What do we think?
My starting point is probably:
1. Like all technological developments under capitalism it is aimed at devaluing human labour and will probably put people out of work or reduce their wages.
2. Its use will become widespread in a whole range of contexts. Many of these will be bad.
3. Some of them might be good.
4. AI is probably best used sparingly if at all.
5. People should say when they have used it to make contributions to Libcom (including discussion threads like this one as well as articles).
6. People should check AI generated material before posting it. If you can't be bothered to read it, why should other people?
7. Using AI to create falsified texts (for example "a document about [x subject] in the style of [dead revolutionary y]") is a no-no.
I just got Co-Pilot to summarise this issue of Workers Dreadnought and it has done a reasonable job of it. Better than I am able to do with the time available to me.
I would be interested to know what other people think...
If I'm not mistaken, the AI…
If I'm not mistaken, the AI summaries use OCR recognition to grab the text from whatever document in order to make their summaries, which can be potentially problematic when the image/text quality on some of the Dreadnought issues is not the best.
Then there are also the issues you mentioned regarding the quality of the AI summaries themselves. I think it is definitely preferable to have someone who is actually knowledgeable about the time period/politics of the Dreadnought do the summaries rather than some AI that is partly just pulling information from various sources to help summarize a text.
I personally think AI is probably more useful in the realm of helping to translate texts rather than provide its commentary on stuff, in which case we should definitely always specify (as you mention) that the text was translated using a translation tool. However, even in the case of translations, it's also usually better to have an actual (human) translator who is familiar with all of the intricacies of the sources and languages at hand rather than relying on some AI.
For what it's worth, I was also going to go through and provide a brief summary or table of contents for all of the Dreadnought issues (or at least the ones that you haven't already provided summaries for) once they're all uploaded.
If you're also looking to…
If you're also looking to automate stuff as far as working with pdfs goes, I would definitely look into using command-line programs (e.g. ocrmypdf and magick) together with a script, which can save loads of time compared with having to constantly upload pdfs to various websites to perform various operations on them. A script, in simple terms, is basically just a text document that contains a bunch of different commands that you can execute together. (I can look into making some general scripts for Windows if that's something we'd be interested in. For example, you can make a general script that combines all the images in a directory into a pdf and then performs text recognition on it, along with other operations like compressing it and removing whatever metadata.)
Thanks adri, that's…
Thanks adri, that's interesting. I absolutely agree that human input is preferable and it's great to hear that your plans for the Dreadnought issues...
I've used google translate before on some missing fragments (I think one footnote) that was omitted from a text here - and again this was flagged up in the final text.
I personally am not able to go down the pathway of command line stuff due to using a work computer, but that sounds interesting for sure and might work for others.
They’ve created the ultimate…
They’ve created the ultimate gravedigger of capital that far surpasses OGAS or Cybersyn, just plug in the (gift) economy and play.
Stuxnet levels of infrastructure attacks can be automated, cycling through from multiple angles to gain control.
Workers’ councils can be remote, largely self operating with a governed set of parameters.
Manual subtitling already obsolete, it’s a small step to translating speech real time, connecting people around the earth.
It’s a game changer and I’m surprised radicals are so far behind the loop on this.
One step closer to Banks'…
One step closer to Banks' Culture.