We’re hearing a great many troubling claims at this week’s public hearings of the parliamentary inquiry into AI, and no doubt there are plenty more to come.
As we follow the proceedings, it’s vital that we stop humanising AI like Big Tech does. Let’s make a start.
1. It’s not “training”. It’s assimilation.
When AI developers say that they’re “training” their models, what they actually mean is that they’re feeding them massive amounts of new data. Without an inexhaustible supply of words, images, equations and other cultural and scientific assets, large language models can’t improve their guesses. All they can do is regurgitate patterns based on the data they’ve already got. The global race that AI developers are in is to secure as much of what humanity has already created as possible, and then churn it through their models.
This process, of course, is not training. It’s assimilation – and it’s endless in scope…
