On generative AI

Is generative AI corrupting human knowledge and language and by extension human thinking and human culture themselves?

A wikipedia dump is around 100 GB. Wikipedia could be improved and be semantically formatted to be computer readable and advanced query systems could be developed. Would not this be better for the acquisition of knowledge and the advancement of science? Are AI generated summaries of books or papers valid replacements for human ones? What justifies our trust in generative AI as compared to a search engine?

Generative AI is corrupting the internet. Maybe it is a zombie or Frankenstein of human language and knowledge. Or a bland blend of stolen and adulterated intellectual property. By adulterating human language and knowledge it adulterates thought and culture. In the old internet one could generally become aware of the source and context of bad material. But in generative AI the poison is injected and dissolved into the whole body in an often subtle, not immediately detectable way. The 'neutral' sounding language and fake 'objectivity' are misleading. The term 'subjective' is used ad nauseam. Due to the nature of the training data, in generative AI the truth of a belief-system is a function of the power of the people upholding or promoting it.

The real danger of AI has to do with the advent of systems which no single person can fully understand or control. This is the case for standard operating systems which due to their size and hardware and firmware-linked complexities, have passed beyond being able to be understood by a single person. And generative AI is a black box.

And yet there is no reason why a slim, efficient OS with readable kernel code could not be running on most devices. Would such a kernel, understandable by a single person, be more secure than current bloated constantly updated ones? And is there a reason to abandon the semantic web project? Would the semantic web be better than both the ordinary internet and LLMs?

But we must acknowledge that philosophically the advent of LLMs is something profoundly uncanny and thought-provoking. We hold that 90% of valid criticism consists in just criticism of the poor quality, the fatal presence of previous AI-generated 'slop' and biased nature of the training data, while only 10% is criticism of LLMs as AI.

Are LLMs an emergent phenomenon caused by the size of linguistic data and hardware power capable of processing it? An emergent phenomenon for massive linguistic data in which it becomes possible to talk to data? An uncanny situation wherein a uniquely human trait (linguistic communication) is convincingly mimicked by a machine as it spontaneously emerges, in a way still little understood, statistically from massive linguistic data. As if the unique prerogative of the logos had been stolen from humanity. Maybe a human super-logos needs to be developed to prevail against the AI-logos which offers the illusion of a divine oracle, of having a god as a friend.