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I mean, it is objectively bad for life. Throwing away millions to billions of gallons of water all so you can get some dubious coding advice.
Throwing away water? Does it escape into space. I completely understand the energy arguments but water?
Now see, I like the idea of AI.
What I don’t like are the implications, and the current reality of AI.
I see businesses embracing AI without fully understanding the limits. Stopping the hiring juniors developers, often firing large numbers of seniors because they think AI, a group of cheap post grad vibe programmers and a handful of seasoned seniors will equal the workforce they got rid of when AI, while very good is not ready to sustain this. It is destroying the career progression for the industry and even if/when they realise it was a mistake, it might already have devastated the industry by then.
I see the large tech companies tearing through the web illegally sucking up anything they can access to pull into their ever more costly models with zero regard to the effects on the economy, the cost to the servers they are hitting, or the environment from the huge power draw creating these models requires.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
And the whole AI industry is holding up the stock market, while AI has historically always ran the hype cycle and crashed into an AI winter. Stock markets do crash after billions pumped into a sector suddenly turn out to be not worth as much. Almost none of these AI companies run a profit and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable. It’s when everybody starts yelling that this time it’s different that things really become dangerous.
and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable
There’s a real twist here in regards to OpenAI.
They have some kind of weird corporate structure where OpenAI is a non-profit and it owns a for-profit arm. But, the deal they have with Softbank is that they have to transition to a for-profit by the end of the year or they lose out on the $40 billion Softbank invested. If they don’t manage to do that, Softbank can withhold something like $20B of the $40B which would be catastrophic for OpenAI. Transitioning to a For-Profit is not something that can realistically be done by the end of the year, even if everybody agreed on that transition, and key people don’t agree on it.
The whole bubble is going to pop soon, IMO.
Yep, exactly.
They knew the housing/real estate bubble would pop, as it currently is…
… So, they made one final last gambit on AI as the final bubble that would magically become super intelligent and solve literally all problems.
This would never, and is not working, because the underlying tech of LLM has no real actual mechanism by which it would or could develop complex, critical, logical analysis / theoretization / metacognition that isn’t just a schizophrenic mania episode.
LLMs are fancy, inefficient autocomplete algos.
Thats it.
They achieve a simulation of knowledge via consensus, not analytic review.
They can never be more intelligent than an average human with access to all the data they’ve … mostly illegally stolen.
The entire bet was ‘maybe superintelligence will somehow be an emergent property, just give 8t more data and compute power’.
And then they did that, and it didn’t work.
I agree with everything you said, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be very useful in many fields.
That too is the classical hype cycle. After the trough of disillusionment, and that’s going to be a deep one from the look of things, people figure out where it can be used in a profitable way in its own niches.
… Unless its mass proliferation of shitty broken code and mis/disinformation and hyperparasocial relationships and waste of energy and water are actually such a net negative that it fundamentally undermines infrastructure and society, thus raising the necessary profit margin too high for such legit use cases to be workable in a now broken economic system.
The world revolves around the profit margin, so the current trend may even continue indefinitely… Sad.
Time will tell how much was just hype, and how much actually had merit. I think it will go the way of the
.combubble.LOTS of uses for the internet of things, but it’s still overhyped
The .com bubble had nothing to do with the Internet of Things.
Fair enough.
The dot-com bubble (late 1990s–2000) was when investors massively overvalued internet-related companies just because they had “.com” in their name, even if they had no profits or solid business plans. It burst in 2000, wiping out trillions in value.
The “Internet hype” bubble popped. But the Internet still has many valid uses.
I mean, I also agree with that, lol.
There absolutely are valid use cases for this kind of ‘AI’.
But it is very, very far from the universal panacea that the capital class seems to think it is.
When all the hype dies down, we will see where it’s actually useful. But I can bet you it will have uses, it’s been very helpful in making certain aspects of my life a lot easier. And I know many who say the same.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
You’re right. It’s the business model driving technological advancement in the 21st century that’s flawed.
I have to disagree that it’s even a nice idea. The “idea” behind AI appears to be wanting a machine that thinks or works for you with (at least) the intelligence of a human being and no will or desires of its own. At its root, this is the same drive behind chattel slavery, which leads to a pretty inescapable conundrum: either AI is illusory marketing BS or it’s the rebirth of one of the worst atrocities history has ever seen. Personally, hard pass on either one.
