Is Good AI Possible?

I like this whole article from Anil Dash, and especially thinking over this section… #AI #AgenticWeb

“The Good AI?

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it’s possible to imagine some traits of an AI system that could credibly offer an alternative to the offerings that are currently dominating the conversation. (This is deliberately light on technical specifics and is intended for a more general audience, but is grounded in familiarity with the current state of progress on consumer-grade AI technologies.)

Here are some highlights:

• Content consent: A model trained on a data set gathered with consent, from creators or content owners who have agreed to allow their work or intellectual property to be indexed, and with revenues (if any) shared back to those creators if those are the agreed terms.

• Hallucination-free: Alternative approaches, possibly other than a large language model entirely, which avoid the confabulation issues generally described as “hallucination” in current systems, or which clearly label content likely to be spurious.

• Green: Clarity on sustainability and energy consumption for both training and usage of new offerings, reflecting the vast improvements in efficiency that have been achieved by recent models, and encouraging and rewarding the use of lower-impact, more conventional approaches (like traditional search!) where appropriate.

• Actually open source: The Open Source Initiative has offered us a clear definition of open source AI, which doesn’t settle for the mere “open weights” that industry titans are trying to pass off as “open”, and offers real transparency for developers and institutions, which would unlock a new era of innovation and accountability. Developers are ready to get their hands on these kinds of tools.

• Community-led: Alternative creation, ownership and governance models for AI tools that address the corporate chaos of today’s big names are well past due. Whether it takes the form of a workers' cooperative, an open source collective, stewardship by an academic or NGO, or some other simple format for sharing the work and the tech, both users and the industry are ready for other players to change the power dynamic around AI tech. There’s even the potential for a platform that is creator-led or owned and controlled by those who contributed to its creation, aligning the motivations of the platform with those who make its existence possible.

• Accessible: These are tools that should be available to all. Whether that means across devices, across continents, across abilities, across platforms, or even simply across a longer span of time and attention than “until the VC money runs out”, there’s a huge opportunity in making tools that serve everyone."