Diamonds are expensive because that's how much money people pay for them. People buy diamonds because [they have no taste and] they can afford to, or want to present themselves as being able to afford to. I'm sure some of them have various dark thoughts about it, too.

People derive their value from their economic status because that is a tool available to them and the world they grew up in forced them to do so. Being able to derive your value from other aspects of life is a luxury and a privelege that is, ironically, unaffordable for the majority.

It's a chart that shows the number of things going up over time. The total number of things increasing over time is going to play a hugely significant role in that, regardless of how broken the selection criteria are.

A contest of skill is not necessarily like spinning a roulette.

If I were to play Lebron James in basketball 1v1, it would not matter how many times we ran the experiment. We could play a trillion times, and I would win 0 of them.

If you sampled 10 Hollywood directors and asked whether The Godfather or The Room is a better movie, the Room would win the poll 0 out of a trillion times.

The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0. So if you see wins go up as volume of submissions goes up, it shows that either ai writing is above that bar, or that faulty judging is a widespread problem beyond a few anomalous organizations.

You can't win a competition without entering it.

You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?

"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.

> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.

I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.

There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.

> You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?

You can easily devise in this thought experiment rules that prevent loopholes, like saying no phones allowed and medical emergencies do not result in a win for the opponent.

If they allow "AI" submissions, it's not a literary award. You can "the future is now, old man" me if you'd like, but the point is that the term 'literary award' in that case does not mean what it means to most people at this point in time.

The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award appears to be very biased in favour of "AI" "generated" "works". This is the source of 5 out of 13 items in the 'Allowed' category. e.g. from one of the notes:

> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.

::

I haven't scoured through all of the listings, but I've found several that are included for pretty weak reasons. e.g. in "suspected or disputed":

> A screenshot of a 100% Pangram result spread online. No author response, organizer investigation, admission, or revocation has surfaced.

_A_ screenshot? Of Pangram? A perfect score? And nobody officially responded to it? Wild. By the way, the piece being referred to has a scattering of em dashes throughout, including one in the opening sentence. Make of that what you will. Or don't -- it's a perfectly normal way to punctuate English prose.

I think maybe people should be able to understand that the Pangram thing is 100% a joke by now -- yes, I checked, 100%. It was damned from the off by the simple fact that it's a service for people who sensed "AI" and want that confirmed. Of course one could also consider the lack of evidence demonstrating its efficacy, or the theoretical and practical difficulty of building software to perform the task [the advertised one, not the task of giving the customer what they want], etc.

::

To be clear, the article here isn't really the target of my ire, as it's largely just a collection of notes. Actually there is one thing I wanted to criticise -- you can't include entries getting shortlisted as examples of "literary awards granted".

The technical/technological nature of the system that made the choice is irrelevant. That is, I think it's right to ignore what a decision is, as you put it. The ability to make decisions is not the ability to choose -- it's the ability, right, privelege, obligation, expectation to take responsibility.

Discussing anything like personhood for AI is really jumping the gun.

The chatbot is software. The software does what it is told. It performs tasks requested of it by the user/operator in line with the (designed, ) immplemented functionality of the code. If the software fails to do what it is told, the vendor has not provided working software. If an operator controlling some software does not do so in a reasonable, safe manner, the operator is negligent. If damages result from such failures or actions, the people who made the decisions that led to that are the people who are responsible.

It does not matter how complex the software is: if a vendor of some software doesn't expect it fail in costly ways because it's too complex or hard to understand, that is a (legal, ethical, moral) failure of the vendor.

It does not matter how autonomous it is: an autonomous sprinkler system that floods the neighbour's basement is not held liable for the damages. The owner, installer, vendor, etc. is. -- maybe the neighbour even did(n't) something wrong!

What you're missing is that "making decisions" isn't the same as being technically capable of making a selection.

Making decisions means taking responsibility.[0] This is really all there is to it -- a computer cannot decide, not because humans are uniquely able to make a choice based on input, but because a computer cannot be responsible. You can decide to do something based on the output of the computer, but that's you deciding to do that. At any point where a computer appears to have made a decision, someone else was behind it. You can complicate this, randomise stuff, obfuscate things, etc. but ultimately either the computer was set in motion by a person, or it malfunctioned. The malfunctioning computer thing is quite interesting but it's not going to change the outcome.

LLMs ("AI" today) have not changed this. It's still just software, it's still doing what it's told. Surprising future technologies may alter this, but there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that's a likely future and it certainly is not the case today.

> Black-and-white positions that insist anyone creating or using an AI is responsible for anything it does wrong under any circumstances are also unrealistic.

At this point in time, AI is just a piece of software. It doesn't matter how useful it is or not. It's just software. We can and should treat it like software. So to evaluate when/where/how someone should (or should not) be held responsible for something that "the AI did", we can start at the same point as we would for any other vendor/creator/user of a piece of software. I'm not going to get into that -- my point is that the framework exists. And yes, sure, maybe that framework needs some tweaks in consideration of the new software, that's OK. The starting point should still be in reality, where software is software.

[0] Yes, this is nuanced, things go wrong, different situations, etc. etc.

> At any point where a computer appears to have made a decision, someone else was behind it.

Are you arguing that not computers are best at chess, but that whichever human last updated the chess algorithm is actually the reigning chess champion?

