AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.
We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.
I suppose some folks were saying that about hydrogen-filled zeppelins too, but it turns out that you can’t just jam new tech down society’s throat that way.
We now have helium and hot air airships and the tech is used way more appropriately.
I do take your point that what whipped up AI frenzy isn’t just the tech, but the tech itself does needs to change before society will accept its ubiquity.
Well, the power efficiency being much better is one problem to solve. Also various laws need to make pronouncements on copyright, etc. There is also figuring out what will happen to open weight models, what will become of challenges like deepseek.
Ultimately, ai will remain in some form, or catalyze another kind of technology, but it will certainly change tech landscape the way the printing press did.
I disagree. I think the technology is halfbaked at best, and deeply damaging to all aspects of society in its current form/implementation regardless of political atmosphere (although, it certainly does not help)
For those who disagree, please note that i agree there are a select very few fields that require a specialized industry standard LLM for processing data in a tedious way. These are obviously not included, but the amount of users actually doing that is surely less than 50,000 highly academic individuals in the world. The entire rest of the usage is “destroying my codebase”, “eroding my technical skills (that ive built over decades) in 2 weeks”, “im too lazy to update my calendar i dont read anyways” and “bird-box bad guy-esque ‘look at this uncreative garbage that no one wants to look at’ posting”
Given to the public at any point in history in its current state would be overwhelmingly negative. The general public should not have access to this, and those that do should be highly regulated. Ideally it would have about 5 years or so longer to increse efficiency before deploying hundreds of databases everywhere all the time.
The phrase “in its current form/implementation” is doing quite a lot of work there, how the technology is implemented is the topic. That’s whether it’s primarily used to replace workers (not that I think it capable of that in earnest right now) and maximise profits, or to reduce workloads, improve services and make people’s lives easier, and those are largely a question of political and economic priorities.
The fact that people can use a tool badly, or become overly dependent on it, doesn’t mean the tool is inherently harmful. You could make similar arguments about calculators, GPS, the internet or countless other technologies we’ve incorporated into everyday life. I’ve always had a naturally good sense of direction, I don’t think GPS ruined the world by helping people who don’t.
I also don’t see how restricting access to a tiny group of specialists is supposed to improve matters. Surely concentrating the benefits of a powerful technology in the hands of a privileged few would make some of the problems we’re discussing way worse?
Nothing changes if we waited another five years, imo. Efficiency and reliability will presumably improve, but if the same economic incentives remain, those improvements can just as easily be used to displace more workers and concentrate more wealth.
That’s really all i’m saying above. We can argue about the limitations of the technology all day, but if we don’t address the systems determining how it’s deployed and who benefits from it, we’re missing a much bigger part of the problem. It’s akin to renovating a house while ignoring that it’s built on a lake of custard.
You misunderstand: its current form is a garbage, half right at best, cheating, autocomplete algorithm. There is no logic except how the petabytes of stolen intellectual property weigh responses. It is esswntially the sum total of quora, reddit, and quizlet after reading 20% of the actual material; most of those sources being flawed, and hardly bothering to pick the good parts instead of the garbage.
That is not a tool, nor is it useful. Useful implies it benefits you, when on the whole it physically hurts the planet (thus you), obliterates critical thinking, and gets you addicted before stealing all of your money – all while increasing human distrust in legitimate work, destroying professional skillsets for no benefit, and in about max 2 years or so will be too expensive to continue running (6ou cant bleed 80 billion every year, unfortunately)
I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.
But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.
LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.
A lot of these are the distractions imo, they take problems with how AI is currently developed and deployed and treat them as inherent properties of the technology itself. A lot of these criticisms have been repeated so often they’ve become accepted wisdom in certain circles, despite not standing up particularly well to scrutiny. You’ve also raised quite a few of them in a relatively short space, without much supporting argument, so addressing them properly is inevitably going to take a much longer response. Apologies in advance but bear with me if you care about the topic at all.
