Let me preface that I hate AI on what it could do to arts, especially I hate its bland writing style. A third of the music on Spotify is AI and majority can’t tell if it’s AI. But LLM/AI or however one calls it, only in Lemmy do I see seething hate and refuse to acknowledge its potential. Most people I spoke to outside of the platform also dislike AI but see its potential and agree that the current models are overrated. Many agree it will probably take years or decades to see bigger improvement.
Lemmy, on the other hand, as much as I love the community, is an echo chamber of pure dismissal and rage on AI believing it will amount to nothing. It’s only in Lemmy I see this behaviour. One person even said bacteria has more consciousness than AI, which is ridiculous because bacteria clearly don’t have the same level of consciousness and context as AI, however the latter has little of. I see many dismissive scoff and straw man arguments that it will never improve; but the same was told of automobiles, planes and renewable energy. Their initial models were terribly bad because of the limitations of the time but now huge strides of improvements are made despite taking years. The AI also clearly has limits but don’t see any reason why the same hurdles won’t be surmounted in years to come.
Again, I hate AI on what negative impact it could do to human society, especially because many of the models are owned by select few. But it’s burying in the head not to see its potential. Because if there isn’t any, techbros or not, governments across the world would not be racing to adopt them. AI had been effectively used in the war in Ukraine. And governments would not want race to implement AI surveillance. So, if there is no potential, why are the big wigs wasting time and energy on AI at all?
I’m convinced that many Lemmy is experiencing the uncanny valley on AI and doesn’t realise it. Plus, and I’m going to be blunt, a huge portion of Lemmy are of older demographics so there is probably a disdain on novelty that many Lemmy folks are not self-aware of.
Because it’s the only place where we talk about it. It’s a forum after all.
You used the word “potential” 4 times without giving examples.
Or they could be fucking idiots. Have you talked to the average middle-manager? Now combine this with power, money, and FOMO. Now you’ll understand. Isn’t it suspicious that they cannot define this “potential” too, except for “we will fire people because money”?
$1.5T spent on something that you and they cannot define. https://isaiprofitable.com/
From another thread:
Well, it’s a program running on a computer. If you believe it can “think” at all, you know pretty much nothing about that technology. I don’t think you’re qualified to talk about it.
I don’t know about you but AI helped me cut down doing “secretary” work so there is indeed potential. But other than that, I don’t trust AI to do more complex tasks.
That’s a very Western centric view. Consider China is aggressively expanding to use AI, and they reign in their own techbros and their economy is a command economy. The Ukrainians are also using AI in their war.
So outside of capitalist snakes oil salesman sales pitch, the public sector around the world won’t be using AI if it has no potential for whatever they want to use it for.
We build data centers, fire people, make people dumb, hallucinate and make propaganda and CSAM material just to do simple tasks that could have been automated with a Python script (or worse with AppleScript since 1993). Is that a good thing? Give us some examples of what you do.
As for China, it only proves they also have stupid people. And in Ukraine, I’m pretty sure they use machine learning to detect patterns, not stupid LLMs in their daily activities. Machine learning was there and useful since the beginning (1950). LLM has proven nothing yet.
Again, governments have wasted billions of billions of $ on stupid shit in the past 100 years. It’s never a good example, even more when you can’t tell us what their goal is.
Last but not least, all those billionaires stole my source code without my consent and without respecting the license of the software I wrote, is that a good thing?
I mean it’s fine to criticise the unscrupulous way AI is developed and being maintained, but to say it has no potential at all is very ridiculous.
Which is why I think AI should be owned publicly.
I asked you 3 times what the potential is.
You are being facetious but i will bite.
There are many including warfare, drug discovery, automating workload, surveillance, healthcare, manufacturing automation, data gathering, the list is endless. I work in healthcare, and there is already report of new antibiotic synthesised because of AI and it has been years since new ones are discovered. The golden age of antibiotic discovery and development was in the 1960s and 1970s. My work also has to deal with tons of data. I remember in college one of the buzzwords is “big data”. And even back then, my professors already talked about AI and automation. So yeah, the AI has HUGE potential.
Now that I think about it, many Lemmy users work in IT, where using AI is probably a hindrance more than a help. But in my opinion, AI is useful but probably only in monotonous and repetitive tasks, which is not necessarily the case in IT because it require a large degree of creativity especially when coding. And as we know, AI isn’t creative (at least not yet for the foreseeable future). I can see now why many Lemmy are against AI in terms of its capability.
The antibiotic you’re talking about had absolutely nothing to do with LLMs. You don’t understand what a.i. is and you’re lumping everything together because of your ignorance.
LLMs are only used for natural language processing. That has a lot of potential, but none of the things you mentioned are natural language processing (except processing linguistic surveillance and gathering linguistic data). Everything else you listed has literally nothing to do with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. LLMs are not the only a.i. in the world and just because something uses a.i. doesn’t mean it’s using an LLM
LLM/AI however you call it, it doesn’t matter since the results are still there that it has been useful in certain areas. Probably not in your area but it is most definitely useful in others which is why many people see huge potential on the technology. Of course, the gravest concern is on fields where human creativity is a must, which we won’t like AI usurping. I also don’t like AI surveillance which is something that governments across the world want to exploit.
So this is the other reason people hate a.i… It’s because people like you who are totally ignorant of how the technology works and how the economics work, when presented with facts, hand wave your own ignorance away as though it’s irrelevant and then snap back to your original position which is that the critique of a.i. comes from some emotional or mental deficiency on behalf of the criticizers when you can’t even understand their criticism because of your ignorance.
It only seems good because you don’t see the electrical cost not to mention the heat it produces. The heat has to go somewhere and that somewhere is our atmosphere. Using fossil fuels that we should’ve just left in the ground.