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Are people paranoid about LLMs?

I believe they are, at least in this rather specific sense of paranoia:

In her influential analysis of practices of reading within literary theory, Sedgwick (1997) draws attention to the “methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice” to the extent that “paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription” (Sedgwick, 1997, p. 125). The influence of thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud can be understood in terms of the susceptibility of human subjects to misapprehension, failing to recognize the realities they confront in ways shaped by exterior economic interests or internal depth psychological ones. In making this case, Sedgwick (1997, p. 125) is not denying the reality of systemic injustice within social life, but rather calling attention to a situation in which “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant”. Paranoia is an anticipatory orientation which seeks to negate unwelcome surprises in a world which by its nature will continually generate them. It tends, as Sedgwick (1997, p. 131) puts it, to “grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding”.

Paranoia tends to be self-perpetuating through its instinct to regard non-paranoid readings as naive. If the paranoid subject steps back from this orientation only to be met by an unwelcome surprise, this can be regarded as a justification of the paranoia which had correctly diagnosed the ubiquity of threat in the first place. In its attempt to control the future by anticipating threats coming from all directions, it places “an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of the knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure” (Sedgwick, 1997, p. 138). It imagines that if only we could expose the threat, we could avoid it and that anticipatory knowledge of the threatening landscape is the means through which we might achieve this. In contrast criticality involves an “emphasis on the potentiality of the present, in all the complexities of our implications in its creation and re-creation” rather than a twitchy focus on how we might negotiate an already bad situation which is always getting worse (Roseneil, 2011).

https://ic4ml.org/journal-article/is-it-paranoia-a-critical-approach-to-platform-literacy/

It’s interesting therefore to discover this empirical finding (HT Helen Beetham) of a correlation between “susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs” and negative attitudes towards AI.

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