It's literally making stuff up and it has no idea what it's making up.

Therefore, it is a bullshit engine.

It's a bullshit engine in that it makes up stuff that is essentially has no semantic content grounding causality or any of that in it.

And it's bullshit because its only goal is to be plausible.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dan McQuillen.

Dan is a lecturer in creative and social computing at Goldsmiths, which is at the University of London.

And he's also the author of Resisting AI, an anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence.

Now, obviously, this is a conversation that is very relevant right now as chat GPT and these image generation tools get a lot of media attention, public attention. You know,

there's a lot of big promises and expectations for what they might mean in the world,

you know, often very positive things, most likely or almost certainly

overpromising on what they can deliver, as is so often with the tech industry. So I think

it's important that we have some conversations that, you know, throw a bit of cold water on this,

throw a bit of reality on what is likely to come of these technologies and whether we should be

so quickly embracing them as Sam Altman and these other billionaires expect us to do.

One thing that was really fascinating to me in having this conversation was that Dan told me when

he set out to write the book, it was actually called AI for good, right? And he was looking for a good

version of AI to promote. And as he did the research, as he further looked into artificial

intelligence, these technologies, how they work, the actual impact that they're having in the

world, he changed that to what is now resisting AI, you know, a very different take on these technologies and how we should approach them.

And I think that this conversation is really instructive, not just to understand how these technologies work, but also how they are deployed and the risks for how they can continue to be deployed as they are improved and advanced and made more capable or have more computing power behind them, not just in the private sector as they are rolled out by these companies, but also in the public sector, right?

As more of these tools are used to deliver services in governments that are increasingly subject to

austerity, spending cuts, don't have the money to deliver the services that publics expect from

...