Alessia Giulimondi
2024
Why academia should cut back general enthusiasm about CAs
Alessia Giulimondi
Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024)
This position paper will analyze LLMs, the core technology of CAs, from a socio-technical and linguistic perspective in order to argue for a limitation of its use in academia, which should be reflected in a more cautious adoption of CAs in private spaces. The article describes how machine learning technologies like LLMs are inserted into a more general process of platformization (van Dijck, 2021), negatively affecting autonomy of research (Kersessens and van Dijck, 2022). Moreover, fine-tuning practices, as means to polish language models (Kasirzadeh and Gabriel, 2023) are questioned, explaining how these foster a deterministic approach to language. A leading role of universities in this general gain of awareness is strongly advocated, as institutions that support transparent and open science, in order to foster and protect democratic values in our societies.