The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor;

Author:Shannon Vallor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Empathy Box

Dost thou know why the mirror (of thy soul) reflects nothing?

Because the rust is not cleared from its face.

—Rumi, “Masnavi” 1:34 (1273 CE)

All technologies are mirrors, because all technologies are extensions of human values into the built world. Every technology—from the wheel, to the book, to the engine, to the computer—reflects what humans of certain times and places thought was worth doing, making, enabling, improving, or trying. Judgments of “worth” always indicate a human act of valuing, whether or not we are valuing the right things. Even acts of violence can express a value judgment. If I willingly strike you in the face, I am expressing a judgment that at that moment, your personal dignity and well-being are not worth enough to me to command my respect—not valuable enough to warrant me making the necessary moral effort to restrain my rage.

When we gaze in our AI mirrors at the words and images they generate, at the predictions and classifications they make, we are not seeing objective truths, under any definition of “objective.” We are seeing reflections of what humans valued enough to describe or record in data. But not all humans. What our AI mirrors show are the values of those humans who have historically had the power to shape the dominant patterns now engraved in our recorded data. For example, for most of recorded history, women were largely barred from professional roles that involved authoring books and magazine essays, producing scientific research, writing and directing films, or reporting news stories. While some countries have now opened these roles to women, any large language model trained on a corpus of digitized text that goes back more than a few decades will reflect primarily what men have had to say, and what men have valued enough to bother to describe. The same is true of the corpus of visual art, music, and other domains of culture. And again, these cultural reflections certainly won’t reflect the value judgments of all men, or even most. Most men who have lived on this planet have been economically, racially, or otherwise marginalized in ways that also blocked their contributions to today’s digitized cultural record of the human family.

The point is that our AI mirrors are nothing like neutral reflections of a shared human reality. They are very potent indicators of how a small subset of humans have seen and valued the world, and the marks they have left on it. For many reading this book, the reflections in AI mirrors will resemble something not too far from your own assumptions and value judgments about the world; what you see in them will be mostly comforting and familiar, even as they surprise and delight you with their power to speak without faces, or to write sonnets without hands. For most others, these reflections have a dimmer cast. Their voices speak a language that is not originally yours, or their patterns retrace a historical arc of devaluation and denigration by other humans who have chosen to see you and your kind as lesser.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.