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?
The short answer is copyright theft, energy consumption, and job displacement. While all those issues are 100% correct, there is also a huge unspoken factor of “you must be against it otherwise you are a brainwashed idiot” because, let’s be honest, the hive mind is real.
Most of the modern no-AI luddites fail to understand that AI has been around for decades in various forms and this is just the last, most visible incarnation. It is here to stay, and it will grow as well. At this rate of adoption, in a few years it will be as normal as having a mobile phone (they weren’t around only 20 years ago).
My humble prediction is that all the concerns around AI will be addressed with time by better hardware, better cooling mechanism, better energy production, different jobs that will leverage AI instead of competing with it, and surely also the copyright will find a new balance (just like MP3, Napster, and Spotify did not kill the music industry).
By the way, AI doesn’t spy on you. An AI model is immutable once it’s trained. The software using the model is spying on you, but that’s true for any scumbag-driven software you use. It is essentially the same typing your secrets in Google Docs or in ChatGPT.
First, mobile phones were extremely common in 2005 (20 years ago), even I had one, and I was literally a child.
Second, and this is the part I’m actually curious about: I wonder if there were people in the 80s and 90s (when mobile phones were actually rare, but becoming more common) who felt the same pure, visceral disgust for them that I feel for LLMs. I sort of suspect not, but I could be wrong, and I’d be curious to read anti-cell phone writing from that era, to see what people were worried about and whether those worries are in any way the same as the current worries I (and many others) have about LLMs.
My mistake, I meant modern smartphones.
Disgust no, but it was something for people in business, so non-business people could be ridiculed. Also consider that the equivalent of social media was the pub at the corner so those who may have had a “visceral disgust” didn’t have a chance to find others with their extreme vision. People were more moderate on average without the modern internet bubbles in which any crazy idea finds a club of supporters.
So you think that the lack of disgust over cell phones (or smartphones, I’m happy to talk about them instead, since that’s what you meant) had more to do with the lack of social media than anything inherent in the technology. I don’t know that I agree, really. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t really use social media now (except posting on Hexbear), and I would say my disgust with LLMs has more to do with my understanding of the mathematics behind them and my experiences using them, rather than listening to what other people are saying about them.
I think that today some people live in an internet bubble reinforcing each other’s ideas without anyone saying “maybe you are exaggerating”. It’s true in general, not just for AI. When I talk with RL friends who are not such “internet nerds” as me, their views are much less black and white than mine… and I’m not remotely as black and white as some people here.
Back in topic, would you be that negative if AI’s issues were addressed and solved? Because they will be addressed and solved. It’s a basic business need to minimise costs (energy, water) and solve legal disputes (copyright).
The issues with LLMs will never be solved. The environmental damage and copyright issues will persist as long as capitalism does. And those aren’t even my main issues. These fucking things are marketed as thinking machines that can reason and help people work through problems, but they are fundamentally incapable of that. They hallucinate and spout nonsense and it’s not a matter of “oh, just train them better, they’ll eventually be worth using”, there are fundamental mathematical reasons that these things spout so much nonsense, and no amount of high quality training data will ever fix it.
If you say so.