NYT: The Surprising Thing A.I. Engineers Will Tell You if You Let Them

Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417134838/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/this-is-too-important-to-leave-to-microsoft-google-and-facebook.html

Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems? Which ones? When is an opt-out clause a genuine choice, and at what point does it become merely an invitation to recede from society altogether, like saying you can choose not to use the internet or vehicular transport or banking services if you so choose.

the examples given are all networks, with many of the nodes human. if “receding from society” means being less connected with the other humans, then there’s no debate: to opt out of these networks is necessarily to “recede from society”.

but LLMs don’t have this property. they aren’t a medium used to bridge connections between individuals: rather things like chatbots exist explicitly to replace human-human interactions with human-machine interactions, and presently they also serve as knowledge repositories: a single massive node with only one connection, to you, the user. to opt out of this form of human-machine interaction at present is not to recede from society, but rather the opposite.

will this change? surely. but i wouldn’t trust the author’s analogy to be at all useful in understanding how.