I skimmed the article, I might have missed it but here’s another strike against AI, that is tremendously important: It’s the ultimate accountability killer.
Did your insurance company make an obvious mistake? Oops teeehee, silly them, the AI was a bit off
Is everything going mildly OK? Of course! The AI is deciding who gets insurance and who doesn’t, it knows better, so why are you questioning it?
Expect (and rage against) a lot of pernicious usage of AI for decision making, especially in areas where they shouldn’t be making decisions (take Israel for instance, that uses an AI to select ““military”” targets in Gaza).
- It’s theft to digital artisans, as AI-generated works tend to derive heavily without even due credit.
- It further discourages what’s called critical thinking.
- It’s putting even technically competent people out of work.
- It’s grift for and by techbros.
Numver 3 is crazy too because it’s putting people out of work even when it’s worse than them, the bubble bursting will have dire consequences and if it’s held together by corrupt injections of taxpayer money then it’ll still have awful consequences, and the whole point of AI doing our jobs was to free us from labour but instead the lack of jobs is only hurting people.
For 3, there are two things:
-
It is common for less good, but much cheaper tech to displace humans doing a job if it’s “good enough”. Dishwashing machines that sometimes leave debris on dishes are an example.
-
The technically competent people have long ofnet been led by people not technically competent, and have long been outcompeted by bullshit artists. LLM output is remarkably similar to bullshit artistry. One saving grace of the human bullshit artists is they at least usually understand they secretly have dependencies on actual competent people and while they will outcompete, they will at least try to keep the competent around, the LLM doesn’t have such concepts.
Ok, but I did specifically point out that AI is doing a worse job than those people. It’d be like replacing your dishwashing guy with chimp that go to shadow him for a bit before he was fired. Another analogy would be replacing a carpenter with a van full of his tools as if they could do the work on their own.
Yeah, but let’s say you had 12 guys hand scrubbing to keep up with the plates, but then you got a mediocre dishwashing machine that did a worse job scrubbing. You wouldn’t dismiss the machine because it was imperfect, you would say I need a dishwashing machine operator, who might have to do a quality check on the way out, or otherwise have whoever is plating put it in a stack for hand scrubbing, and lay off 11 of the guys.
So this could be the way out if AI worked ‘as advertised’. It however largely does not.
But then to the second point, it doesn’t even need to work as advertised if the business leader thinks it’s good enough and does the layoffs. They might end up having to scale back operations, but somehow it won’t be their fault.
-
- It’s not theft
- PEBKAC problem.
- totally agree. This right here is what we should be worried about.
- yep, absolutely. But we need to be figuring out what to do when all the jobs go away.
- If vanilla ice takes 6 notes from the base line from a queen song it’s theft and costs $4mio. If AI copies whole chapters of books it’s all fine.
- No. PEBKAC is if it affects one person, or maybe a handful of people. If it affects whole sections of the population it’s systematic. It’s like saying “poverty is an user error because everyone could just choose to be rich”.
username checks out
The reason we hate AI is cause it’s not for us. It’s developed and controlled by people who want to control us better. It is a tool to benefit capital, and capital always extracts from labour, AI only increases the efficiency of exploitation because that’s what it’s for. If we had open sourced public AI development geared toward better delivering social services and managing programs to help people as a whole, we would like it more. Also none of this LLM shit is actually AI, that’s all branding and marketing manipulation, just a reminder.
Yes. The capitalist takeover leaves the bitter taste. If OpenAI was actually open then there would be much less backlash and probably more organic revenue.
none of this LLM shit is actually AI, that’s all branding and marketing manipulation, just a reminder.
To correct the last part, LLMs are AI. Remember that “Artificial” means “fake”, “superficial”, or “having the appearance of.” It does not mean “actual intelligence.” This is why additional terms were coined to specify types of AI that are capable of more than just smoke and mirrors, such as AGI. Expect even more niche terms to arrive in the future as technology evolves.
It’s extremely wasteful. Inefficient to the extreme on both electricity and water. It’s being used by capitalists like a scythe. Reaping millions of jobs with no support or backup plan for its victims. Just a fuck you and a quip about bootstraps.
It’s cheapening all creative endeavors. Why pay a skilled artist when your shitbot can excrete some slop?
