I agree with all of the points about enclosure etc., but not with: "The most popular LLMs will experience a feedback loop. More people will use them, which means that they will have more access to up-to-date training data, which means that the quality of their answers will be better." the only data that LLM users regularly supply to LLMs is *questions*. how will that data improve the quality of the LLM's *answers*? at most, the data will include instances where the LLM user happens to have mentioned in the chatbot text that the LLM's code worked, which seems like pretty low-quality data to me
"The marginalisation of local and Indigenous knowledge has long been driven by entrenched power structures. GenAI simply puts this process on steroids."
"The problem with all of us being so much more a hive mind than we realize is that knowledge problems that ripple across our a information ecosystems can become not just threats to individuals with weak character or bad habits, but the equivalent of colony collapse.... Real belief in collective knowledge may also suggest that caring for our own knowledge formation in social systems is a way of caring for the system as a whole."
"'Thinking' by guessing what words to say next based on words we’ve previously heard might actually help find a good idea — and it’s also how know-nothings get through work meetings, and how people come to think they know stuff they really don’t, and how they internalize the stupidest notions."
Shannon Mattern: "What if we imagined that Field as a Library: a public space, a social infrastructure, an intellectual and ecological commons, a site for the convergence of myriad ways of knowing?"
"[W]hat is currently sold to us as “Artificial Intelligence”... is neither intelligent nor entirely artificial, yet it’s pumping the internet with automated content more quickly than you can fire an editorial office. No system predicated on these assumptions can hope to discern “misinformation” from “information”: both are reduced to equally weighted packets of content, merely seeking an optimization function in a free marketplace of ideas. And both are equally ingested into a great statistical machinery, which weighs only our inability to discern."