Comment by ants_everywhere
6 hours ago
The bigger risk to European credibility is surely from people parroting AI-skeptic rhetoric. Imagine if a bunch of vaccine skeptics or evolution skeptics signed a letter saying their leaders were over-hyping science... and if the language from that letter came directly from anti-science troll campaigns.
That's not making any sense as it presumes the arguments here are not based on science and common sense of experts, which is not the case.
The letter is not based on science and common sense of experts.
You can read the letter here https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251110_Scie...
It doesn't make any positive claims other than a statement from a budget speech relied on marketing "driven by profit-motive and ideology" that are "manifestly bound with their financial imperatives". So exactly the same AI-skeptic line of attack that's currently being played out in forums and social media.
If you look at the signatories and randomly sample a few, it's a lot of people in social sciences, gender studies, cultural studies, branches of AI critique (e.g. AI safety), linguistics, and the occasional cognitive scientist. These aren't the people who have the technical expertise to evaluate the current state of AI, however impressive their credentials are in their own fields.
That doesn't make them incorrect, investors, media and even many developers have been duped by the impressive linguistic human mimikry that LLM's represent.
LLM/"AI" tools _will_ continue to revolutionize a lot of fields and make tons of glorified paper pushers jobless.
But they're not much closer to actual intelligence than they were 10 years ago, singluarity level upheavals that OpenAI,et al are valued on are still far away and people are beginning to notice.
Spending money today to buy heating elements for 2030 is mostly based on FOMO.
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In those cases the correct term is "denialist". Skeptics care about evidence for or against the thing, and there is plenty of evidence in favor of skepticism about AI, unlike about vaccines or evolution.