A lot of otherwise intelligent people are scared to criticize chatGPT because they think there is an observed pattern in history where new technology is always either good or inevitable, and people who are skeptical of new technology always look like fools, and they are scared to look foolish when AI is The New Technology That Revolutionized Everything.
I am not scared of any of that nonsense. The first reason, is that chatGPT isn't a "new technology" at all, both because it is just a scaled-up version of stuff that already existed, and because "technology" implies a thing that does something useful and ChatGPT doesn't appear to do anything useful.
The second reason, is that the people frightened of looking like Luddites assume that because we are all alive, the feared bad outcomes of new technology have never happened, and that is just completely false. New technologies have sometimes had awful impacts upon human quality of life and the environment. Sometimes, unilaterally inferior technologies have replaced superior technologies for economic or other reasons. Almost always new technologies have a mix of positive and negative impacts.
In fact, I think the uncontrolled, rapid growth of generative AI and large language models is happening because of the common belief that "new technology" is always inevitable and good. This is a new technology, therefore "developing" it is inherently leading towards Something. But instead, the amount of resources and environmental and human devastation is simply accelerating and accelerating. The new technology takes everything and gives us nothing.
