatar

Good one Alberto, I like your level headed take between the extremes. For my less level headed take, we don't have to choose between blaming bad users or the companies, we can blame them both.

In defense of current AI, it could be that our blame game instincts, mine included, are seriously out of whack. Just a few days ago I wrote an article related to yours entitled "Exploring The Strange Phenomena Of Outrage".

https://www.tannytalk.com/p/exploring-the-strange-phenomena-of

In that article the question essentially was, who is to blame for tobacco deaths, smokers or the tobacco companies? I acknowledge that each of us is responsible for our own choices, and then come down hard on the tobacco industry.

Let's establish some context for our concerns about AI.

Did you know that the tobacco companies kill almost as many Americans EVERY YEAR as were killed in all the wars Americans fought in over the last century? The CDC puts the yearly death toll at around 480,000.

Seeing that is making me wonder why I hang out on AI blogs wringing my hands about chatbots. Have chatbots killed a single person yet?

It's interesting how we choose what to get all worked up about. I don't claim to know how that works, but it does seem that a cool headed logical analysis is not a big part of the process.

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Stephanie Losi's avatar

Great article and I'm really liking these takes. There was a book way back in 2001 or thereabouts called "Mac OS: The Missing Manual", and maybe AI needs something like that (paging O'Reilly....). The feedback I sent after using Bing Chat was that there should be a fun intro video before Chat access is granted, with someone like Hank Green explaining in regular-person terms what deep learning is and how the model works.

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