"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want, but that’s completely outweighed by the way companies are developing them just for profit and for eliminating jobs
Capitalism can ruin anything, but that doesn’t make the things it ruins intrinsically bad
I used to be so excited about tech announcements. Like...I should be pumped for ai stuff. Now I immediately start thinking about how they are going to use the thing to turn a profit by screwing us over. Can they harvest data with it? Can they charge a subscription for that? I'm getting so jaded.
this but tech in general.
on the modern internet
when you search for knowledge or try to connect with others on social media or consume content as a form of escapism from this hellhole what do you get?
you get fed ads, sponsored posts, scams, algorithmically curated content to optimize your engagement, and now also AI drivel that's inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.
even off the internet you cannot escape it. there are cameras, microphones, and other sensors everywhere tracking your every movement to anticipate your thoughts and desires to try to sell you something or even manipulate the costs of what you're already planning to buy to optimize profit.
i feel that the modern technological landscape is slowly driving me, a once tech supporter and enthusiast, toward some sort of neo-luddism to get away from it all.
and what's it all boil down to?
money.
it's always about the money.
AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want
The current implementation of very large data sets obtained through web scrapping, very aggressive marketing of these services such that the results pollute existing online data sets, and the refusal to tag AI generated content as such in order to make filtering it out virtually impossible is not going to enable great things.
This is just spam with the dial turned up to 11.
Capitalism can ruin anything
There's definitely an argument that privatization and profit motive have driven the enormous amounts of waste and digital filth being churned out at high speeds. But I might go farther and say there are very specific bad actors - people who are going above simply seeking to profiteer and genuinely have mega-maniacal delusions of AGI ruling the world - who are rushing this shit out in as clumsy and haphazard a manner as possible. We've also got people using AI as a culpability shield (Israel's got Lavendar, I'm sure the US and China and a few other big military superpowers have their equivalents).
This isn't just capitalism seeking ever-higher rents. Its delusional autocrats believing they can leverage sophisticated algorithms to dictate the life and death of billions of their peers.
These are ticking time bombs. They aren't well regulated or particularly well-understood. They aren't "intelligent", either. Just exceptionally complex. That complexity is both what makes them beguiling and dangerous.
I was gonna say, of all the things to be upset about AI, not enabling things that I want isn't one of them. I use it all the time and find it incredibly useful for boring tasks I don't care about doing myself. Just today I had to write some repetitive unit tests and it saved me a bunch of time writing syntax so I could focus on the logic. It sounds like OOP either hasn't used it much or doesn't have a use for it.
I think the problem is that for consumers, it most often being used for generating spammy ad revenue sites with plagiarized rewritten content. Or the ads themselves in the case of image generation.
I’m glad it’s working for writing unit tests, though it would seem that better build/debug systems could be designed to eliminate repetitive coding like that by now. But I quit web dev about 5 years ago, and don’t intend to go back.
that doesn’t make the things it ruins intrinsically bad
Hmmm tricky, see for example https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/ where capitalism is very good at transforming everything and anything, including culture in this example, to preserve itself while making more money for the few. It might not indeed change good things to bad once they already exist, but it can gradually change good things to new bad things while attempting to make them look like the good old ones it replaces.
Electricity lead to more profits and eliminated jobs. Fuck capitalism.
jobs existing is the problem with capitalism, people shouldn't need to work to live.
Corporate is pushing AI. It's laughably bad. They showed off this automated test writing platform from Meta. That utility, out of 100 runs, had a success rate of 25%. And they were touting how great it was. Entirely embarrassing.
People leaving pro-AI comments in [email protected] lmao
I thought echo chambers were a bad thing?
I also thought echo chambers were a bad thing.
Yeah right ?! glad we agree on this. Damn, we should hang out more often
I'm so tired of these tech-bros trying to convince everyone that we need AI
Mom says it’s my turn to repost this tomorrow.
I mean.. Shouldn't we start differentiating generative AI from stuff that's actually useful like computer vision?
My head cannon is that AI = LLMS and machine learning = actually useful "artificial intelligence"
That's the way most discussion trends right now. Blame the tech bros and investors chasing a buck for killing the term AI.
Apple Intelligence*
Maybe we can start referring to AI devices as Genius Bars.
Absolutely! I hate cool and useful shit like OCR (optical character recognition for anyone who doesn't know) getting mixed with ~~content theft~~ generative AI
That would be nice. If you're talking about generative AI, then call it "generative AI" instead of simply "AI".
It's why only open source ai should exist
Ethical
AI tools aren’t inherently unethical, and even the ones that use models with data provenance concerns (e.g., a tool that uses Stable Diffusion models) aren’t any less ethical than many other things that we never think twice about. They certainly aren’t any less ethical than tools that use Google services (Google Analytics, Firebase, etc).
There are ethical concerns with many AI tools and with the creation of AI models. More importantly, there are ethical concerns with certain uses of AI tools. For example, I think that it is unethical for a company to reduce the number of artists they hire / commission because of AI. It’s unethical to create nonconsensual deepfakes, whether for pornography, propaganda, or fraud.
Environmentally sustainable
At least people are making efforts to improve sustainability. https://hbr.org/2024/07/the-uneven-distribution-of-ais-environmental-impacts
That said, while AI does have energy a lot of the comments I’ve read about AI’s energy usage are flat out wrong.
Great things
Depends on whom you ask, but “Great” is such a subjective adjective here that it doesn’t make sense to consider it one way or the other.
things that people want
Obviously people want the things that AI tools create. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t use them.
well-meaning
Excuse me, Sam Altman is a stand-up guy and I will not have you besmirching his name /s
Honestly my main complaint with this line is the implication that the people behind non-AI tools are any more well-meaning. I’m sure some are, but I can say the same with regard to AI. And in either case, the engineers and testers and project managers and everyone actually implementing the technology and trying to earn a paycheck? They’re well-meaning, for the most part.
The AI has a huge beneficial for drug development however. Iirc AI has synthesised a stronger version of one of the antibiotics.
This is really more about what the public considers AI- generative AI bullshit.
but it allows for some people to type out one-liners and generate massive blobs of text at the same time that they could be doing their jobs. /codecraft