I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something here? Are there any genuine benefits?
Much like automated machinery, it could in theory free the workers to do more important, valuable work and leave the menial stuff for the machine/AI. In theory this should make everyone richer as the companies can produce stuff cheaper and so more of the profits can go to worker salaries.
Unfortunately what happens is that the extra productivity doesn’t go to the workers, but just let’s the owners of the companies take more of the money with fewer expenses. Usually rather firing the human worker rather than giving them a more useful position.
So yea I’m not sure myself tbh
No no you found the actual “use” for AI as far as businesses go. They don’t care about the human cost of adopting AI and firing large swaths of workers just profits.
Which is why governments should be quickly moving to highly regulate AI and it’s uses. But governments are slow plodding things full of old people who get confused with toasters.
As always capitalism kills.
Trouble is the best way to regulate it isn’t clear. If the new tool can do the job at least as well and cheaper, just disallowing it is less beneficial to society. You can tax its use until it is only a little cheaper, but then you have to get people to approve of taxes. Et cetera
This already happened with the industrial revolution. It did make the rich awfully rich, but let’s be honest. People are way better off today too.
It’s not perfect, but it does help in the long run. Also, there’s a big difference in which country you’re in.
Capitalist-socialism will be way better off than hard core capitalism, because the mind set and systems are already in place to let it benefit the people more.
Most email spam detection and antimalware use ML. There are use cases in medicine with trying to predict whether someone has a condition early
Medical use is absolutely revolutionary. From GP’s consultations to reading tests results, radios, AI is already better than humans and will be getting better and better.
Computers are exceptionally good at storing large amount of data, and with ML they are great at taking a lot of input and inferring a result from that. This is essentially diagnosing in a nutshell.
I read that one LLM was so good at detecting TB from Xrays that they reverse engineered the “black box” code hoping for some insight doctors could use. Turns out, the AI was biased toward the age of the Xray machine that took each photo because TB is more common in developing countries that have older equipment. Womp Womp.
A large language model was used to detect TB in X-ray? Do you not just mean Machine Learning?
There are supposedly multiple Large Language Model Radiology Report Generators in development. Can’t say if any of them are actually useful at all, though.
This sort of feels like someone using a PC for the first time in 1989 and asking what it does that they can’t do on a piece of paper with a calculator. They may not have been far off at the time, but they would be missing the point. This is a paradigm shift that allows for a single application to fulfill the role of, eventually, infinite applications. And yes it starts with mundane tasks. You know, the kind people don’t want to do themselves.
The problem is that most of the things it feels we can currently see applications for are… Kinda bad. Actually repulsive frankly. Like I don’t want those things. I don’t wanna talk to an ai to order my big mac or instead of just getting a highlighted excerpt from a webpage when I search things. I don’t want a world where artists have to compete with image generators to make a living, or where weird creepy porn that chases and satisfies ever more unrealistic expectations is the norm. I don’t want to talk to chat bots that use statistical analysis to convincingly sell me lies they don’t understand.
I just wanna talk to actual people. I wanna see art made by people, I wanna look at pictures of the bodies of actual human beings, I wanna see the animations that humans poured their soul into, I wanna see the actual text a person wrote on the subject I’m researching. I wanna do simple things, in simple ways, and the world that it feels like AI companies are offering us honestly sucks, and as soon as that door is fully opened things will just be permanently worse. Convenience is great but I don’t want a robot to feed me a weird gross regurgitation of reality or approximation of human interaction to me like a bird that chews and digests its food for its babies. I don’t wanna consume the spit-up of an overgrown algorithm. Its a gross idea of how we could engage with the world. It obfuscates the humanity of whatever it touches, and the humanity is the worthwhile part. There comes a point where the abstraction is abstracting away everything of value and leaving you with the most sanitized version.
If ai was just gonna be used to improve medicine and translate books or webpages, or as interactive accsessibiltiy tool, or do actually helpful shit maybe I wouldn’t be so opposed to it, but it feels like everything consumer or employee facing that ai is offering is awful and something I absolutely do not want. But companies don’t care, and that shitty world is gonna be the reality cause it’s profitable
Well then I guess I’d ask you to reconsider your answer but from the perspective of 1989. I’d imagine that’d be the same answer you’d give to the personal computer. AI isn’t going to make things more complicated It’s going to make things simpler. But people will create a more complicated (diverse) world in the vacuum that leaves. Just like an ox pulled plow made it easier to till farmland led to more complex agricultural societies. This type of advancement has been the story of human history since its beginning. Your perspective seems most concerned with people using this advancement against you, but our future now holds the possibility of having this AI on your side.
Using it to synopsize complicated TOS that corporations use to obfuscate what you’re agreeing to, actually answering questions instead of needing to search through ad riddled web pages, allowing more people to become artists and create their vision.
Your examples of useful ways to use AI are great. So help build or support them. If you only look at the future corporations are selling you, yeah, it’s going to look like a bleak corporate nightmare. But the truth is technology empowers the individual. So we need to do something good with that power.
TBF if a mathematician or a programmer cannot do it on paper then they’ve kind of failed and probably won’t have any notable impact. Paper math didn’t end when consumer computers came about.
Wrap it up, climate scientists, the show is over! This lad said he can do your job without the supercomputer.
I know plenty of modern programmers who are empowered by the ease at which they can learn the trade now. Some never go deeper than front end developer, because there’s good money there. That job would look nothing like it does today if it had to be done by hand.
AI is a very broad topic. Unless you only want to talk about Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) or AI Image Generators (Midjourney) there are a lot of uses for AI that you seem to not be considering.
It’s great for upscaling old videos: (this would fall under image generating AI since it can be used for colorizing, improving details, and adding in additional frames) so that you end up with something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw
It’s useful for scanning an image for text and being able to copy it out (OCR).
It’s excellent if you’re deaf, or sitting in a lobby with a muted live broadcast and want to see what is being said with closed captions (Speech to Text).
Flying your own drone with object detection/avoidance.
There’s a lot more, but basically, it’s great at taking mundane tasks where you’re stuck doing the same (or similar) thing over, and over, and over again, and automating it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think most of those are only labelled AI to generate tech hype, though? Like, sure, machine learning and maybe even LLM can and are used for those, but it isn’t a machine given human discernable input and pretending to give human output.
“AI” is the broadest umbrella term for any of these tools. That’s why I pointed out that OP really should be a bit more specific as to what they mean with their question.
AI doesn’t have the same meaning that it had over 10 years ago when we used to use it exclusively for machines that could think for themselves.
