Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?

TL;DR

This paper discusses how large AI models are exacerbating global crises and emphasizes the urgent need for the NLP community to develop sustainable, human-centered alternatives.

Contribution

It highlights the societal impacts of LLM engineering and calls for collective action to create a more ethical and life-affirming AI future.

Findings

LLMs are accelerating ecological and societal crises.

Current AI practices benefit a few while harming the planet.

A collective effort is needed to redirect AI development.

Abstract

The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises that are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. LLM engineering sits at the core. Despite the public good motives of language engineers and the promise of LLMs, this work is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. As a profession, we urgently need to come together to explore alternatives and to design a life-affirming future for our field of natural language processing that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.