On February 10th, I took the high-speed train from Lyon to go to the AI Counter-Summit in Paris.
What’s the AI Counter-Summit?
The Counter-Summit was organized by Éric Sadin, philosopher, and Éric Barbier, journalist, as a response to France’s "Artificial Intelligence Action Summit" that rolled out the red carpet to people like Sam Altman and J.D. Vance (yep).
Why did this event take place?
So representatives of various corporations could gather and talk about the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on their jobs and at various levels.
What are these levels?
- Environment
- Education
- Work
- Information and culture (encompassing translation, interpreting, dubbing, journalism, music and the film and comic book industries)
- Intellectual property
Why did I choose to attend?
To show solidarity to all the people whose job, like mine, is affected by AI’s uncontrolled expansion, and because I refuse to see this as the new normal.
What should be remembered from all the interesting talks?
🔥 We are delegating our most fundamental abilities, like writing and thinking, to machines.
🔥 AI is forced up on public service employees, even when its efficiency is far from being a fact (French jobseekers’ benefits are put in danger due to system errors, notably).
🔥More and more film producers are asking skilled scriptwriters to simply “correct” AI-generated scenarios.
🔥The massification of AI use in the context of translation and interpreting is leading to language impoverishment, from a syntactical and lexical point of view.
🔥 AI-generated translations are based on statistics, with no care for discursive coherence. The output is produced by using the most frequent wording, neglecting all other variants.
🔥 The voice of dubbing artists is being stolen to create new synthetic voices, in total contempt of said artists and copyright laws.
🔥 Natural resources are being plundered (particularly in western Congo-Kinshasa) and liters and liters of water wasted to satisfy AI’s enormous needs.
What did this Counter-Summit make me realize (even more)?
That fatalism is definitely not an option for me. I won’t accept being told that "there is nothing we can do about AI, we have to adapt." Particularly when this technology is encouraging a culture of mediocrity, harming our planet, already impairing children’s cognitive development and causing emotional distress to all those affected.
Thank you to the Counter-Summit’s organizers and to all the speakers for their implication. All your efforts deserve to be praised.
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(Since a whole counter-summit can’t be summarized in a blog post, feel free to have a look at the resources listed below if you want to know more about all this.)
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RESOURCES IN ENGLISH
RESOURCES IN FRENCH
https://youtu.be/8n7UQ8D0uuc?si=qlHuJJM_VZ6udJ1q (recording of the whole Counter-Summit)
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List of all the speakers:
Éric Sadin
Fabien Lebrun
Béatrice Laurent
Romain Protat
Francis Magois
Vincent Elbaz
Brigitte Lecordier
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