Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 224.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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    [1]    From: Bill Benzon <wlbenzon@gmail.com>
           Subject: Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI - by Erik Hoel - The Intrinsic Perspective (29)

    [2]    From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
           Subject: not Walden Pond (25)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2021-09-09 12:31:24+00:00
        From: Bill Benzon <wlbenzon@gmail.com>
        Subject: Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI - by Erik Hoel - The Intrinsic Perspective

From the linked article:

> Because as we discussed, this sort of AI will be solely owned and developed by
Big Tech due the scaling laws around how they’re trained and run. The immediate
licensing of GPT-3 by Microsoft was an augury of this. Indeed, the rights to
interact with these AIs will be some of the most valuable licenses on the planet
in the next decade. Consumers, even academic AI researchers, will communicate
with company-owned trillion-parameter AIs solely via oracles, getting nowhere
near the source code. The future of this technology belongs to huge corporations
with major resources. So it’s not really that “AI is automating art”—no,
corporations are automating art. And writing. And translation. And illustration.
And music. And the thousand other human forms of creativity that give life
meaning. They are now the province of Big Tech.
>
> At this point I, for one, am willing to consider a Butlerian Jihad. As AI,
particularly what’s called “artificial general intelligence,” gets more powerful
and more concentrated in the hands of Big Tech, the government should step in to
regulate it and force it to be narrow in the scope in its abilities.2
<https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/big-tech-is-replacing-human-artists#footnote-2>
After all, we regulate things like animal-human hybrids not just because they
cause harm, but because they are an affront to human dignity. And the same is
true here.
>


https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/big-tech-is-replacing-human-artists

Bill Benzon
wlbenzon@gmail.com

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2021-09-10 05:59:09+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: not Walden Pond

Scrolling
Gavin Francis

Review of:

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, from
the Telegraph to Twitter
by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt

Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet
by Maël Renouard, translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty

The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the
Digital Age
by Howard Axelrod

New York Review of Books
23 September 2021
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/09/23/scrolling/

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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