I wonder if Mahelona explained the damage to the environment that is also caused by these learning models. I feel mentioning the repercussions on the planet would have made convincing the elders a little more difficult. Its a wonderful thing that the Maori language will survive this culling of minority human languages but something about the whole ordeal feels unfair. Like the Maori community is forced to participate in this multi-facetted situation (technological advancement, degradation of environment, commodification of human knowledge wherein the profits are given to those who didn't produce it) or become forgotten/irrelevant in the world being created by a careless few.

I find this fragility to be true for many of the social constructs we live with in society today. Whether it be gender norms, capitalism, or nationalism all are concepts that are held in place through institutional and social pressures. I often think about this when I have to make students stand for the national anthem each morning, why must I also participate in the enforcement of nationalism in my students, creating invisible boarders between "us" and "them"? But I also see resistance against other constructs like the "give-and-take" philosophy of capitalism, when students inherently come to their peer's aid or give away their snacks without expecting anything in return to ensure their friend doesn't go hungry for the day.

I find this perspective of viewing the output of LLMs as a form of predictable mathematical steps refreshing because it demystifies the notion that these LLMs show any sign of consciousness. Viewed from this perspective LLMs are simply advanced search engines that respond with an answer the user wants to hear less than the truth the user is actually seeking. However, the notion that the responses these LLMs produce can fools many into perceiving intelligence says so much about that wealth of knowledge that exists within the relationship between words but also how desperately our minds seek patterns and work to anthropomorphize non-living entities simply because they can imitate our speech. Is an LLM that produces full form sentences thoughtlessly more intelligent than a crow that mimics human words for treats? I suppose in a way both entities have managed to interact with the human species to their benefit whether that be gaining information to sell to advertisers or a snack.

I find this classification interesting especially when later on it is identified how LLMs have been trained greatly on online content generated by WEIRD individuals. It is especially jarring to find out that advertisers know that a large portion of data being scraped to provide LLM users with reliable answers are websites like Reddit. Advertisers are now actively seeding these websites with promotional content to result in AI promoting their product to user query.

This quote strikes me because of how historically culture has been organically generated by groups or communities that collectively keep it alive through active participation. However, now that technological advances have made the sharing of ideas instantaneous the internet as a whole now has developed a culture (memes, newsfeeds, social media, etc.). Since the users themselves have no ownership or control over these methods of communication, it gives their owners and investors (elites) the ability to dictate what ideas are allowed to be shared and governing the ideas around which culture can be congregate. This may leave the reader with a defeatist attitude, that we are incapable of escaping this control, but Gramshi argues the opposite, culture is non-existent without its participants and the more citizens that are aware of this form of control, the less control it has. One is less likely to believe a liar after they have been exposed for lying.

The information derived from the relationship between words carry with them the stereotypes, biases, and the contemporary worldviews of the users who's data is being scraped (WEIRD individuals) creating spaces made by and for those already privileged people. Additionally, since words are ever evolving and change depending on the contexts within which they are used, means that the LLMs will never truly understand the information it is taking in or generating well enough to generate novel ideas that critique the popular ideas of today.