My understanding is most of you are anti AI? My only question is…why? It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness. No joke the AI in sci fi movies is worse than what we actually have in many ways!

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”. If that’s what being Anti AI is…to that I say Amen.

But simply not liking a privacy conscious experience or utilization of AI at all? I’m not getting it?

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    1 day ago

    LLMs and image generators are incredible inventions to be sure, but my main opposition to them is related to the very real negative outcomes of flooding our society with computer generated drivel.

    • Small time artists are fucked. Anyone and everyone who could make money from small commissions is now out of a job, period. Even though generators will never be as good as real artists, the fact is that most people don’t care and the generation is good enough. Oh yeah and real artist who are continuing to do real work regardless now have to live in a world where they can and will be accused of using the bots even when they aren’t.
    • Internet search is fucked. Search for an image and you’ll have to sift through AI sites for the real thing, search on a topic and you’ll be inundated with language model slop. Search music on sites like Spotify and certain genres are now swamped by “artists” who make an album a week of generated trash, making the already difficult problem of discoverability that much worse.
    • People with certain kinds of susceptability to addiction are fucked. There are now countless people who feel that they are in love with a chat bot, because they suffer from modern loneliness and have tricked themselves into seeing a Mechanical Turk as a real person. There are also people who have turned a chatbot into an abusive cult figure, people who’ve amplified delusions with them, and other terrible mental health related outcomes that will only keep getting more common.
    • The fact that these text generators are so easily confused for thinking machines means that a genuinely alarming number of people are now offloading their ability to think critically to the bots. An entire generation of students are graduating high school and college right now having learned literally nothing. Those systems weren’t perfect before but this is definitely worse.

    There’s more stuff but I’ll end this by saying that I’ve use an LLM to help me write code and it’s pretty good at doing repetitive writing that has to strictly follow a certain format. Still need to understand code in order to read and troubleshoot its output though, which is why everything the so-called “vibe coders” make is so sloppy.

    • JumpyWombat@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 day ago

      Although you’re not wrong, you should consider that what’s normal for you today fucked somebody’s job yesterday.

      Small time artists are fucked

      Textile workers have been fucked by machines, same for anyone working with horses was fucked by cars, and mass production fucked more of less any job that existed before… or not? Those jobs still exist today, they are just less prevalent and often a well paid niche.

      Internet search is fucked.

      The internet we know today with SEO and ads-driven businesses had been around for 20-30 years max and it is now a dumpster on fire with all the user tracking that has been put in place. We won’t miss it should it disappear.

      • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        1 day ago

        Textile workers have been fucked by machines

        I’m not a fan of this comparison because textile machines replaced textile workers at the same time as demand for textiles increased a thousandfold. The industrial revolution achieved this increased demand by increasing people’s living standards - instead of having a handful of outfits people (in the privileged parts of the world at least) started keeping dozens or hundreds of them - but with art demand/consumption is already effectively “maxed out” because every person with an internet connection already has access to more art than it is possible for them to consume in their entire lifetime, so increasing the amount of art produced can only have a “zero sum” effect on art writ large because the amount of art will increase while demand will not.

        The internet we know today… We won’t miss it should it disappear.

        Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.

        • JumpyWombat@lemmy.ml
          11·
          1 day ago

          with art the living standard is already effectively “maxed out”

          Quite frankly, it’s not. Now “video on demand” means that you can sit on your couch and start the movie when you want. Tomorrow it may mean that you will also decide the content. Another sequel of Star Wars? Sure! A new season of Game of Thrones? No problem!

          Moreover, AI is being used to create products and also in scientific research. It’s already improving our standards.

          Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.

          My guess? AI will kill the cheap stuff, but internet will not change much overall and surely not rapidly.

          • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            11·
            1 day ago

            I don’t think you understood what I meant by increasing demand/consumption. “Another sequel of Star Wars” or “A new season of Game of Thrones” aren’t increasing demand for art, they’re replacing previous forms of art with generated forms. And the usefulness of machine learning in fields like medical research is great - but it isn’t going to massively increase consumption.

            • JumpyWombat@lemmy.ml
              1·
              1 day ago

              I see your point. Assuming that in the future we will consume content as we do today, you are probably right.

              My point is a bit different though: things will change. Famously in the 70s somebody didn’t see the point of having a computer at home because nobody would need the stuff that computers could do in that period. Then needs changed, new needs came, computers evolved, and now we have computers even in our pockets. With AI it will likely be the same.

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        41·
        1 day ago

        I imagine there is probably somebody who died of a fentanyl overdose on an American street last week, who would have had a relatively prosperous life as a textile worker or horse trainer if they had been born 160 years ago.