Generative AI has seen massive adoption driven by ease of use, free availability, and broad applicability. These systems generate new verbal and visual outputs by detecting patterns in vast, often web-scraped data. The outputs are produced probabilistically and can appear convincing without being grounded in truth, making correctness a matter of epistemic luck. Ethical issues include privacy, data protection, surveillance, bias, discrimination, fairness, transparency, explainability, accountability, responsibility, sustainability, and poor working conditions. Foundational concerns include agency and the societal impact of increased reliance on statistical reasoning for autonomy, freedom, solidarity, and justice.
Since autumn of 2022, generative AI has taken the world by storm. With millions of regular users, billions of requests and corresponding results, tools employing generative AI are ceaselessly used and abused for a wide variety of purposes. There are at least two reasons for this massive uptake: ease of use and free availability on the one hand, and breadth of applicability on the other.
The core of generative AI is the capacity to produce new verbal or visual products of increasingly high quality based on patterns discovered in massive amounts of data sources, most of them scraped from the web. As such, these tools use probability calculations to generate plausible texts, pictures, video, or audio files which may sound elegant or look realistic, but don't have any grounding in truth. Indeed, given the underlying probabilistic generation, generative AI "getting it right" (i.e., providing a correct response to a query) must be considered an instance of epistemic luck.
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