Realizing this is a story about capitalism as much as it is about technology. You can see the constant circle of Open AI setting guardrails and then breaking them to compete with other companies or raise revenue to keep growing.

(Adding after the end of the chapter) …capitalism and of course empire as Hao’s core hypothesis! “The empire of AI was returning to the exact same form of expansion as the empires of old: To fuel its growth, it needed more material resources and, crucially, more land.”

However much you hate AI, it's not enough

The amount of skilled writing labour that workers were asked to do in service of training these AI models makes me so sad. Writing fiction and recipes and poetry and email and so much else besides. I knew that AI used so much public data and writing, but I didn’t realize how much direct human labour was also fed into it. 🥲

Every new fact pushes the limits of my imagination of how evil and cruel the data training process is. From targeting people experiencing economic hardship in formerly colonized countries and deliberately creating job precarity to drive costs down... to making people train AI by writing the worst possible content? Forcing desperate people to write sexual violence scenarios to the detriment of their mental health while billionaires are actually committing unthinkable violence against women and children on Epstein Island. It's all so so awful.

This disaster capitalism section is so dark. It's not lost on me that training these AI models exacerbates climate disasters and then these companies reap the benefits of the low labour cost during disasters for the labour to build these systems. This is why the wealthy are unconcerned about climate change: to a certain extent, it's good for their businesses, to always have a traumatized and exploitable workforce available. It makes me sick to my stomach for the people already caught in this trap, and for the rest of us, as climate change continues to progress. All the more reason to start building strong communities and mutual aid networks now.

In yesterday's NYT the daily podcast, a dad going back to his hometown in Gaza with all his children buried thought this most angering thing was that "what was this all for?" https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-long-road-home-for-gazans/id1200361736?i=1000734191758

Reading this at the same time, can't help but connect how many of our struggles are just a bunch of powerful men who I want to ask that question to

Knowing how many lives it takes to produce such a harmful and utterly useless product as chagpt.. I don’t know how to sleep at night.

doing jail time ✍🏻 in a foreign country ✍🏻 is not a reasonable ✍🏻 ask from your bosses ✍🏻 got it!