why i don't like AI: it mostly uses english and only has access to the internet
08 May 2024i am continually surprised by people’s excitement about AI.
call me a luddite, but i’m not into it. the main reason? having read amusing ourselves to death by neil postman and having other media awareness and critique, i don’t trust that we are collectively well-educated enough to not eventually be fooled at a catastrophic level by something fabricated by machines that most of us don’t understand. said a little more simply: i believe that we are collectively under-educated enough to be fooled at a catastrophic level by something fabricated by machines that most of us don’t understand.
that said, i didn’t come here (today) to write about that. today i’m here to write about an insight i had in a conversation the other day that freaked me out: AI is primarily using english.
it’s long been known that a bias of the internet is that it’s mostly in english. i think as of 2024, the data is that ~60% of the internet is in english. last i checked, about 20% of humans speak english. and when i think about the historical knowledge of the world, the majority of it is not in english and the majority of it is not on the internet.
so AI, which uses the internet as data source, is doubling down on several biases/limitations. what freaks me out about that is that some people are already beginning to assume (without criticality) that the answer AI gives them to a question is the best answer.
that. freaks. me. out.
what to do about it? i don’t know. but i def want the record to show: i’m not a fan (at least not yet).
ps - i know that many folks use AI with appropriate criticality. but i worry that, given the state of education (in america at least), many folks don’t.
some data sources:
- how does AI actually work
- statista: Common languages used for web content 2024, by share of websites. As of January 2024, English was the most popular language for web content, representing nearly 59 percent of websites. Russian ranked second, with 5.3 percent of web content, while the content in the Spanish language followed, with 4.3 percent. - Feb 19, 2024
- words rated: As of 2023, an estimated 1.46 billion people speak English around the World. Incredibly, this amounts to 18.07% of the global population, almost 1 in 5 people. More people speak English than any other language. - dec 2023
words / writing / post-processing
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