These are the last good ol’ days you will have before it’s all over. Worrying about it won’t change the future. Just try to focus on all the good AI does.
After AI: 99% of everything is crap
... but there will be >10x more of it, so we'll ultimately end up with more good stuff.
Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.
For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.
At the same time, I can see social media is being flooded with absolutely horrid AI slop images and video. I'm much more pessimistic about the practical beneficial real world use of totally artificial image and video generators. It seems the uses that these things are put to when they get into the hands of millions of people are detrimental to society and not a benefit.
/s
Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...
I see nothing here but them TELLING us how great it is. Not showing us.
Have you watched the 46s video full screen on a monitor and not marvelled at the incredible 4K detail of the FPV motorcycle racing clip?
Pessimistic opinions on the labor market, views about society and politics that border on the dystopian, as well as exaggerated concerns about datacenter environmental impacts, all seem like a poor fit for this website.
Anyone ever taken a CS course that includes extensive discussion of the Therac-25?
What substance is there beyond "I don't like it, and I think it is a negative for society", typically delivered with what I perceive as a self-righteous attitude?
To quote the movie, that’s just your opinion, man. To me, the impact of technology on society is 100X as interesting and important than the technology itself. Tech does not exist in a vacuum. And we don’t invent it for its own sake. The major point of AI (maybe the only point of it) is what humans will do to each other with it. And like it or not, not all of those things are positive.
Is there something in particular that you think would be interesting to discuss here?
You will not see me leaving comments such as this, for example, on the release of a "strong in coding tasks" tool like GLM5.2.
I actively go out of my way to avoid patronizing businesses that advertise with AI slop generated images now, AI slop restaurant menus, and so forth.
Whether you want to interpret a desire for authenticity as some sort of self-righteous attitude is up to you. There's a lot of people that share my opinion, and a lot of them that don't. There is also clearly a lot of money behind pushing AI slop images everywhere. Facebook and the various 'pages' and 'groups' that are near 90% AI slop content are a fine example of that. I'm sure a great many advertising impressions and click-throughs have been served, much revenue has been earned. Great success.
That must be the poster child of the most boring and meaningless accusation thrown around new technologies (after the data center water scare, which was just plain bogus). We've heard this non stop since Cambridge Analytica nothingburger. It's all noise distracting from the one meaningful aspect of it: marketing to people is electoral manipulation, and since that's unquestionably allowed, the horses have left the barn long time ago, and futzing over the AI barn door control makes no sense at this point.
If anything, the problem that this is effective in the first place is the one to address - this translates to people still believing anything politicians say, despite decades of continued proof all the campaign promises are just plain bullshit, and stated beliefs are situational and not principled.
For a more immediate example, look at Russian weaponization of social media in Mali for a pro-russia, anti-everyone-else narrative. Often deployed against a population that has a much greater level of credulity of anything they see on social media, and lack of inoculation against it by multiple years of seeing artificially generates nonsense.
There are urgent matters, important matters, and nice matters - all relevant to us.
We live in a time where artificial intelligence begins to rival humans in some areas.
We can now really automate things.
How interesting is that? There is so much to talk about.