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Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all being bucketed under "AI", is misleading. This is why @Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) and @Alex Hanna say to name the specific thing being discussed rather than calling it "AI". 🧵

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, writes that my collaborator and I warned about these eugenicists a few years ago and were called all sorts of names. As she writes, we were "treated as extremists and conspiracy theorists." Even so-called "critics" of large language models came for me unsummoned as I spoke up about this. Marcus and LeCun were on the same side on this one, the side of attacking me for calling out these eugenicists.

Is It Too Late?

No. But We Must Better Understand the Nature of the Battle