As a way to think about the stakes in the AI debate:

A language model like GPT-3, which trains on a corpus of text & produces new text in response to prompts, is a printing press for world views.

It mechanically reproduces the world view in the training set at scale.

We are headed for a set of cultural upheavals, crises, and church-state fights on the order of what we went through after Gutenberg and the rise of Protestantism. Right now, and small-c catholic civil religion is fighting for control of this new press. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/

That civil religion doesn't have control of the government, but it is constituted as as kind of separate power -- a "cultural" axis of entertainment and education, and the modern means of setting & policing public morality. Language models, tho, are a threat to this.

AI has the potential to produce at scale cultural products that represent & reproduce vulgar (in the modern English sense & in the archaic sense of "common") values, norms, and mores. You don't need expensive monasteries controlled by the church & staffed w/ scribes.

Running through the papers in the ironically named "Resistance AI" workshop is a strong anti-populist impulse. A repeatedly expressed fear of "size," "scale," & of what is popular -- the ideas & language in the bulk of the text in online communities. https://sites.google.com/view/resistance-ai-neurips-20/accepted-papers-and-media?authuser=0

This is a priesthood that has become accustomed to wielding power at our elite sites of cultural production -- Netflix, HBO, movie studios, advertising agencies, universities -- & they would not see that power threatened by a printing press that elevates vulgar world views.

I think the analogy between wokeness & the medieval Catholic Church is worth pondering for so many reasons, not least which is that the Church was not all-powerful -- it was locked in struggle w/ the monarchy, & both together had to negotiate power w/ an unruly populace.

These elite woke academics, pundits, & entertainers see themselves not as powerful but as persecuted, b/c commoners aren't totally on-board & b/c they don't control the levers of state power. But, y'know, Catholicism didn't fully control the monarchy & populace everywhere either.

Yeah. The hierarchy is strict and strictly enforced, & the interpretation of anything from the most casual utterance to the most expensive & elaborate cultural product hinges entirely on where in that hierarchy it comes from. https://twitter.com/drethelin/status/1339977944974942213