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@Homebrewandhacking Thank you for your response to my rant yesterday. I've listened to the presentation by Timnit Gebru that you linked. I'm convinced by all of her points about the problems with LLMs, and the idea of AGI.

Still, I hope it's possible to have LLMs and similar models (such as GPT-4V) without the serious problems that critics such as her have pointed out, because such tools have already been shown to be useful to at least one marginalized group: disabled people.

@Homebrewandhacking I know that one of your interests is accessibility. Same here; I'm legally blind. But I'm not optimistic that we can convince the whole world to go out of their way to accommodate us. Automation is the only thing that can solve the problem comprehensively. And while current tools like GPT-4V aren't perfect, and there's a lot of snake oil (the accessibility overlays), I disagree with dismissing the idea entirely, because some tools that are called AI are already useful.

@matt

I don't have a problem with AI that would help. E.g. autocorrect is AI, red eye reduction is AI.

These narrow intelligences (ANI) are not what is currently meant by AI (properly AGI) which as you agree can't be scoped and therefore does not exist

I am glad that it is helping accessibility for blind people but the quality of information is very very dubious unless you're already a subject matter expert.
Eg https://tabletopden.com/dnd/best-armor-for-rogues-5e/ should in theory be great but it's actually mostly tosh.

@matt @weirdwriter

And I'm 100% sure that any help you're getting is accidental rather than a priority of the designers. They are the same grifters that pivoted from crypto and NFTs and are supported by the eugenics movement!

AI in that sense scrapes creative work without permission or recompense.

I'm a big believer in the cut kerb effect where alt text has actually helped me personally out several times on the fedi. By explaining the point of a diagram or when I had bad phone signal.

@Homebrewandhacking It doesn't matter to me if the developers of tools like GPT-4V actually intend to help us, or even if they think we really shouldn't exist (eugenics). In my opinion, we disabled people have to take advantage of whatever useful tools are available to us. Better still if we can develop our own tools to solve our accessibility problems, possibly building on top of things like GPT-4V.

@matt

I appreciate the desperation you feel but it seems very obviously built on sand and environmentally damaging processes. Wild amounts of water and energy being used for results which are deceptive rather than trustworthy.

The references themselves are confabulated and any truth you get is a happy accident.

Plus the very real harms against POC that the in built biases perpetuate. I'm not against AGI because I'm contrary, I'm against it because it's an oppressive tool to so many.