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>>technologies have built-in politics that stem from the political views and goals of the people building the technology.
First, its not just technology that has built-in politics. It's everything, think of tshirts, cups, hats sold on political rallied. Second- how does this even hold up in the context of AI? Who do you credit for building "AI"? Is it just the bunch of founders listed in the article? What about Geoffrey hinton? What about Turing or shannon or leibniz?
The practical implementation is what leads to the autocratic and or fascist like tendencies. LLMs in their current state take massive amounts of money/compute/energy to make. Those items in large amounts are typically managed by corporations or governments. Corporations are not democracies. Corporations also have liability considerations they have to work around. And, they have to do all this without pissing off the government they operate under too much. So yes, this is almost always going to lead to a situation that is not individual friendly. The implementation ends up opinionated because it must. There are only a small number of implementations and the company has much less freedom in what it outputs than the average 'open all the freedom gates' idiot thinks.
Really the only solution here, if possible, is hoping that we can train LLMs/AI with far less resources in the future. If so, this can lead to a proliferation of different models optimized for different purposes. But at the end of the day we must remember all models are biased, this includes human brains. At the end of the day, both AI and brains, are a map and not the territory. We are defined by what we filter out.
i agree that specific implementations of a technology (claude, gemini, qwen) are never neutral but any tech itself (llms as a concept) is neutral you can implement it in any way you want. you can make a llm trained on diverse data, tuned for anti fascist opinions, using solar power and recycled hardware to be carbon neutral. the reason nobody is really doing it is just good old wealth inequality. as long as only big corporations can afford to use and develop llms or any other tech it will be biased to benefit them, thats why its so important to democratize it.
and for the open source part, the fact that it started as a libertarian movment dont mean it cant also be socialist. its going against the capitalist norm of exclusive property rights (including ip) and profit at all costs. sharing the product of your labor with everyone for free is one of the biggest things you can do to help, its like the online equivalent of putting food in the community fridge.
open llms let you fine tune them to add the missing under represented perspectives. you can run them locally with zero climate impact. analyze them in depth to reveal biases the devs never noticed or dont want you to see. none of that possible with closed source. the right thing to do is not avoid using ai at all costs but do everything you can to make it good. your skills and hardware access are a privilege. use it.
does electricity harbor evil?