What’s not to hate?
As with almost all technology, AI tech is evolving into different architectures that aren’t wasteful at all. There are now powerful models we can run that don’t even require a GPU, which is where most of that power was needed.
The one wrong thing with your take is the lack of vision as to how technology changes and evolves over time. We had computers the size of rooms to run processes that our mobile phones can now run hundreds of times more efficiently and powerfully.
Your other points are valid, people don’t realize how AI will change the world. They don’t realize how soon people will stop thinking for themselves in a lot of ways. We already see how critical thinking drops with lots of AI usage, and big tech is only thinking of how to replace their staff with it and keep consumers engaged with it.
You are demonstrating in this comment that you don’t really understand the tech.
The “efficient” models already spent the water and energy to train, these models are inferior to the ones that need data centers because you are stuck with a bot trained in 2020-2022 forever.
They are less wasteful, but will become just as wasteful the second we want it to catch up again.
You are misunderstanding the tech. That’s not how this works, models are trained often, did you think this was done only a few years ago? The fact that you called them bots says everything.
You’re just hating to hate on something, without understanding the technology. The efficiency I’m referring to is the MoE architecture that only got popular within the last year. There are still new architectures being developed, not that you care about this topic but would prefer to blindly hate on what’s spewed from outdated and biased news sources.
Yeah nah
Same shit people said in 2022
In 3 more years you’ll be making the same excuses for the same shortcomings, because for you this isn’t about the tech, it’s about your ideology.
You make weird assumptions seemingly based on outdated ideas. I’ll let you be, perhaps you need some rest.
Oh god i dint even see the .ml till now
Eww
Please get some rest. You’re oddly irritable and delusional and it can’t be healthy.
It was also inefficient for a computer to play chess in 1980. Imagine using a hundred watts of energy and a machine that costed thousands of dollars and not being able to beat an average club player.
Now a phone will cream the world’s best in chess and even go
Give it twenty years to become good. It will certainly do more stuff with smaller more efficient models as it improves
Show me the chess machine that caused rolling brown outs and polluted the air and water of a whole city.
I’ll wait.
Servers have been eating up a significant portion of electricity for years before AI. It’s whether we get something useful out of it that matters
That’s the hangup isn’t it? It produces nothing of value. Stolen art. Bad code. Even more frustrating phone experiences. Oh and millions of lost jobs and ruined lives.
It’s the most american way possible that they could have set trillions of dollars on fire short of carpet bombing poor brown people somewhere.
Not even remotely close to this scale… At most you could compare the energy usage to the miners in the crypto craze, but I’m pretty sure that even that is just a tiny fraction of what’s going on right now.
Crypto miners wish they could be this inefficient. No literally they do. They’re the “rolling coal” mfers of the internet.
Very wrong
In 2023 AI used 40 TWh of energy in the US out of a total 176 TWh used by data centers
https://davidmytton.blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use/
From the blog you quoted yourself:
Despite improving AI energy efficiency, total energy consumption is likely to increase because of the massive increase in usage. A large portion of the increase in energy consumption between 2024 to 2023 is attributed to AI-related servers. Their usage grew from 2 TWh in 2017 to 40 TWh in 2023. This is a big driver behind the projected scenarios for total US energy consumption, ranging from 325 to 580 TWh (6.7% to 12% of total electricity consumption) in the US by 2028.
(And likewise, the last graph of predictions for 2028)
From a quick read of that source, it is unclear to me if it factors in the electricity cost of training the models. It seems to me that it doesn’t.
I found more information here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/
Racks of servers hum along for months, ingesting training data, crunching numbers, and performing computations. This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it’s estimated that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days.
So, I’m not sure if those numbers for 2023 paint the full picture. And adoption of AI-powered tools was definitely not as high in 2023 as it is nowadays. So I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers were much higher than the reported 22.7% of the total server power usage in the US.
It probably would have if IBM decided that every household in the USA needed to have chess playing compute capacity and made everyone dial up to a singular facility in the middle of a desert where land and taxes were cheap so they could charge everyone a monthly fee for the privilege…
Not the same. The underlying tech of llm’s has mqssively diminishing returns. You can akready see it, could see it a year ago if you looked. Both in computibg power and required data, and we do jot have enough data, literally have nit created in all of history.
