The two words the AI industry hates more than anything

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I, and I think that the, I, again, I'm purely speculating here, but having watched sort of this battle play out time and time ag- again over the last couple years, um, and, and watched the amount of energy that they are willing to expend, you know, I mean, it, it is almost kind of funny that they do, like, they, it, it's almost the Streisand effect, where they come back out and they're like, "Ah, the stochastic parrots again."

[laughs]

It's like, wait, what? Why are you, you know? Like, it's, it, I mean, I think once in a while somebody will come, like, "We're on the brink of, of, of danger because AI has gotten so powerful, and it's all because, uh, you know, the stochastic parrots paper has taught people that these aren't, you know, Terminator, uh, bots in, uh, in, in, waiting in the wings." And it's like, what? Okay.

And then the cycle begins all over again.

Yeah.

And it feels very, very coordinated.

And one thing that surprises me is that there is other really important critiques of what's going on.

Um, and, like, in particular, there is, um, the work that, uh, Emil Torres did together with Dr. Timnit Gebru documenting the Tescreal bundle of ideologies.

Adam Becker also talks about it in his book.

Um, and, you know, basically, uh, Valerie Veach in her recent film, Ghost in the Machine, tracing the ideology of artificial intelligence to eugenics and fascism and race science, and somehow there's no energy spent defending against that.

Hmm.

Um, and you know, is it because they think that those are good ideas, actually?

[laughs] Who's to say? Or maybe they, maybe, yeah, or they, that's just a live wire that, that, that, they won't touch that.

They'll touch-

Yeah

... again, they, I mean, again, let's, let's, let's be honest here.

Like, the stochastic parrots paper was written by, uh, by, also wr- was written by women, right? And I do feel like that, I mean, do you feel at all that there's a layer of sexism that's also sort of baked into this, this, this recurring wave of critique?

I, I do think so.

I think that the way that the scientific expertise of women can be easily dismissed is gonna be, you know, part and parcel of misogyny.

Mm-hmm.

Um, definitely see that over and over again.

Um, I mean, I've seen people talking about how, um, we aren't, in quotes, "technical," right? And computational linguistics is a technical field, but, uh, I can see that people might not get that, and it's true that, you know, my department at UDaB is in the humanities.

But, like, you know, both Dr. Margaret Mitchell, so Meg and Timnit both have PhDs in computer science, right?