People said the same things about the Internet when it came out and calculators before that
Calcgpt.io combines all 3 to demonstrate how right all of these detractors are.
“When I was young, they told me that AI would do the menial labor so that we could spend more time doing the things we love, like making music, painting, and writing poetry. Today, the AI makes music, paints pictures, and writes poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job.”
AI bros are like pro-lifers, straw-manning an argument nobody is making.
I didn’t use it for those things but I do use it every day for a multitude of tasks. For myself I use it far more than Google itself.
But these are the things people are complaining about - not AI itself, but the people making it, the reasons that they’re making it, and the consequences that that is having on the human condition.
For your example, people don’t complain about it making Google obsolete or something, but about the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT are wrong about 53% of the time and often completely make stuff up, and that the companies making and pushing them as a replacement for search engines have collectively shrugged their shoulders and literally said “there’s nothing we can do to prevent it” when asked about these “hallucinations” as they call them.
Which is absolutely hilarious to me given how often it hallucinates answers.
I recently tried ChatGPT as a Google alternative. It looked very impressive as it found things based on the slightest of clues. Except that literally everything it found was made up. It “found” a movie quote by Orson Welles that was never quoted. It “found” a song by an artist that said artist never released. It “found” an album by a group released four years before said group’s first release.
If you’re using ChatGPT as a Google replacement you are being dangerously misinformed by a degenerative “AI” that speaks with the certitude of a techbrodude.
The world is a wildly different place now, and the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.
This is not nearly as comparable.
Beyond that, very few people had an issue with AI as fuzzy logic and machine learning. Those techniques were already in wide use all over the place to great success.
The term has been co-opted by the generative, largely LLM folks to oversell the product they are offering as having some form of intelligence. They then pivot to marketing it as a solution to the problem of having to pay people to talk, write, or create visual or audio media.
Generally, people aren’t against using AI to simulate countless permutations of motorcycle frame designs to help discover the most optimal one. They’re against wholesale reduction in soft skill and art/content creation jobs by replacing people with tools that are definitively not fit to task.
Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.
the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.
I mean… they were developing an information tool that could survive a nuclear strike. One of the ironies of the modern internet is how its become so heavily centralized and interdependent that it no longer fulfills any of the original functions of the system.
Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.
One could argue the same of the original internet. The Web1 tools were largely decentralized and difficult to navigate, but robust and resilient in the face of regional outages. Web2 went the opposite direction, engaging in heavy centralization under a handful of mega-firms and their Walled Garden of services. The promise of Web3 was supposed to be a return to fully decentralized network, but it just ended up being even more boutique fee-for-service Walled Gardens.
Modern internet is horribly expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to outages at an international scale. Convenience has become obligation (always-on DRM, endless system updates, tighter and tighter obsolescence timelines). Interface has become surveillance (everything with a mic or a camera is used to spy on us). Communication has become commodity (constant data scraping, compiling, and trading of human interactions).
AI is all this on steroids.
Yeah and people also said the same thing about NFTs and now they barely exist. If there was a use for AI outside of very specific things I’d agree with you. But the uses for AI are very basic when comparing it to the Internet.
Nobody said that about nfts. Maybe s couple of foolish kids and shysters but nobody ever took them seriously.
Maybe later on, but in the beginning everyone was hyping NFTs and companies were trying thousands of different ways to put NFTs onto their platform. The only difference is what side you are on.
I’m not saying NFTs are like AI. AI has actual potential. I’m just saying lot of technologies are more hype than substance. My life has changed zero percent since AI came out. If anything it’s been more annoying and made things like Internet searches more frustrating. And when I saw that new ad for Google Gemini as they vaguely tell you what it can even do or be used for, the same thought came to my mind, “Yeah, but what is it even for? Do you guys even know?”
