this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts

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[–] raspberriesareyummy 0 points 7 months ago

Telling everyone else how they should use language is just an ultimately moronic move. After all we’re not French, we don’t have a central authority for how language works.

There's a difference between objecting to misuse of language and "telling everyone how they should use language" - you may not have intended it, but you used a straw man argument there.

What we all should be acutely aware of (but unfortunately many are not) is how language is used to harm humans, animals or our planet.

Fascists use language to create "outgroups" which they then proceed to dehumanize and eventually violate or murder. Capitalists speak about investor risks to justify return on invest, and proceed to lobby for de-regulation of markets that causes human and animal suffering through price gouging and factory farming livestock. Tech corporations speak about "Artificial Intelligence" and proceed to persuade regulators that - because there's "intelligent" systems - this software may be used for autonomous systems that proceed to cause injury and death on malfunctions.

Yes, all such harm can be caused by individuals in daily life - individuals can be murderers or extort people on something they really need, or a drunk driver can cause an accident that kills people. However, the language that normalizes or facilitates such atrocities or dangers on a large scale, is dangerous and therefore I will proceed to continue calling out those who want to label the shitty penny market LLMs and other deep learning systems as "AI".