AI: Pollution and Digital Garbage
December 26, 2022
Humans are polluting the Earth with our addiction to consumerism, meat, and halted advancement in recycling technology. In an ironic twist of fate, the human created AI algorithms are generating decabytes of digital garbage. Ploum wrote about the digital cash in the post: “Drowning In AI Generated Garbage: The Silent War We Are Fighting.”
Ploum asserts we are experiencing the “spectacular results” of forty years of work put into statistical algorithms. He points to “deep fake” videos of public figures, the ability to copycat voices, and digital paintings comparable to masterpieces. AI algorithms need information to learn; the Internet is the greatest bastion of human knowledge (and filth). Everything that AI algorithms learned from was created by humans and now they are creating their own stuff.
It sounds magical, right?
Yes, except it is bad.
“The algorithms are already feeding themselves on their own data. And, as any graduate student will tell you, training on your own results is usually a bad idea. You end sooner or later with pure overfitted inbred garbage. Eating your own shit is never healthy in the long run. Twitter and Facebook are good examples of such algorithmic trash. The problem is that they managed to become too powerful and influential before we realised it was trash…Fascinating garbage but garbage nonetheless.
The robot invasion started 15 years ago, mostly unnoticed. We were expecting killing robots, we didn’t realise we were drowned in AI generated garbage. We will never fight laser wearing Terminators. Instead, we have to outsmart algorithms which are making us dumb enough to fight one against the other.”
The fix? To resist the robot takeover humans need to unplug and engage in reality. That is great advice, except it requires effort and human contact. While some humans are okay, the vast majority stink like the digital garbage.
Whitney Grace, December 26, 2022
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