Why not the person who thought to stage the match? They had arguably more input in the win.

I got sick of Pokemon's (Game Freak's, Nintendo's) exploitative practices back when they just tried to con you into buying two of every game. Anyway I don't know how bad pokemon is these days, but I think your analogy would make more sense if you thought about the AI companies like they're in a big hole in the ground. There's something down there, no doubt about it, but they don't know what it is or what to do with it, they just know that it loves munchin' down on cash. Sometimes Jensen Huang is down there and he also loves munchin' down on cash and if you don't feed him he gets mad and says he wasn't born a loser. OK, now forget about all the different users and enterprise customers because they're insignificant by orders of magnitude, a bit like how you focused on the whales in your analogy but we're zooming out further, until we can see the even bigger fish: the venture capital investors! They're the ones with the wheelbarrows of cash that they're tipping into the void.

Anyway, the only "whales" funding the AI companies is venture capital. The reason it's not a viable business (yet, so far, whatever) is because they spend more money than they make.

> everyone agrees that the frontier labs are responsible for hacking attempts. No one is trying to deflect blame.

No, they really don't. I suppose I agree to some extent that no one is trying (hard) to deflect blame, because the people in control are barely a part of the conversation in the first place.

Almost all of the reporting on these stories assigns the blame to the chatbots first. Most prominently through the language/wording that gets used -- it's usually e.g. "BOT infiltrated ...", "Agents ruined the ...". I mean, they call them agents. I'm not trying to claim this terminology was selected as an entirely strategic move, but it sure does seem convenient. Calling them agents shifts the conversation away from the real human people and companies that are controlling them. This extends well beyond this one word, as well. The (captured) media picks up on and adopts the language used by the tech/AI companies.[0] In this way (among others) these companies can influence how the media portrays them indirectly.

> Instead, this is a legal question

There are legal questions, but the two (legal, ethical) aren't mutually exclusive. The criminal law question is the most significant one here, I think. If you do what they did as an individual, you are pretty likely to get visited by the FBI.

You're skipping over a couple of important points, I think:

- The AI labs clearly stand to benefit from the "AI is dangerous narrative". We know this for several reasons, probably the most significant one is that they keep telling us how the new one is super extremely dangerous, and proceeding to make no changes to their behaviour. It's marketing.

- The AI labs are clearly in control of their bots. It's a computer. Networks are not mysterious. Computers don't do surprising things. The principles and technologies involved in securing a network are mature and there is a ready supply of trained workers available worldwide, keen to apply those principles and deploy/manage those technologies. You can believe that something went wrong and the various hacks and excursions were unexpected. In that case, the labs are clearly incompetent[1] and also, they're still to blame. Repeatedly running "experiments" that you can't control is, in fact, a failure of basic morals and ethics.

[0] Of course they do, right? Well there used to be a distinction made between experts and marketing departments. These days it seems a lot of journalists think that marketing copy is as good as any other source.

[1] Surely they hired someone that can setup a firewall.

> The AI labs are clearly in control of their bots. It's a computer. Networks are not mysterious.

Yes, exactly. The issue isn't, "we don't know how to sandbox an agent", the issue is that they need to test the agent with full internet access because that's the product they are selling. They are selling a product that does things for you on the web. You have to be able to test it with a real web connection.

Maybe the answer is to simulate the web. What if you ask an agent to reproduce the key parts of the web (travel sites, government sites, etc.); effectively, clone a real, working version of the web, but inside a simulator. Now you could test the agents inside the simulator. Since "coding is a solved problem" maybe that wouldn't be as hard as it sounds. Right?

Good article. Good point, well made.

I have to add that, unsurprisingly, the fake therapy on offer is fucking toxic. Right away it's putting thoughts in your head that are obviously based on nothing relevant, contradict each other, and are escalatory. It is not at all surprising that people are killing themselves and others because of their interactions with these things.

I'm a little bit surprised to see someone taking such grand & absolute claims so seriously. I guess I don't, generally. Actually thinking about it, it's not that I treat them as unserious, it's more like I read it as something akin to hyperbole. Anyway this isn't to say exploring this ("taking it serously") isn't worthwhile, just that I hadn't been prior.

As for the backlash itself, it seems safe to say it's motivated by a wide range of things. Ultimately though, I do agree with the point in the title (i.e. it's about datacentres) but I think a lot of the other factors mentioned are significant, but I still wouldn't expect even a perfect (impossible) poll/study to find a neat, unifying reason for most of the backlash.

Of course it's about the datacentres: why would anybody want even a modest, ye olde time datacentre, let alone a neo cloud / AI one, in their neighbourhood? You can call this nimbyism, which it is, but it's important to note the gulf of difference between a tech company's private profit facility and the sorts of projects where "nimby" typically is invoked.

Because this particular DC rollout is so massive and high profile, people have realised en masse that rejecting these things is something they can do. The anti-AI movement is absolutely a big part of this -- in terms of publicity, awareness, outreach -- but the various local peoples can (should, must) have their own reason for rejecting/protesting the projects.

Finally, given the dismal rate of promised capacity actually coming online -- which was apparent prior to and separately from "the backlash" -- I can't help but wonder if the widespread local resistance will end up as a scapegoat when questions start getting raised.