Today’s links “Open” “AI” isn’t: Not “open,” nor “artificial,” and certainly not “intelligent.” Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading “Open” “AI” isn’t (permalink) The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism’s flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007 Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption. A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it’s an incredibly effective one. In “Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI,” a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 Openwashing is the trick that large “AI” companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of…Pluralistic: "Open" "AI" isn't (18 August 2023)