AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want, but that’s completely outweighed by the way companies are developing them just for profit and for eliminating jobs
Capitalism can ruin anything, but that doesn’t make the things it ruins intrinsically bad
I used to be so excited about tech announcements. Like…I should be pumped for ai stuff. Now I immediately start thinking about how they are going to use the thing to turn a profit by screwing us over. Can they harvest data with it? Can they charge a subscription for that? I’m getting so jaded.
this but tech in general.
on the modern internet
when you search for knowledge or try to connect with others on social media or consume content as a form of escapism from this hellhole what do you get?
you get fed ads, sponsored posts, scams, algorithmically curated content to optimize your engagement, and now also AI drivel that’s inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.
even off the internet you cannot escape it. there are cameras, microphones, and other sensors everywhere tracking your every movement to anticipate your thoughts and desires to try to sell you something or even manipulate the costs of what you’re already planning to buy to optimize profit.
i feel that the modern technological landscape is slowly driving me, a once tech supporter and enthusiast, toward some sort of neo-luddism to get away from it all.
and what’s it all boil down to?
money.
it’s always about the money.
AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want
The current implementation of very large data sets obtained through web scrapping, very aggressive marketing of these services such that the results pollute existing online data sets, and the refusal to tag AI generated content as such in order to make filtering it out virtually impossible is not going to enable great things.
This is just spam with the dial turned up to 11.
Capitalism can ruin anything
There’s definitely an argument that privatization and profit motive have driven the enormous amounts of waste and digital filth being churned out at high speeds. But I might go farther and say there are very specific bad actors - people who are going above simply seeking to profiteer and genuinely have mega-maniacal delusions of AGI ruling the world - who are rushing this shit out in as clumsy and haphazard a manner as possible. We’ve also got people using AI as a culpability shield (Israel’s got Lavendar, I’m sure the US and China and a few other big military superpowers have their equivalents).
This isn’t just capitalism seeking ever-higher rents. Its delusional autocrats believing they can leverage sophisticated algorithms to dictate the life and death of billions of their peers.
These are ticking time bombs. They aren’t well regulated or particularly well-understood. They aren’t “intelligent”, either. Just exceptionally complex. That complexity is both what makes them beguiling and dangerous.
I was gonna say, of all the things to be upset about AI, not enabling things that I want isn’t one of them. I use it all the time and find it incredibly useful for boring tasks I don’t care about doing myself. Just today I had to write some repetitive unit tests and it saved me a bunch of time writing syntax so I could focus on the logic. It sounds like OOP either hasn’t used it much or doesn’t have a use for it.
I think the problem is that for consumers, it most often being used for generating spammy ad revenue sites with plagiarized rewritten content. Or the ads themselves in the case of image generation.
I’m glad it’s working for writing unit tests, though it would seem that better build/debug systems could be designed to eliminate repetitive coding like that by now. But I quit web dev about 5 years ago, and don’t intend to go back.
that doesn’t make the things it ruins intrinsically bad
Hmmm tricky, see for example https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/ where capitalism is very good at transforming everything and anything, including culture in this example, to preserve itself while making more money for the few. It might not indeed change good things to bad once they already exist, but it can gradually change good things to new bad things while attempting to make them look like the good old ones it replaces.
Corporate is pushing AI. It’s laughably bad. They showed off this automated test writing platform from Meta. That utility, out of 100 runs, had a success rate of 25%. And they were touting how great it was. Entirely embarrassing.
People leaving pro-AI comments in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world lmao
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.
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.
I’m so tired of these tech-bros trying to convince everyone that we need AI
Mom says it’s my turn to repost this tomorrow.
