It is accurate to call it a parrot in the context of it essentially being used as ambiguated plagiarism machines to avoid paying workers.
Yes it is capable of that. Yes that word means something else in the actual field. But you need to understand people are talking about this technology as it’s political relationships with power, and pretending prioritizing that form of analysis is well thats just people being uninformed about the REAL side and that’s their fault is yourself missing the point. This isn’t about pride and hurt feelings that a robot is doing something human do. It’s about the fact it’s a tool to undermine the entire value of the creative sector. And these big companies aren’t calling it AI because it’s an accurate descriptor. It could also be called a generative language model. They are calling it that because the common misunderstanding of the term is valuable to hype culture and VC investment. Like it or not, the average understanding of the term carries different weight than it does inside the field. And it turns the conversation into a pretty stupid one about sentience and humanity, as well as legitimizing the practice by trying to argue this is fundamentally unenforceable from the regulations we have on plagiarism, which it really isn’t.
People who are trying to rebrand it aren’t doing it because they misunderstand the technical usage of the word AI. They are arguing the terminology is playing into the goals of our (hopefully shared) political enemies, who are trying to bulldoze a technology that they think should get special privileges: by implying the technology is something it isn’t. This is about optics and social power, and the term “AI” is contributing to further public misunderstand how it actually works, which is something we should oppose.
There really isn’t much that can harm rich people that won’t indirectly do splash damage on other people, just because their actions control so much of the economy that people depend on for survival.
Look, some people are not switching. But if they aren’t going to switch, more negative PR for Reddit is the most they can accomplish. We can speculate all we want about the abstract value of negative PR vs engagement, but at the very least I support this over them being there and silent about disliking it.
The members of a site openly despising the site itself encourages migration too. Keep the attention on how lothesome things are and people are more likely to drift away slowly over time.