Dear λx.x,
On 2026-06-01 09:55, λx.x wrote:
I don't agree that "the leading commercial genAI services ... achieve
a concentration of power over the lives of people rarely seen before".
I see AI as a tool for remixing the world, decentralizing control.
Surely governments and oligarchs would prefer exclusive access to
these technologies.
output of LLMs has been shown to be heavily biased in favour of the
companies who ‹own› the models; that is, not only is there external
bias present in the training data (which, in itself, is exploitable by
outside actors[3][4]), the companies themselves filter the data to
present a view more favourable of them, their business, generative
artificial intelligence, their political stances, et cetera.[5]
On the topic of AI and control, its worth flagging some of the more
overlooked facets of well known dystopic fiction (which I have always
considered the most egregious):
excerpt from 1984, Appendix, The Principles of Newspeak, page 241-251:
``
...What was required, above all for political purposes, was short
clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and
which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of
the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of
them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink,
Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and
countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress
distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of
them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and
monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to
make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically
neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the
purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to
make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the
correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth
bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an
almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their
harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the
spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our
own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were
constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other
languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every
year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice,
the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to
make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the
higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the
Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck". Like various
other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning.
Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it
implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the
orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a
warm and valued compliment.
```
https://www.orwelltoday.com/readerduckspeak.shtml
(I once had the opportunity to have Bill Inmon discuss duckspeak in the
context of textual disambiguation).
Its also worth noting Huxley's riffing on hypnopædia and its narrow
learning outcomes, namely the inability to answer the question:
"Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?"
https://www.huxley.net/bnw/two.html
kind regards,
Jonathan