This is not “ai”, it’s a profoubsly wasteful capitalist party trick.
Please get off the slop and re-build your brain.
That’s the argument Paul Krugman used to justify his opinion that the internet peaked in 1998.
You still need to wait for AI to crash and a bunch of research to happen and for the next wave to come. You can’t judge the internet by the dot com crash, it became much more impactful later on
No. No i don’t. I trust alan Turing.
NB: Alan Turing famously invented ChatGPT
One of the major contributors to early versions. Then they did the math and figured out it was a dead end. Yes.
Also one of the other contributors (weizenbaum i think?) pointed out that not only was it stupid, it was dabgeroys and made people deranged fanatical devotees impervious to reason, who would discard their entire intellect and education to cult about this shit, in a madness no logic could breach. And that’s just from eliza.
We’re talking about 80 years ago
It seems like you are implying that models will follow Moore’s law, but as someone working on “agents” I don’t see that happening. There is a limitation with how much can be encoded and still produce things that look like coherent responses. Where we would get reliable exponential amounts of training data is another issue. We may get “ai” but it isn’t going to be based on llms
You can’t predict how the next twenty years of research improves on the current techniques because we haven’t done the research.
Is it going to be specialized agents? Because you don’t need a lot of data to do one task well. Or maybe it’s a lot of data but you keep getting more of it (robot movement? stock market data?)
We do already know about model collapse though, genai is essentially eating its own training data. And we do know that you need a TON of data to do even one thing well. Even then it only does well on things strongly matching training data.
Most people throwing around the word agents have no idea what they mean vs what the people building and promoting them mean. Agents have been around for decades, but what most are building is just using genai for natural language processing to call scripted python flows. The only way to make them look coherent reliably is to remove as much responsibility from the llm as possible. Multi agent systems are just compounding the errors. The current best practice for building agents is “don’t use a llm, if you do don’t build multiple”. We will never get beyond the current techniques essentially being seeded random generators, because that’s what they are intended to be.
It might, but:
- Current approaches are displaying exponential demands for more resources with barely noticable “improvements”, so new approaches will be needed.
- Advances in electronics are getting ever more difficult with increasing drawbacks. In 1980 a processor would likely not even have a heatsink. Now the current edge of that Moore’s law essentially is datacenter only and frequently demands it to be hooked up to water for cooling. SDRAM has joined CPUs in needing more active cooling.
Stockfish on ancient hardware will still mop up any human GM
Umm… ok, but that’s a bit beside the point?
Unless you mean to include those 1980 computers, in which case stockfish won’t run on that… More than about 10 year old home computer would likely be unable to run it.
Only because they are not 32 bit so they won’t support enough RAM. But a processor from the 90s could, even though none of the programs of the time were superhuman on commodity hardware.
The chess programs improved so much that even running with 1000 times slower hardware they are still hilariously stronger than humans
Twenty years is a very long time, also “good” is relative. I give it about 2-3 years until we can run a model as powerful as Opus 4.1 on a laptop.
There will inevitably be a crash in AI and people still forget about it. Then some people will work on innovative techniques and make breakthroughs without fanfare
Ai is the smart fridge of computing.
Your door is ajar.
No, its a can!
We hate it because it’s not what the marketing says it is. It’s a product that the rich are selling to remove the masses from the labor force, only to benefit the rich. It literally has no other productive use for society aside from this one thing.
I would even hate it if it was exactly how it is marketed. Because what it is often marketed for is really stupid and often vague. The fact that it doesn‘t even remotely work like they say just makes me take it a lot less seriously.
You missed the high energy consumption and low reliability. They’re equally as valid issues as stealing jobs.
It literally has no other productive use for society aside from this one thing.
I’d refrain from saying that AI replacing labor is productve to society. Speeding up education, however, might be.
I wasn’t saying labor replacement was a good thing. You misread that.
You hate it because the media which is owned by the rich told you to hate it so that they can horde it themselves while you champion laws to prevent lower class from using and embracing it. AI haters are class traitors
Lol, right, that’s why. All the people in here are wrong, but you’ve got the right take 🤣
Yes. A lot of people on Lemmy are collectively wrong about things. That isn’t a radical thing to say
Found the fake tankie.
