this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Fuck AI
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This is a strawman argument. AI is a tool. Like any tool, it's used for negative things and positive things. Focusing on just the negative is disingenuous at best. And focusing on AI's climate impact while completely ignoring the big picture is asinine (the oil industry knew they were the primary cause of climate change more than 60 years ago).
AI has many positive use-cases yet they are completely ignored by people who lack logic and rationality.
AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.
AI is helping doctors to expedite cancer screening rates.
AI is powering robots that can do the dishes.
AI is also helping to catch illegal fishing, tackle human trafficking, and track diseases.
Yes, ai is a tool. And the person in the screenshot is criticizing a generative gpt-like and midjorney-like ai, which has a massive impact on the climate and almost no useful results.
In your examples, as I can see, they always train their own model (supernovae research, illegal fishing) or heavily customize it and use it in close conjunction with people (cancer screenings).
And so I think we talking about two different things, so I want to clarify:
ai as in neural-network algorithm that can digest massive amounts of data and give meaningful results - absolutely is useful and, I think, the more the time will pass (and more grifters move on to other fields) the more actual useful niches and cases would be solved with neural-nets.
But, ai as in we-gonna-shove-this-bot-down-your-throut gpt-like bots trained on all the data from all the internet (mostly reddit) that struggle with basic questions, hallucinate glue on pizza, generate 6-fingered hands and are close to useless in any use-case are absolutely abismal and not worth it to ruin our climate for.