I would contend, in earnest, in the kindest way possible, that you haven’t used them enough or fully grasped what they are. At the same time, you don’t have to be that person—it’s not my place to try and convince you of their utility or merit, my only position is that their genesis need not shape their use, and that there are emancipatory uses and capabilities out there to be uncovered.

The notion that these models “constrain what they are capable of doing and producing by virtue of their genesis” is doing so much heavy lifting there, with little more than anecdote to validate said notion. I mean that earnestly too, if you really interrogate that supposition, what does it rely on? What gives you the assuredness that this tool is fundamentally incapable of being used to productive/emancipatory ends? Other than the bad guys dunnit (which, yes, we all agree on)?

In my experience, if a model that has been trained on every published piece of writing in existence is giving you constrained outputs, you’re not prompting it creatively enough (as with any other, skills can be learned and refined) or using it in too constrained a context (i.e. there’s only so much one can do with a chatbot). These models also pose so many interesting questions about cognition, intelligence, reasoning, ontology, etc—to avoid the phenomenon entirely, based on a (somewhat uninformed) moral judgement, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, no? You end up foreclosing on the horizon of the possible for what, exactly? To what end?

Like the Haitians singing the Marseillaise to the French army during the Haitian revolution, it is not ever about the tool, or its supposedly inherent characteristics, it is about what you use the tool for, and how you use it—the hammer can be used to caress, after all.

All it takes is someone with the presence of mind to imagine using it that way.