The ideology of the tool

I’ve previously written about how there’s something creepy and very sexual lurking behind a lot of the people into “AI”, primarily men who can’t handle being told no.

Others have noticed this trend. The latest I’ve come across is from Laura Bates in The Guardian:

It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “ gold rush-type of scenario ”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”.

I can’t find statistics, but I suspect this sort of thing is far more prevalent than most advocates of LLMs would be comfortable admitting. Something about the way how LLMs works brings this out in people, both abusive sexual fantasies and the idea of a worker that obediently jumps through whatever pointless hoops you dream up.

And Bates continues with a look at the recent past:

Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.)

Technology is certainly not neutral. An entire world view is inherent to the tools we use.