I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

30 year IT Professional here.

The thing about AI that most people do not understand is the sheer amount of processing power required and just how much that requirement impacts everything. Entire data centers dedicated to one thing that can require the output of a power plant and the associated cooling requirement. I believe Microsoft is in the process of reactivating Three Mile Island TMI-1 reactor. TMI-2 was destroyed in an accident in 1979.

For what? What is it actually doing that is truly worth investing those kind of resources?

That’s not even considering the financial investment. Which has resulted in tech companies taking a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” tactic to get it to start making money. Tactics like that usually result in a bubble where the technology is perceived to have more value that it really does. The problem with this is people won’t spend their money on something that does not return their investment. So it’s a matter of time that we have these huge data centers sitting all over the country abandoned.

Actual AI for scientific research I’m OK with.

But AI shit crammed into literally everything. No sir, I hate it sir.

I dont work in IT so I may have misconceptions so I’m open to being corrected. What I dont understand is general AI/LLM usage. One place I frequent, one guy literally answers every post with “Gemini says…”. People just dont seem to bother thinking any more. AI/LLM doesnt seem to offer any advantage over traditional search & you constantly gave to fact check it. Garbage in, garbage out. Soon it’ll start learning from its own incorrect hallucinations & we won’t be able to tell right from wrong.

I have succumbed a couple of times. One time it actually helped (I’m not a coder, it was a coding related question which it did help with). With a self host/Linux permissions question it fucked up so badly I actually lost access to an external drive. Im no expert with linux, Im learning & managed to resolve it myself.

AI answers have been blocked from DDG on all my devices.

This feels like how Bitcoin was neat for a time, before 99% of the space became pyramid schemes.

…And if “AI” is on the same trajectory as crypto, that’s not great, heh…

I’ve not loved nor hated AI. I’ve been both impressed and irritated by what it can do.

But, one thing has been pissing me off lately. My wife and I often share funny videos throughout the day, and over the past few weeks, about 1/3 of them have been real video, 1/3 of them have been obviously AI (like talking babies), and the other third are deceptive AI. (Something that looks impressive yet believable, until you see the SORA watermark, or find an inconsistency in the background)

There was a time where I could watch a video of a dog doing tricks and just think “that’s adorable!” but now I have to check everything I watch for watermarks, missing teeth, and scrambled text in the background. I have to verify it’s authenticity before I can decide how I feel about it.

I loved the image generation for about 20 minutes.

Generative AI was vaguely funny when it created trippy, acid hallucination images and incoherent druggy ramblings of text. I know an author who fed their own content into an early LLM (small language model?) and the bizarre, yet undeniably “his” stuff it produced was worth a laugh. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, but it was kind of amusingly quirky.

What was depressing is how quickly people began to claim AI content was “theirs”. As someone who ran a fiction-creating community, people were so eager to latch on to what AI would spit out that they began to create convoluted things for the early models to “depict”.

I briefly toyed with some of the early image generation stuff. It was a fun toy for making NPCs for RPGs.

But now it’s everywhere and being used as an excuse to squeeze labor harder and deliver dubious value. If it just stayed as a toy I wouldn’t mind it much. I get annoyed at the aggressive “do you want me to rewrite that for you??” shit that pops up now.

I’m a musician, an artist, and I was even started to get into voice acting so I have hated generative AI from the beginning. These are all things that are insanely difficult to get jobs in and money from and now it is basically impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are genuinely good uses for AI when it comes to science and medicine and I am a strong advocate of those kinds of AI. The problem with AI is that it is being developed in a purposefully disruptive and malicious way. They’re not innovating for the sake of innovation, they are innovating for the sake of making more money and generally making peoples lives worse.

They could make an AI model that artists can use to help in the creative process by making some of the more tedious aspects easier, but they’d rather steal everyone elses art and replace you. They could make writing easier by developing tools that can make putting your thoughts onto paper a more seemless experience that can open the door to those that may struggle with literacy and dyslexia, but they’d rather steal everything you write and replace you. They could make AI tools that can make making music easier by creating tools that make the post processing part easy and basically automated like how Autotune works, but they’d rather steal everyone’s music and make their own as they replace you.

We’ve developed the greatest technology of the past decade and put it into the hands of people that do not care about us and only want to suck as much money out of our pockets as much as possible and manipulate us against each other while we all lose our jobs to the tools that were supposed to make our jobs easier. And now it’s to the point in the US that these companies have invested so much money and infrastructure into it that backing down is not an option anymore without collapsing the entire economy. And all the while they are destroying neighborhoods and peoples lives with their data centers just to maybe one day possibly achieve AGI if it’s even possible with current AI architecture, which it probably isn’t. When OpenAI is prioritizing generated videos and being able to have sex with ChatGPT, that should be a clear sign that they have lost the plot entirely.

Just to be clear this is all aimed at generative AI. AI is an amazing technology that can do a lot of amazing things. The problem is that the companies making generative AI are actively using them to make peoples lives worse just for the sake of money and are barely even hiding it. And yeah I know, that’s capitalism baby. But this feels different. They aren’t competing against each other, they are competing against us, our rights, our freedom, our privacy, and our money. It feels like the corporations stopped fighting each other and turned all their fighting spirit onto the general population.

I don’t hate AI. It can be quite helpful when I go to where IT lives and ask it a question sometimes.

What I don’t want is that AI to have unlimited access to my devices and just be a ‘thing’ that is constantly watching me in the background.

It’s like if my neighbour is a mathematician, and I’m having trouble figuring out a complex equation. It’s very helpful that I can go next door and knock on his door to ask him. But that doesnt mean I want him sitting in my house forever looking over my shoulder.

I’ve been a luddite since long before AI. AI is black box engineering. It’s a shield they can and do use to create a malicious product.

As you pointed out, the most obvious use case is reducing cost of labor regardless of whether total labor is reduced.

When the money and energy sucking slop that currently is being billed as “AI” is what tech bros are using to rob us now. It is garbage. It will remain garbage. It will suck as much money as possible into the tech bros companies and waste energy to the Nth degree while doing it. It is a the biggest con / scam of this century.

The history of the field has made important contributions to how modern computing works. Optimizing compilers, multitasking, and virtual machines all directly comes out of work that started with AI. Even if you don’t use all of these directly, you benefit from them just by using a computer built after 1980.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, particularly the first two sections that are about MIT CSAIL. The third section is about the Sierra games studio, which has its own historical interest, but not really relevant here (and for various reasons, that part of the book hasn’t aged as well, IMO).

I don’t like the part of the field that has been weaponized against the working class. Which is almost everything that gets headlines right now. There are still good researchers doing good work who should be praised. They’re just not the ones “publishing papers” on Anthropic’s web site.

I like “AI” like I like plastic. Technologically it’s amazing! It allows us to do many things that would have been impossible or very difficult before!It has many different uses! Average people use it terribly! Business people use it for awful things! It is poisoning our reality in a pervasive manner that will persist long after I am dead!

So yes and when it became overly marketable.

I also really enjoyed when “AI” models made distinctly uncanny images rather than “realistic” soulless images. I have an image of a weird-looking baby and a chicken-man screaming at each other and it is distinctly hyper-perceptual. Good times! (update: I found it)