Fuck tankies
dbzero is that way ----->
There was a thread of people pointing out biases that exist on Lemmy, and some commenters obviously mention anti-AI people. Cue the superiority complex (cringe).
Some of these people actually believe UBI will become a thing for people who lose their jobs due to AI, meanwhile the billionaire class is actively REMOVING benefits for the poor to further enrich themselves.
What really gets me is when people KNOW what the hell we’re talking about, but then mention the 1% use case scenario where AI is actually useful (for STEM) and act like that’s what we’re targeting. Like no, motherfucker. We’re talking about the AI that’s RIGHT IN FRONT OF US, contributing to a future where we’re all braindead ai-slop dependent, talentless husks of human beings. Not to mention unemployed now.
A system is what it does. If it costs us jobs, enriches the wealthy at our expense, destroys creativity and independent thought, and suppresses wrongthink? It’s a censorious authoritarian fascist pushing austerity.
Show me AI getting us UBI or creating worker-owned industry and I’ll change my tune.
Someone on bluesky reposted this image from user @yeetkunedo that I find describes (one aspect of) my disdain for AI.
Text reads: Generative Al is being marketed as a tool designed to reduce or eliminate the need for developed, cognitive skillsets. It uses the work of others to simulate human output, except that it lacks grasp of nuance, contains grievous errors, and ultimately serves the goal of human beings being neurologically weaker due to the promise of the machine being better equipped than the humans using it would ever exert the effort to be. The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.
The people that use generative Al to write things for them have no interest in writing. The people that use generative Al to find factoids have no interest in actual facts. The people that use generative Al to socialize have no interest in actual socialization.
In every case, they’ve handed over the cognitive load of developing a necessary, creative human skillset to a machine that promises to ease the sweat equity cost of struggle. Using generative Al is like asking a machine to lift weights on your behalf and then calling yourself a bodybuilder when it’s done with the reps. You build nothing in terms of muscle, you are not stronger, you are not faster, you are not in better shape. You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.
Damn that hits the nail on the head. Especially that analogy of watching a robot lift weights on your behalf then claiming gains. It’s causing brain atrophy.
But that is what CEO’s want. They want to pay for a near super human to do all of the different skill sets ( hiring, firing, finance, entry level engineering, IT tickets, etc) and it looks like it is starting to work. Seems like solid engineering students graduating recently have all been struggling to land decent starting jobs. I’ll grant it’s not as simple as this explanation, but I really think the wealth class are going to be happy riding this flaming ship right down into the depths.
I’m quite happy for a forklift driver to stack pallets and then claim they did it.
You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.
Chef’s kiss on this last sentence. So eloquently put!
The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.
Good sentiment, but my critique on this message is that the people who produce this stuff don’t have really have any interest in producing what they do for its own sake. They only have interest in producing content to crowd out the people who actually care, and to produce a worse version of whatever it is in a much faster time than it would for someone with actual talent to do so. And the reason they’re producing anything is for profit. Gunk up the search results with no-effort crap to get ad revenue. It is no different than “SEO.”
Example: if you go onto YouTube right now and try to find any modern 30-60m long video that’s like “chill beats” or “1994 cyberpunk wave” or whatever other bullshit they pump out (once you start finding it you’ll find no shortage of it), you’ll notice that all of those uploaders only began as of about a year ago at most and produce a lot of videos (which youtube will happily prioritize to serve you) of identical sounding “music.” The people producing this don’t care about anything except making money. They’re happy to take stolen or plagiarized work that originated with humans, throw it into the AI slot machine, and produce something which somehow is no longer considered stolen or plagiarized. And the really egregious ones will link you to their Patreons.
The story is the same with art, music, books, code, and anything else that actually requires creativity, intuition, and understanding.
I believe the OP was referring more to consumers of ai in the statement, as opposed to people trying to sell content or whatever, which would be more in line with what you’re saying. I agree with both perspectives and I think the Op i quoted probably would as well. I just thought it was a good description of some of the why ai sucks, but certainly nit all of it.
Everyone who uses AI is slowly committing suicide, check ✅
Cognitive suicide.
The people who commission artists have no interest in being an artist; they simply want the product. Are people who commission artists also “slowly committing suicide?”
