I wrote recently about how my concerns about (generative AI) are probably more about the broader Ellulian system of technique than the specifics of the technology. Here’s a passage from this article that makes a similar point better:

For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.

• Sam Altman
• OpenAI
• Jacques Ellul
• technique
• generative AI
• AI