(Of course there are plenty of exceptions. E.g. Seth Dickinson's description of ML in his new novel Exordia is precise and incisive, but this type of critique seems all too rare.) 4/

Instead of old paradigms of totalizing AI, we can take up materially grounded depictions that do not obscure technical limitations & social harms. A neural network is not, after all, a sentient entity but a function with an ungodly number of parameters trained on vast amounts of energy & data. 5/

Ligotti is a great call