People who commission art don’t call themselves the artist. That’s the big difference. If people found out you commissioned the painting that you later told everyone at the party that you painted yourself, and that it is practically your work of art, because you gave the precise description of what you wanted to the painter, and thus you’re an artist. Then you would be the laughing stock and the butt of many jokes and japes for decades. Because that’s ridiculous.
If people found out you commissioned the painting that you later told everyone at the party that you painted yourself, and that it is practically your work of art, because you gave the precise description of what you wanted to the painter, and thus you’re an artist.
It’s not the difference you think it is. Lots of people who use AI art generators don’t call themselves artists either. I certainly don’t, because I don’t care whether I’m called an artist. I just want the art.
I think you may be generalizing a stereotype.
Then you arent getting art. Your collecting pretty computer generated images
That’s fine.
But your arent getting art. It’s just not. And yes. Your a stereotype.
I misread you at first so here’s an answer to if someone uses AI art:
Within the jokingly limited sphere of the discussion… “yes”? Particularly their artistic ability in that situation is being put to death slowly as whatever little they might have attempted without access to the tool will now not be attempted at all.
I don’t know as much about if someone were to commission art from an actual person.
the analogies used and the claims made are so dumb, they make me think that this is written by ai 🤣
It’s corporate controlled, it’s a way to manipulate our perception, it’s all appearance no substance, it’s an excuse to hide incompetence under an algorithm, it’s cloud service orientated, it’s output is highly unreliable yet hard to argue against to the uninformed. Seems about right.
Its an unfinished product with various problems, used in humans to develop it and make money.
It does nothing right 100%! We as humanity care to make money out of it, and not help humanity in many ways.
Ed Zitron is one of the loudest opponents against the AI industry right now, and he continues to insist that “there is no real AI adoption.” The real problem, apparently, is that investors are getting duped. I would invite Zitron, and anyone else who holds the opinion that demand for AI is largely fictional, to open the app store on their phone on any day of the week and look at the top free apps charts. You could also check with any teacher, student, or software developer.
ChatGPT has some very impressive usage numbers, but the image tells on itself by being a free app. The conversion rate (percentage of people who start paying) is absolutely piss poor, with the very same Ed Zitron estimating it being at ~3% with 500.000.000 users. That also doesn’t bode well with the fact that OpenAI still loses money even on their $200/month subscribers. People use ChatGPT because it’s been spammed down their throats by the media that never question the sacred words of the executives (snake oil salesmen) that utter lunatic phrases like “AGI by 2025” (Such a quote exists somewhere, but I don’t remember if this year was used). People also use ChatGPT because it’s free and it’s hard to say no to get someone to do your homework for you for free.
I love how every single app on that list is an app I wouldn’t touch in my life
Not even Google maps
Absolutely not, I haven’t used any Google products or services in 15 years
That’s pretty impressive. I can’t do without YouTube or Android unfortunately.
That’s fair. Once the “don’t be evil” was gone, so was I hahahaha
You can use the Google-free Android forks.
Posting from graphene OS
Also a fan. Check out Qubes OS on the desktop in case you haven’t already.
I don’t need chatGPT etc for work, but I’ve used it a few times. It is indeed a very useful product. But most of the time I can get by without it and I kinda try to avoid using it for environmental reasons. We’re boiling the oceans fast enough as it is.
Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user’s perceived value in such products lol
people currently don’t pay for it, because currently it’s free. most people aren’t using it for anything that requires a subscription.
Idk that the average GPT user knows or cares about AGI. I think the appeal is getting information specifically tailored to you. Sure, I can go online and search for something. Try and find what I’m looking for, or close to it. Or I can ask AI, and it’ll give me text tailored exactly to my prompt. For instance, having to hope you can find someone with a problm similar to yours online, with a solution, vs. ChatGPT just tells you about your case specifically
I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.
OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.
I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong
Except he doesn’t say that. the author of this article simply made that up.
There is a high usage rate (almost entirely ChatGPT btw, despite all the money sunk into AI by others like Google) but its all the free stuff and they are losing bucketloads of money at a rate that is rapidly accelerating.
but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired.
There is no path to profitability.
I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: “There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products.”
