If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?

She also says:

> What I am trying to do... is to help people understand what these systems actually are

Can a phrase that has no empirical content aid people in understanding an empirical phenomenon?

> the astonishing willingness of so many to... turn to synthetic text... for all kinds of weighty decisions.

Why is this astonishing, if the nature of these models as "stochastic parrots" places no limitations whatosever on their empirical capabilities, reliability, etc?

> the field of linguistics is particularly relevant in this moment, as a linguist’s eye view on language technology is desperately needed to help make wise decisions about how we do and don’t use these products

Is it wise to make decisions about a product on the basis of information that has no relevance to how it is actually likely to behave?

(It may be, if one has ethical concerns with "data theft, the exploitative labor practices", etc -- but one could have such concerns about any kind of product, not just a "stochastic parrot", and linguists are not generally academia's experts on, e.g., labor practices.)

I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

But also, even if bust is business as usual in the big picture and not a social disaster long term, it's of course not what individual investors want for their particular current investments.

The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence.

And what are the possible outcomes?

- Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.

- Success! We're the dog that's caught the car. Then what? Currently the political debate is, to caricature only slightly, between "oh no the datacenters will use more water than golf courses" and "lol what are you going to do, regulate matrix multiplication?". How the hell are we going to cope with introducing a new intelligent species?

Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?

To be clear, I don't think the law should tolerate scams of this kind, or that policy should encourage them in any way. But empathy for the victims is an ask on top of policy, and "maybe there will be some bad indirect effects" is a weak argument for it.

A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.

> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.

What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.

Where is all the weird misinformation in these comments coming from?

> mean girl slights