They’re also trying to use this as an excuse to strangle open weights models so they can maintain an oligarchy.

That’s a lot of syllables… Don’t strain yourself.

Pretty sure Cory’s pronouns are he/him.

And he’s been consistently spot on from fighting the good fights against DRM, for right to repair, interoperability, anti-surveillance, against enshitification, and his take here today on AI. I was personally happy to read this because it exactly echoes what I’ve said countless times myself and I’m very glad to be in his good company.

He does not even try to present or debate “how” “ai” works. He’s speaking about how it is employed and what the boundaries are around the rhetoric we hear every day in the press that amounts to nothing more than fear mongering.

There’s absolutely a LOT to be afraid about with respect to how “ai” is used to surveil and control our society, but it has nothing to do with intelligent software and everything to do with corporate and government power, enabled by a mystique created around what is really a (admittedly powerful and useful) statistical parlour trick.

confidently diagnosing an essay as dogma while admitting you didn’t even read the thesis is peak internet.

​His mentioning of python being a basic/easy to master language isn’t manipulation, he’s demystifying. It strips the magical hyperbolic framing that has been attributed to AI (and to which those with most to gain from it financially very much wish to feed into!)

​His point about being wrapped in python isn’t a failed attempt to give a lecture on transformer architecture, its to explain that the automation loop is controlled by basic inputs from a user controlled and relatively simple software stack, not some sentient machine with a mind of its own. Its not emergent behavior, it’s optimizing execution patterns embedded in the data it was trained on.

​For my part, I’m just awed how many comments I come across that are just half-assed lazy people who evidently can barely read, but think they’re experts. Calling Doctorow’s work ‘slop’ or quitting reading while feeling so confident proves his point: people would rather buy into hype than actually understand how the tech works.

:::

If you think Cory Doctorow is “slop” you should really consider simply not ever posting anything online again.