LLM as MLM
No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped.
It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion that "AI" is a con. They stamp their feet and insist that no, no, no. "AI" is real, and it's good (and will only get better). They're not suckers, they're not swayed by the hype; the real fools, the real losers are those who refuse to buy in.
Indeed, if there's a theme to many of the reviews of Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's recent book The AI Con, it's a spluttering how-dare-they?! How dare they use the word “con.” Funnily, it's often accompanied with the admission that the authors are correct in their analysis of the detrimental effects of "AI," but it's followed with that finger-wag: they should not have suggested that something so scientific is actually a scam.
Bender and Hanna are clear – it’s right there in the subtitle – that the “AI con” is wrapped up in “Big Tech’s hype,” and that hype is about pushing a product for the sake of profiteering and not scientific progress. “Artificial intelligence, if we’re being frank, is a con," they write, "a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets. A few major well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.” “AI,” they argue, has always, since its very coinage, been a marketing term, “one that doesn’t refer to a coherent set of technologies.” That is, we're not talking about technology at all; we're talking about talk: big talk, bombastic storytelling, tall tales.
Almost all of the ed-tech software that’s now being sold to schools as “AI” is the exact same software that was previous sold as “personalized learning” or “adaptive learning” software. Sold as “intelligent tutoring systems." Software with “predictive analytics” or “learning analytics.” There has been no technological or scientific breakthrough in ed-tech since the emergence of ChatGPT– in the products themselves and certainly not in their “outcomes.” To insist there has been is a con, “a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets,” to repeat Bender and Hanna’s framing.
LLM.
MLM.
A con. A scam. A scheme. A deception. A fraud. A cheat. A crime.
"A Ponzi scheme usually operates like this," Bridget Read explains, "A promoter promises a fantastic investment vehicle to generate fabulous returns but is really just paying off old investors with new ones. He requires a constantly replenishing influx of new cash, new marks, in order to keep up the facade of growth before the scheme collapses, which it always does, because the chain can never go on forever. The people eventually run out. For this reason, Ponzi schemes are also described as 'endless chain' frauds."
Endless chains. Endless expansion. Endless power. Endless computation. Endless consumption. "More everything forever," as Adam Becker puts it.
