In her new newsletter Helen Beetham offers an intelligent and in many ways original account of accountability in AI and the role of language in society. Don't miss this article. Beetham argues, "Whatever features of writing are reproduced by the statistical and neural processing work of LLMs, they do not produce a meaningful, accountable relationship between words and world, self and others." It is for this reason the AIs cannot be referenced as authors, but also, for this reason the task of language writing would not be exhausted even if AIs wrote perfectly. With language, we don't just manipulate words and sentences, we do things (as writers as varied a Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin have argued). By contrast, the AI "is unaccountable, with no body to stand behind its utterances, no community to feel the consequences, no needs to negotiate. It has no intentions or values of its own, except those added on to the black box of code by human data workers." See also Beetham's follow-up article where she discusses developing accountable writing assignments. Via Sheila MacNeill.
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