“Fundamentally unreliable” is an increasingly outdated way of viewing LLMs given how much they’ve improved in fairly short order. There’s no denying the fact they can be wrong, but reliability is entirely task-dependent. AI might be poor at specific factual verification while being extremely useful for programming, accessibility, education, brainstorming or countless other applications. It’s a tool, and how useful it is depends enormously on what you’re using it for and how well you understand its limitations. Dismissing an entire technology because it performs poorly at certain tasks is an arbitrarily narrow way of evaluating it.
“Rooted in plagiarism” confuses training on existing material with reproducing it. There are legitimate copyright and consent issues, but that doesn’t make the technology itself plagiarism. Likewise, there’s a big difference between pointing out unethical practices in the AI industry and claiming that the technology fundamentally depends on them. You’ve demonstrated neither why those practices are unavoidable nor why they couldn’t be addressed. If you want to point out a company that’s done something unethical, entirely valid, that’s not the same thing as saying the technology cannot exist ethically, that’s nonsense.
Re artists, fully agree there are legitimate concerns about compensation, consent and displacement, but I don’t think the existence of AI generated art inherently devalues human creativity. Much of the damage here comes down to how the technology is commercialised and regulated, which ties into my comment above.
The environmental costs are real, but you’ve not attempted to weigh them against the benefits, so you could be saying that about any polluting technology. You’ve used one to write this to me. You probably used one to get to work this morning. There might be one keeping your house the correct temperature. New technologies are very often relatively inefficient in their early stages, I doubt you’ll struggle to imagine prior examples of that, and LLMs have already become significantly more computationally efficient in the few years since their mainstream introduction, as has the hardware. That obviously doesn’t negate their environmental impact, particularly as demand continues to grow, but treating today’s resource requirements as an inherent, permanent characteristic of the technology is shortsighted.
That’s a regulation issue. Ireland put in some rules last year that any new data centre had to also install enough solar to cover it’s entire demand and connect it to the grid. More of the world needs to be doing shit like that. If they want to profit, they need to earn it.
The cognitive debt research you mentioned is preliminary and task specific, and evidence of AI reinforcing delusions in vulnerable individuals doesn’t mean that the technology generally causes psychological harm, and it’s hardly the first technology capable of that. Books can do that, tv, social media, not to mention 4chan. That’s another regulation issue, safeguarding. Similarly, AI reinforcing people’s existing biases is a legitimate concern, but that’s not really unique to AI. Algorithms have been doing that for years, and AI can equally be used to challenge people’s assumptions, depending on how it’s designed and used.
The corporate greed, labour displacement, reckless investment and the concentration of wealth are serious concerns, and the core part of why I think the political and economic context surrounding AI matters so much, and that leads me into to the thing that drives me to argue any of these points. The chances of the technology going away are essentially zero, there is absolutely no point in talking about that. It’s a fantasy. You’d need a solar flare or a global revolution, most of us cant even revolt against being reigned by overt paedophiles. There is far more value in talking about how to mitigate the issues around it, because that is actually plausible.
I just think you’re making a big leap from identifying problems with AI, some perfectly legitimate, to concluding that the technology itself is fundamentally bad. And calling it a “technological dead end” seems especially strange given how much it’s improved in just a few years. I don’t see how you’ve arrived at that conclusion, or why you’d be confident these problems are impossible to address.
It’s worth comparing AI to previous ‘technological revolutions’. They brought enormous benefits alongside serious social disruption, exploitation and unintended consequences. How those benefits and harms were distributed depended massively on the political and economic systems surrounding them. There’s no reason to look at AI any differently.
I appreciate that we’re probably not going to agree on this, but you put some effort into your response, so I thought it deserved a proper one in return.
An age legislation issue and a capitalistic over-reach issue. Algorithms are fucking people’s minds, no argument there. AI is just more fuel on an existing fire that nobody profiting from it wants to do anything about.
AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.
We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.
I suppose some folks were saying that about hydrogen-filled zeppelins too, but it turns out that you can’t just jam new tech down society’s throat that way.
