AI can’t be all that bad. The problem I’m always seeing with AI is a double-edged sword. You have corporations shoving AI in just about everything, treating it like its a cure for cancer and that really rubs people the wrong way. Then, on a more of a society level, you’ve got people who use AI for an assortment of things like making art with AI and still accredit themselves as an artist to people who treat AI like a therapist when it is not advised to.
However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.
The technology itself is novel and cool. Its the complete and utter meltdown of all tech companies into brainless hype machines that is harmful, which is course, is a function of capitalist incentive and the need for the tech industry to come out with some new paradigm shifting innovation every decade. A normal, healthy society would have been able to leverage machine learning and LLM technology where its most useful, like parsing large amounts of data, or running a local instance on your computer to ask a few questions, etc. We wouldn’t see LLMs in every text editor, pencilcase and pair on sneakers but these snake oil salesmen who run the US economy are absolutely desperate for a new paradigm shift so they can keep making exponentially more money.
The thing is, we don’t need to build these datacenters siphoning comically evil amounts of energy from the grid and making personal compute a thing of the past. Average everyday person doesn’t need cloud compute, they can run a local 4b parameter (very, very small) model on their laptop or phone if they need to ask chatgpt to make them a workout routine or to ask them who won the 1918 world series. But these fucking cretins don’t care, that’s not the point, they are in this because it’s a golden ticket to growth city and once they cash their check they don’t give one hot fuck about the human-spirit-stealing-machine they built.
TLDR: our society is broken and that’s why we keep getting the shittiest, lowest-common-denominator version of everything. everything has to suck by definition because that’s the only version that the system we built will allow.
Accurate