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Accepted Paper:
Hail to the doomers: narratives of control / control of narratives in the generative AI era
Jonathan Roberge
(National Institute of Scientific Research, Canada)
‘AI doomerism’ deals with control, namely that i) discourses and dramatic performances about the existential risk of losing control to machines simultaneously ii) relates to how control plays out within the research field of AI in terms of who’s capable of steering its entire development.
Long abstract:
The release of ChatGPT came with a resurgence of ‘AI doomerism’. “Risks of extinction” now deals with control: namely that i) discourses and dramatic performances about the existential risk of losing control to machines simultaneously ii) relates to how control plays out within the research field of AI in terms of who’s capable of steering its entire development. My argument is threefold. First, I depict Bengio’s take on Xrisk, for it is a vocal attempt at re-thinking social engineering. From there, the second part of the argument shows how AI doomerism has been met with resistances, e.g. the position of LeCun who has argued that doom is “preposterous” as well as “political”. Which brings the third part of the argument: the profoundly conflictual nature of the current debate shows how “AI is a registry of power” (Crawford, 2021), even if —or precisely because—such a reality is obfuscated in the debate. In fact, this debate is not two-, but three-sided as a lesser-known faction tries to have its voice heard, i.e. the DAIR-Parrot community, represented, among others, by Gebru and Bender. Their position is at times portrayed as insisting on ‘short-term’ biases, but this is only one aspect of a broader critique addressing the issue of control. The problem, in turn, is that such subtler and sociologically accurate perspectives is what make them unable to shape global conversations on AI; something which also raises the question of the very possibility of Critical AI Studies as a field of inquiries.