Re: <nettime> FWD: The Copy Far "AI" license (fwd)

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 10/2/23 10:38, mp via nettime-l wrote:
> On 10/2/23 07:33, Christian Swertz via nettime-l wrote:
> > But I would really like to learn more about the idea that an AI
> > might be free. I've heard this quite often, but never understood
> > the concept. Can somebody help me?
>
> It could possibly have to do with the concepts of the "earth rights 
> movements", which seek to decenter the perception and legal treatment
> of "the environment" from the "white colonial gaze" where humans,
> starting with "the White Male", is on top and in the centre and most
> important, and where everyone and everything else is subordinate.

While I'm in favor of expending rights to non-humans (animals, plants, 
ecosystems), I'm quite opposed to doing the same to technology.

This, as far as I can see, is a false symmetry.

The main reason why this is a false symmetry concerns a the question of 
autonomy and with that, any notion of non-human self-hood. A tree 
doesn't need humans to exist and from that you can assume that there is 
an element of "treeness" that is beyond human utility. To preserve that, 
against the Western, colonial tendency of "thingification", as Aimé 
Césaire put it, the extension of rights might be the next best thing to 
dismantling the Western notion of individual rights altogether.

Technology, including contemporary technology such as AI, is 
fundamentally different from trees. Even if a certain degree of 
'stochastic freedom' is built into it, technology is not, and cannot be, 
autonomous. That would amount to a perpetuum mobile. And, more than 
that, technology is fundamentally utilitarian. You might fall in love 
with ChatGPT, but if OpenAI decides that providing the bot to you no 
longer fits their business model, you're out of luck. That doesn't mean 
that people are always fully in control, thousands of people die 
everyday because people are not in full control over their cars, but 
that doesn't make care somehow beyond human control.

As Joanna Bryson recently put it: "An AI system independent of humans is 
the ultimate shell company, purely an available hiding place for 
corruption by the human agencies that set it in place."

https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-very-short-primer-on-ai-ip-including.html?m=1

One might put it even stronger: To claim that an AI system is 
independent of humans, is to create the ultimate shell company...." And 
we definitely do not need more rights for shell companies.

--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org