Ignore botlickers, ‘Al’is just normal tech

We desire existential certainty in this world of complexity and amid our sense of powerlessness, but turning to the new oracles isn’t a solution

- Aragorn Eloff

Most of us know at least one slopper.

They're the people who use ChatGPT to reply to Tinder matches, choose items from the restaurant menu and write creepily generic replies to office emails. Then there’s the undergraduate slopfest that’s wreaking havoc at universities, to say nothing of the barrage of suspiciously em-dash-laden papers polluting the inboxes of academic journal editors.

Not content to merely participate in the ongoing game of slop roulette, the botlicker is a more proactive creature who is usually to be found confidently holding forth like some subpar regional TED Talk speaker about how “this changes everything”. Confidence notwithstanding, in most cases Synergy Greg from marketing and his fellow botlickers are dangerously ignorant about their subject matter — contemporary machine learning technologies — and are thus prone to cycling rapidly between awe and terror.

Indeed, for the botlicker, who possibly also has strong views on crypto, “AI” is simultaneously the worst and the best thing we've ever invented. It’s destroying the labour market and threatening us all with techno-fascism, but it’s also delivering us to a fully automated leisure society free of what David Graeber once rightly called “bullshit jobs”.

You'll notice that I’m using scare quotes around the term “AI”. That’s because, as computational linguist Emily Bender and former Google research scientist Alex Hanna argue in their excellent recent book, The AI Con, there is nothing inherently intelligent about these technologies, which they describe with the more accurate term “synthetic text extrusion machines”. The acronym STEM is already taken, alas, but there’s another equally apt acronym we can use: Salami, or systematic approaches to learning algorithms and machine inferences.