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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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"AI is a surveillance technology"
Remarkably stupid take. It's produced by big-data companies because you need a lot of data to feed it but that doesn't make it "surveillance technology". Stable Diffusion wasn't trained on the kind of data she's talking about, and it can't be used to surveil you either. ChatGPT no more permits surveillance of its users than does chatting with a real person.
You can’t see the potential this has for parsing massive sets of data across multiple types of media and drawing conclusions? The person in the link isn’t talking about LLMs and image generators. It’s pretty clear you didn’t read it.
AI absolutely has the potential to be used for surveillance; its use in facial recognition most obviously. But the person quoted in the article didn't say "AI has the potential to be used for surveillance" - she said "AI is fundamentally a surveillance technology". So if she's not talking about LLMs and image generators, why is she saying that it's a fundamental part of the technology? It's not very fundamental if these two year-defining AI technologies aren't included in it.
Fundamental is part of the headline and not a quote. She never said that. Stupid headline, sure. Stupid take? Nah. Surveillance is one of the most practical applications of machine learning; they can finally easily sift through all that data they’ve collected.
Fair enough, I genuinely misread and thought that was within the quotation marks. But her message is still wrong because she is still talking about AI in general, but her argument applies only to a) AI whose data is derived from data scrapers like Facebook or b) AI put to surveillance tasks. That does not apply to Stable Diffusion, which is why I mentioned it, but it is caught by her assertion, "AI is a surveillance technology."