We now have helium and hot air airships and the tech is used way more appropriately.
I do take your point that what whipped up AI frenzy isn’t just the tech, but the tech itself does needs to change before society will accept its ubiquity.
How so, what sort of change do you imagine?
Well, the power efficiency being much better is one problem to solve. Also various laws need to make pronouncements on copyright, etc. There is also figuring out what will happen to open weight models, what will become of challenges like deepseek.
Ultimately, ai will remain in some form, or catalyze another kind of technology, but it will certainly change tech landscape the way the printing press did.
I disagree. I think the technology is halfbaked at best, and deeply damaging to all aspects of society in its current form/implementation regardless of political atmosphere (although, it certainly does not help)
For those who disagree, please note that i agree there are a select very few fields that require a specialized industry standard LLM for processing data in a tedious way. These are obviously not included, but the amount of users actually doing that is surely less than 50,000 highly academic individuals in the world. The entire rest of the usage is “destroying my codebase”, “eroding my technical skills (that ive built over decades) in 2 weeks”, “im too lazy to update my calendar i dont read anyways” and “bird-box bad guy-esque ‘look at this uncreative garbage that no one wants to look at’ posting”
Given to the public at any point in history in its current state would be overwhelmingly negative. The general public should not have access to this, and those that do should be highly regulated. Ideally it would have about 5 years or so longer to increse efficiency before deploying hundreds of databases everywhere all the time.
The phrase “in its current form/implementation” is doing quite a lot of work there, how the technology is implemented is the topic. That’s whether it’s primarily used to replace workers (not that I think it capable of that in earnest right now) and maximise profits, or to reduce workloads, improve services and make people’s lives easier, and those are largely a question of political and economic priorities.
The fact that people can use a tool badly, or become overly dependent on it, doesn’t mean the tool is inherently harmful. You could make similar arguments about calculators, GPS, the internet or countless other technologies we’ve incorporated into everyday life. I’ve always had a naturally good sense of direction, I don’t think GPS ruined the world by helping people who don’t.
I also don’t see how restricting access to a tiny group of specialists is supposed to improve matters. Surely concentrating the benefits of a powerful technology in the hands of a privileged few would make some of the problems we’re discussing way worse?
Nothing changes if we waited another five years, imo. Efficiency and reliability will presumably improve, but if the same economic incentives remain, those improvements can just as easily be used to displace more workers and concentrate more wealth.
That’s really all i’m saying above. We can argue about the limitations of the technology all day, but if we don’t address the systems determining how it’s deployed and who benefits from it, we’re missing a much bigger part of the problem. It’s akin to renovating a house while ignoring that it’s built on a lake of custard.
You misunderstand: its current form is a garbage, half right at best, cheating, autocomplete algorithm. There is no logic except how the petabytes of stolen intellectual property weigh responses. It is esswntially the sum total of quora, reddit, and quizlet after reading 20% of the actual material; most of those sources being flawed, and hardly bothering to pick the good parts instead of the garbage.
That is not a tool, nor is it useful. Useful implies it benefits you, when on the whole it physically hurts the planet (thus you), obliterates critical thinking, and gets you addicted before stealing all of your money – all while increasing human distrust in legitimate work, destroying professional skillsets for no benefit, and in about max 2 years or so will be too expensive to continue running (6ou cant bleed 80 billion every year, unfortunately)
I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.
But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.
LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.
A lot of these are the distractions imo, they take problems with how AI is currently developed and deployed and treat them as inherent properties of the technology itself. A lot of these criticisms have been repeated so often they’ve become accepted wisdom in certain circles, despite not standing up particularly well to scrutiny. You’ve also raised quite a few of them in a relatively short space, without much supporting argument, so addressing them properly is inevitably going to take a much longer response. Apologies in advance but bear with me if you care about the topic at all.