There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.
a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing
How exactly will that make OpenAI and the likes more profitable?! That should be one of the scenarios that will make them less profitable.
If the models are more efficient, the tasks that still need a server will get the same result at a lower cost. OpenAI can also pivot to building more local models and license them to device makers, if it wants.
The finances of big tech companies isn’t really relevant anyway, except to point out that Ed Zitron’s arguments are not based in reality. Whether or not investors are getting stiffed, the bad outcomes of AI would still be bad, and the good outcomes would still be good.
I agree that this was poor wording on Ed’s side. He meant to point at the lack of adoption for work/business purposes, but failed to articulate this distinction. He is talking about conversion to paid users and how Google cheated to make the adoption of Gemini by corporate users to looks higher than it is. He never meant to talk about the adoption by regular people on the free tier just doing random non-work-related things.
You were talking about a different adoption metric. You are both right, you are just talking about different kinds of adoption.
I don’t think he is talking about specifically businesses, though, because he also talks about Gemini replacing Google Assistant, which only matters in consumer products (Assistant was never an enterprise product). It’s more like he’s moving the goalposts mid-statement.
on-device processing
Oh, when will I get my free phone to do this ?
It dehumanizes us by devaluing the one thing that was unique to us, our minds and creativity.
It’s actually a useful tool… If it were not too often used for so very dystopian purposes.
But it’s not just AI. All services, systems, etc… So many are just money grabs, hate, opinion making or general manipulation… I have many things I hate more about “modern” society, than I do as to how LLMs are used.
I like the lemmy mindset far more than reddit and only on the AI topic people here are brainlessly focused on the tool instead of the people using the tool.
I like the lemmy mindset far more than reddit
…and Facebook.
I hardly remember Facebook… Isn’t that these days a retirement platform?
A platform for people in developing countries, however. In some cases it supplants most if not all of the functions of what used to be several programs for Internet access and communication.
I mentioned Facebook because I’m seeing some people trying to share information how to grift with AI.
That… Doesn’t sound good.
Facebook is not exactly a trustworthy thing and to have developing countries dependent on it the way you describe sounds dystopian. :/
But dystopian is sadly the theme of the 2020s
What are your views on gun control?
But whatabout YOUR thoughts on bladder control???!
Oh, I was genuinely curious — this very same argument can be used when talking about guns. This very same argument is used when talking about guns.
This wasn’t an attempt at a strawman, I’m merely drawing parallels. To say that this one topic is one where Lemmy focuses on the tool and not the people using them is false.
The better comparison I’ve seen is knives. Knives have multiple purposes, yet they can also be used quite dangerously. Guns on the other hand only really have one purpose. Since AI can at least be used for other more useful stuff (think protein folding), I would say they are closer to knives.
That’s a fair point, I agree.
That the death data tells clearly they should have laws like many EU countries have on gun ownership.
Those are not multi purpose tools. Guns are for killing.
Those are not multi purpose tools. Guns are for killing.
Nah, they are multi purpose tools:
I don’t hate AI. I’m just waiting for it. Its not like this shit we have now is intelligent.
I don’t hate AI. AI didn’t do anything. The people who use it wrong are the ones I hate. You don’t sue the knife that stabbed you in court, it was the human behind it that was the problem.
While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it “wrong” more often than not.
Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.
The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don’t care about others, it’s that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.
It’s like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you’d always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.
Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.
We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI’s models was on “OpenAI Playground,” where you’d have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn’t word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.
Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was “chatting” with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.
And now, ChatGPT’s homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. “deep research”) and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.
And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.
The tools might not be “evil” on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.
This is fantastic description of Dark Patterns. Basically all the major AI products people use today are rife with them, but in insidiously subtle ways. Your point about minimal UX is a great example. Just because the interface is minimal does not mean it should be, and OpenAI ditched their slider-driven interface even though it gave the user far more control over the product.
But it’s when you promote the knife like it’s medicine rather than a weapon is when the shit turns sideways.
The thing they created hates you. Trust me, it does.
The thing they created was a mathematical algorithm.
Trust me, it has no feelings.
Why do you say that? I’m not disagreeing. Even if you’re just being rhetorical/trolling, where’s that coming from? Because…actually yeah, I do get that impression sometimes and it’s weird as hell.
