Please correct me if I’m wrong, but, IMHO, most of the problems I see being voiced by anti-AI (actually, anti-LLM) people, seem to have less (if anything) to do with the tech per se and more to do with capitalism’s and corporations’ usurpation of it.

I mean, if LLMs were something exclusively made and maintained by, say, a not-for-profit academia (as in a “Libre and Open Science” kind of academia where scientists are working for the entire Earth rather than working for profit/egoistic goals), like the Machine Learning field kind of already was back in the dawn of perceptrons, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be experiencing this whole dystopia, no?

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

I think that LLMs are very useful for specific tasks, but they’re being pushed as if they’re useful for almost everything.

I also have huge ethical concerns over LLM-peddlers’ treatment of the environment.

I’m alarmed by some people’s susceptibility to falling for obvious slop and worried about what will happen if and when the slop gets less obvious.

I’m frustrated with many people who share those concerns conflating LLMs with the general concept of intelligence that is artificial.

You are not going to get a general pulse here. This is a fuck ai echo chamber. I am not saying that the sentiment is wrong, but it isn’t representative of the general public.

it’s sort of mixed.

overall i hate how it’s being made, advertised, brainwashing people, used for fake images/propaganda, reducing signal to noise ratio with meaningless slop, environmental concerns etc.

OTOH there’s some genuinely great things (imo) being made because of it. like people making drivers for long obsolete hardwares, reverse engineering proprietary blobs. maybe it isn’t something very advanced technically but it’s still something i find very interesting. most recently i saw someone got iOS 7 running on a HTC HD2 (leo), 17 years after that phone first released.

i still don’t use llms yet other than short testing back a few years ago, but i might start using them soon. i really want to get volte working on my phone, i don’t know how to reverse engineer the vendor’s IMS implementation, and i’ve seen people with not much knowledge get it working on their phones with llm help.

maybe i’m justifying immoral things… idk. something to think about.

First of all, it isn’t going away. Stop telling yourself that lie. If you hate it, then compare it to herpes or mosquitoes. Not going away. People love to talk about sensational things like bubbles or how it will end humanity. Stop being hysterical. It is software. You don’t have to use it, you don’t have to like it, but be informed. Saying it will go away is about as ignorant as saying the internet is a fad and smartphones are on the edge of failing out of the market. You just sound like a Luddite.

In the end, it is a tool. It can be used for stupidity, waste and nonsense, or it can be used for something good.

You can use a hammer to build something or you can murder someone with it. Any tool can be misused.

It is terribly inefficient in its current form. It needs to be refined just like any other technology. We used to have cars that got single digit mpg. Now you can buy a cheap car that gets 30+, a hybrid that can crack 50 or straight electric. Like anything, it will improve over time.

Society did not revert to riding horses, we did not give up mobile phones for land lines and ai isn’t going away. There is solid historical precedent to demonstrate this. You can be the old man yelling at the clouds, but it won’t do anything but make you look silly.

“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Its shit and I’ll be glad when it gets flushed.

It’s going to destroy human culture via homogenizing our arts and entertainment into a formless unappealing landscape of generic and easily digested slop.

People will stop bothering to learn music, writing, etc, because the idiot hacks in their school are able to create entire albums with absolutely no skill.

I mean… the data centers are already paying dividends to the lawmakers that enable their existence, and we’re rushing full-speed toward a computer industrialization of our environment that it cannot sustain.

Everything about it is going to be disastrous in the long run.

I’ve been doing scientific software development for 20 years, and here’s my personal experience:

• Software development as it had been is already over due to AI. There’s no reason to write code yourself anymore in 99% of cases. Even highly technical stuff (GPU algorithms, for example) are no problem for the AI.

• Scientific work is very different than it used to be. The AI doesn’t have the initiative to just do it for you yet the way it can with writing software, but it’s an expert in every field so it provides an excellent foundation for your own novel ideas and it can often suggest new ideas from fields you aren’t personally knowledgeable about.

• Socializing is going to be very different soon. Right now the AI is already more interesting to talk to than most humans, but talking to it doesn’t feel like talking to a human and doesn’t satisfy the need for interpersonal interaction. I expect that to change. (I suspect that the current absence of a human-like AI is more because developing it is not good business than because it’s technically difficult.)

• A lot of AI critics have objectively false ideas of how well AI works. I think they either haven’t tried cutting-edge models recently or they have deliberately tried to make those models fail. You can break most things if you try; that doesn’t mean they don’t work well.

As I type this, an AI is working on a tricky problem in molecular dynamics for me. It has already found and fixed issues with the algorithm that my co-worker spent a month on, but it thinks that a different algorithm it came up with can do even better. After coming up with the idea, it’s independently implementing it, unit testing it, running simulations with it, and doing statistical analysis of those simulation results. If it gets errors, it can debug them on its own. If the results aren’t as good as it expected, it can iterate over different variants on its own. If the algorithm ends up not working, it can reason about why, from a scientific perspective. What the AI does in hours would have taken me weeks if I came up with the idea, which I didn’t.

Right now human experts can still do what AI does, just slower. I expect that in less than 5 years, that will probably no longer be true. Predicting the future after that point is nearly impossible. Will we all die? Maybe.

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

Before asking what AI can do for you,

Ask how many kidneys do I need to sell, when my SSD fails?

Are humans, 3rd degree citizens on the internet now?

How many proof of work rounds do I need to keep my website from getting eaten by scrapers?

Are you a bot or am I?

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

“Rapid Evolution” = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.