That opening caricature was so off-putting and dismissive (and extremely wrong, that's not at all what the discourse is about generally speaking), I failed to conclude the reading session.
One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nuclear weapons without suffering from a blast personally. The idea that if you don't use a tool you can't form conclusions about why it's bad is devoid of any factual or historical grounding. It's an empty rhetorical device which can be used endlessly.
Literally 100% of the inventions which come out now or in the future can be handled in the exact same way. Somebody invents a robot arm that spoon feeds you so you never need to feed yourself with your own hand ever again? Oh this is revolutionary, everybody's going to install this in their home! What, you haven't? And you think it's a bad idea? Gosh, you're so backwards and foolish. The world is moving on, don't be left behind with your manual hand feeding techniques.
This article is like 1.5 years out of date. The discourse around genAI as a tech movement and its nearly uniformly terrible outcomes has moved on. OP hasn't. Seems the gap is widening between writers who are talking about these tools soberly and seriously, and writers who aren't.
But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.
The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".
I don't know any engineers, any reports, or any public community voices who claim GenAI is bad because "AI doesn't work because I tried ChatGPT in 2022 and it was dumb." So it's a critique of a fictional movement which doesn't exist vs. an attempt at critiquing an actual movement.
One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nuclear weapons without suffering from a blast personally. The idea that if you don't use a tool you can't form conclusions about why it's bad is devoid of any factual or historical grounding. It's an empty rhetorical device which can be used endlessly.
Literally 100% of the inventions which come out now or in the future can be handled in the exact same way. Somebody invents a robot arm that spoon feeds you so you never need to feed yourself with your own hand ever again? Oh this is revolutionary, everybody's going to install this in their home! What, you haven't? And you think it's a bad idea? Gosh, you're so backwards and foolish. The world is moving on, don't be left behind with your manual hand feeding techniques.
This article is like 1.5 years out of date. The discourse around genAI as a tech movement and its nearly uniformly terrible outcomes has moved on. OP hasn't. Seems the gap is widening between writers who are talking about these tools soberly and seriously, and writers who aren't.