“Fundamentally unreliable” is an increasingly outdated way of viewing LLMs given how much they’ve improved in fairly short order. There’s no denying the fact they can be wrong, but reliability is entirely task-dependent. AI might be poor at specific factual verification while being extremely useful for programming, accessibility, education, brainstorming or countless other applications. It’s a tool, and how useful it is depends enormously on what you’re using it for and how well you understand its limitations. Dismissing an entire technology because it performs poorly at certain tasks is an arbitrarily narrow way of evaluating it.
“Rooted in plagiarism” confuses training on existing material with reproducing it. There are legitimate copyright and consent issues, but that doesn’t make the technology itself plagiarism. Likewise, there’s a big difference between pointing out unethical practices in the AI industry and claiming that the technology fundamentally depends on them. You’ve demonstrated neither why those practices are unavoidable nor why they couldn’t be addressed. If you want to point out a company that’s done something unethical, entirely valid, that’s not the same thing as saying the technology cannot exist ethically, that’s nonsense.
Re artists, fully agree there are legitimate concerns about compensation, consent and displacement, but I don’t think the existence of AI generated art inherently devalues human creativity. Much of the damage here comes down to how the technology is commercialised and regulated, which ties into my comment above.
The environmental costs are real, but you’ve not attempted to weigh them against the benefits, so you could be saying that about any polluting technology. You’ve used one to write this to me. You probably used one to get to work this morning. There might be one keeping your house the correct temperature. New technologies are very often relatively inefficient in their early stages, I doubt you’ll struggle to imagine prior examples of that, and LLMs have already become significantly more computationally efficient in the few years since their mainstream introduction, as has the hardware. That obviously doesn’t negate their environmental impact, particularly as demand continues to grow, but treating today’s resource requirements as an inherent, permanent characteristic of the technology is shortsighted.
That’s a regulation issue. Ireland put in some rules last year that any new data centre had to also install enough solar to cover it’s entire demand and connect it to the grid. More of the world needs to be doing shit like that. If they want to profit, they need to earn it.
The cognitive debt research you mentioned is preliminary and task specific, and evidence of AI reinforcing delusions in vulnerable individuals doesn’t mean that the technology generally causes psychological harm, and it’s hardly the first technology capable of that. Books can do that, tv, social media, not to mention 4chan. That’s another regulation issue, safeguarding. Similarly, AI reinforcing people’s existing biases is a legitimate concern, but that’s not really unique to AI. Algorithms have been doing that for years, and AI can equally be used to challenge people’s assumptions, depending on how it’s designed and used.
The corporate greed, labour displacement, reckless investment and the concentration of wealth are serious concerns, and the core part of why I think the political and economic context surrounding AI matters so much, and that leads me into to the thing that drives me to argue any of these points. The chances of the technology going away are essentially zero, there is absolutely no point in talking about that. It’s a fantasy. You’d need a solar flare or a global revolution, most of us cant even revolt against being reigned by overt paedophiles. There is far more value in talking about how to mitigate the issues around it, because that is actually plausible.
I just think you’re making a big leap from identifying problems with AI, some perfectly legitimate, to concluding that the technology itself is fundamentally bad. And calling it a “technological dead end” seems especially strange given how much it’s improved in just a few years. I don’t see how you’ve arrived at that conclusion, or why you’d be confident these problems are impossible to address.
It’s worth comparing AI to previous ‘technological revolutions’. They brought enormous benefits alongside serious social disruption, exploitation and unintended consequences. How those benefits and harms were distributed depended massively on the political and economic systems surrounding them. There’s no reason to look at AI any differently.
I appreciate that we’re probably not going to agree on this, but you put some effort into your response, so I thought it deserved a proper one in return.
Sure, but fighting AI is also a fight against these corpos and unfettered capitalism.
Meh. People would still use it to cheat on homework so they can spend 16 hours a day watching AI-generated brainrot.
An age legislation issue and a capitalistic over-reach issue. Algorithms are fucking people’s minds, no argument there. AI is just more fuel on an existing fire that nobody profiting from it wants to do anything about.