• zd9@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    AI is not evil. AI is being used to find cancer cures, fusion research, climate and environment research, materials science, literally every possible industry. It’s also being used to control and surveil people, and profit more from every corner of life. Both are true of AI.

    The part that’s evil is that the people with the most money who are funding the large AI investments want to use AI to support their tech fascist desires. As usual, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the billionaires. It’s ALWAYS the billionaires. They are the evil.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        5 days ago

        No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.

        I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it’s surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.

      • Fawkes@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        No it isn’t. That’s the distinction that is made when arguments arise, but the claims really are spawned indiscriminately.

        You need to understand what you’re complaining about before you can name it, and most people don’t understand much of anything about modern AI and LLMs.

        • stickyprimer@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Asking this group to be discriminating in their hate for AI is never going to win you votes, but you’re completely correct.

        • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          Well, like you said that’s basically the corporations fault. They push “AI” everywhere and AI in the media is 100% LLMs and other GenAI. I wouldn’t blame the public for not knowing the difference. Those data centers aren’t built to cure cancer, but to cause it. Figuratively and literally.

          • Fawkes@lemmy.zip
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            5 days ago

            Cool, then go after the corporations shoving tech in places we don’t want it.

            Go after the data centers that are displacing families and wasting resources.

            Go after the media for misrepresenting reality and distorting truths.

            Those are all real harms with real actors. Getting angry at the camera because someone took blackmail photos of you is nonsense.

          • Fawkes@lemmy.zip
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            4 days ago

            You’re right. Anybody that is angry is allowed to condemn literally anything they want indescriminantly.

            Somebody mugged me yesterday, so I’m going to demand shoes be outlawed, as they used shoes to run away.

            If you tell me I’m being unreasonable, you’re victim blaming.

            • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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              4 days ago

              I’m not saying angry people are right. I’m saying you sound an awful lot like those people in ivory towers saying the plebs don’t get it, instead of trying to understand why all the anger and questioning themselves and how they could maybe try to communicate better.
              Instead they sound like assholes.

    • polotype@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      Nah, redstone valley is right, this meme is very clearly oriented towards generative ai. If you know enough about ai to know that ML and expert algorithms exist and that they are different from gen ai, you know enough to distinguish between an attack towards gen ai and an attack towards the whole of ML.

      • zd9@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years. Generative AI also has many applications that tangibly improve the world. For example, I’m using diffusion models for super resolution of surface wind fields to forecast wildfire propagation. It’s not “just” generative AI that’s the problem. The exact same transformers or CNNs used for Capital to try to finally triumph over Labor can also be used to do all kinds of amazing things.

        My point is that the incentive structure is fucked. It’s just more apparent with a powerful and widely known technology like “AI” these days.

      • SorryQuick@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        And yet it’s LLMs doing these things, not only ML. People don’t cure cancer either, but the things that get close (eg. AAV viruses) are currently being done with LLMs.

    • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        5 days ago

        AI means, and has always meant, artificial means of doing what before computers seemed only possible with real, human intelligence. Another good way of looking at it is algorithms for problems for which it’s not practical to explicitly write an algorithm to solve.

        It’s meant this since Turing. That’s a remarkable foresight if it’s “purposefully poisoning the well.”

      • zd9@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Nah. The math is all the same, the models can be the same, it’s all just the application. We don’t like AI applied to bullshit capitalist profit driven goals, but those exact same models are being used to tangibly improve the world in other applications.

        It’s like saying hammers are evil because people can murder people with hammers, which is ignoring the entire industry of construction workers. It’s just in the case of AI, it’s way more powerful than a hammer, so the implications are much larger depending on the application.