AI and Eugenics

A quick shoutout to an excellent article I read recently

Published today in Volume 29 of First Monday, Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres have written what I think is one of the interesting and well timed articles of the year. In their article, The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence, they make a very compelling case that the project of Artificial General Intelligence is rooted in white supremacist principles of eugenics.

I encourage you to read through the article yourself and draw your own conclusions and connections, but I find it quite startling, and surprising that I hadn’t seen this pointed out anywhere else. It feels particularly salient to me as I’m in the process of writing a Masters Thesis on Dead Internet Theory, which is very much connected to AI, particularly OpenAI.

There is something especially grim about the fact that these AI are trained on Large Language Models, whose datasets are collected from our own thoughts and expressions, and used in this eschatological project, over which we have no control.


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