An armchair diagnosis of the chatbot moral panic
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Solarpunk
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Moral panic
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The article explicitly frames public reaction to chatbots as a 'moral panic' - understanding the sociological concept of moral panics (their characteristics, historical examples, and how they spread) would give readers critical framework for evaluating the author's thesis
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Adorno is mentioned in the key terms and his critical theory work on the 'culture industry' and mass media criticism is directly relevant to understanding intellectual traditions of technology skepticism that inform chatbot critics
I can understand panicking about AI chatbots if you think they show that AI is shockingly capable. I’m around a lot of people worried about AI mass unemployment, potential for misuse to lock-in authoritarian governance, and extinction risks. When I use chatbots today, I feel in my bones that they are better than me at a lot of the ways I’ve built up status for myself. It’s hard to imagine the next 40 years of my life not involving some point where a lot of the moats I’ve dug are filled by some future AI. While there’s a lot of potential for huge positive effects as well, I’m pretty sympathetic to people becoming uneasy after interacting with chatbots as they exist.
I’m also sympathetic to people who worry that chatbots as they exist are massively overblown, that we’re in a pretty intense hype cycle, that today’s AI models aren’t reliably producing accurate or novel enough results to justify the money and energy spending on them, that scaling is now producing such diminishing returns that something is about to blow up. I still have plenty of experiences with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini where they’ll give me results I know to be straightforwardly wrong or made up.
But there’s a third completely different reaction, which I think of as the chatbot moral panic view, that combines three contradictory beliefs:
Chatbots are phenomenally stupid, useless, and incapable.
Chatbots cannot provide anything of value by definition.
Chatbots are demonic. There is something ominous and evil about using them, beyond any measurable clear harm. The person might list a lot of specific harms chatbots cause, but it’s clear that even if all of the problems were solved, the person would still have some deeper moral revulsion. Their concern about specific problems is post hoc and disproportionate to the problems themselves, and goes way beyond their concern about other online tools causing similar problems.
3 contradicts 1 and 2 because it seems hard for something ineffectual to also be deeply evil. 1 contradicts 2 because, if something by definition cannot produce anything of value, it doesn’t make sense to complain that it’s very far down on some axis of quality. It seems like complaining that a rock can barely sing at all.
Yet I keep bumping into people who seem to hold all three beliefs at once.
This is anthropologically interesting. Chatbots ...
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