On AI

Apologies for my needlessly combative tone. We all have our off-days. Just on the subject of AI, over the last three or four months I have found that I have increasingly used AI for all sorts of purposes. Indeed, it has become completely indispensible to me. It actually makes me wonder if Laudate Agno is still keeping to his resolution never to use it, since I can scarcely believe that anyone would forgo some of the conveniences it supplies -- unless, of course, not experimenting with it, he hasn't discovered those conveniences. In terms of research, it massively commutes the amount of labour. If I am looking for some specific detail on some topic, it can find in seconds what would formerly have taken me hours of online research. It seems silly not to use a tool when not using it would only mean wasting hours of time. I have better things to do than read through reams of material on a screen. I'd rather be spending time in my library reading actual books. AI gives me that time. I also use it for translations. For years I have had books in German and Russian which I had bought because they had lovely illustrations or because they intrigued me for one reason or another, and which I thought I would never actually read. Now I can read them with ease. I just show the pages to ChatGPT and ask for a translation, and read the text a chapter at a time. I have long had an interest in DEFA films, and I have been reading a really interesting book by Knut Elstermann called Früher war ich Filmkind: Die DEFA und ihre jüngsten Darsteller (German Amazon page here) about child stars in DEFA films, and have learnt a great deal. For example, one detail I read was about how DEFA always had high standards of animal welfare in their films whenever they used animals, and would always have a vet on set to make sure that no animal was harmed, because they considered it part of their progressive, Enlightenment values that they wanted to instil in the population that no animal should be injured or endure pain merely for entertainment. This book has never been translated into English, but I can print out the translated text and fold and insert the pages into the book, so that I have a translation at my fingertips. AI has also been a very great help in constructing good subtitle files for non-Anglophone films using transcription and translation programs. To make a properly polished file, human input and work is still necessary; but if one only cares for the file being good enough to be able to follow the conversations, then no human work is really necessary. I have had philosophical conversations with an AI -- I think it was Gemma -- in which the LLM came up with genuinely novel possibilities that hadn't occurred to me before. I have even found AI useful in my gradually adopting a vegetarian diet. For any dish involving meat, I just ask ChatGPT for a substitute for the meat, and it always finds something suitable and tasty. It really is a wonder. Having said that, I am as concerned as anyone at the impact of data centres on our environment as well as the existential risks posed by AI, and I rather feel that the technology should be paused. Certainly, all additional energy required to run the centres should come 100 per cent from renewables.