You nailed it, IMO. However, I would like a real artificial sentience of some sort just to add to the beautiful variety of the universe. It does seem that many of my fellow humans just want chattle slaves though. Which is saddening.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is Capitalism.
The problem is always Capitalism.
AI, Climate Change, rising fascism, all our problems are because of capitalism.
Can’t delete this old-ass comment because the fediverse is so free it forces me not to delete it.
Anyway, don’t care, still think the root of the problem are humans, and we will ruin whatever system is in place.
Even if lemmy users want to blindly believe switching from capitalism will be the fix to every single problem.Problems would exist in any system, but not the same problems. Each system has its set of problems and challenges. Just look at history, problems change. Of course you can find analogies between problems, but their nature changes with our systems. Hunger, child mortality, pollution, having no free time, war, censorship, mass surveilence,… these are not constant through history. They happen more or less depending on the social systems in place, which vary constantly.
While you aren’t wrong about human nature. I’d say you’re wrong about systems. How would the same thing happen under an anarchist system? Or under an actual communist (not Marxist-Leninist) system? Which account for human nature and focus to use it against itself.
I’ll answer. Because some people see these systems as “good” regardless of political affiliation and want them furthered and see any cost as worth it. If an anarchist / communist sees these systems in a positive light, then they will absolutely try and use them at scale. These people absolutely exist and you could find many examples of them on Lemmy. Try DB0.
And the point of anarchist or actual communist systems is that such scale would be miniscule. Not massive national or unanswerable state scales.
And yes, I’m an anarchist. I know DB0 and their instance and generally agree with their stance - because it would allow any one of us to effectively advocate against it if we desired to.
There would be no tech broligarchy forcing things on anyone. They’d likely all be hanged long ago. And no one would miss them as they provide nothing of real value anyway.
And the point of anarchist or actual communist systems is that such scale would be miniscule.
Every community running their own AI would be even more wasteful than corporate centralization. It doesn’t matter what the system is if people want it.
The point is, most wouldn’t. It’s of little real use currently, especially the LLM bullshit. The communities would have infinitely better things to pit resources to.
The point is, most wouldn’t.
People currently want it despite it being stupid which is why corporations are in a frenzy to be the monopoly that provides it. People want all sorts of stupid things. A different system wouldn’t change that.
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I think you are underestimating how adaptable humans are. We absolutely conform to the systems that govern us, and they are NOT equally likely to produce bad outcomes.
Every system eventually ends with someone corrupted with power and greed wanting more. Putin and his oligrachs, Trump and his oligarchs… Xi isn’t great, but at least I haven’t heard news about the Uyghurs situation for a couple of years now. Hope things are better there nowadays and people aren’t going missing anymore just for speaking out against their government.
Time doesn’t end with corrupt power, those are just thing that happen. Bad shit always happens, it’s the Why, How Often and How We Fix It that are mote indicative of success. Every machine breaks down eventually.
I mean you’d have to be pretty smart to make the perfect system. Things failing isn’t proof that things can’t be better.
Rather, our problem is that we live in a world where the strongest will survive, and the strongest does not mean the smart… So alas we will always be in complete shit until we disappear.
That’s a pathetic, defeatist world view. Yeah, we’re victims of our circumstances, but we can make the world a better place than what we were raised in.
Well, you can believe that there is a chance, but there is none. It can only be created with sweat and blood. There are no easy ways, you know, and sometimes there are none at all, and sometimes even creating one seems like a miracle.
The fittest survive. The problem is creating systems where the best fit are people who lack empathy and and a moral code.
A better solution would be selecting world leaders from the population at random.
For those who know
I need to watch that video. I saw the first post but haven’t caught up yet.
it’s just slacktivism no different than all the other facebook profile picture campaigns.
I have no idea about what’s being called for at all.
Search for clippy and rossman
Its true. We can have a nuanced view. Im just so fucking sick of the paid off media hyping this shit, and normies thinking its the best thing ever when they know NOTHING about it. And the absolute blind trust and corpo worship make me physically ill.
Nuance is the thing.
Thinking AI is the devil, will kill your grandma and shit in your shoes is equally as dumb as thinking AI is the solution to any problem, will take over the world and become our overlord.
The truth is, like always, somewhere in between.
Lots of AI is technologically interesting and has tons of potential, but this kind of chatbot and image/video generation stuff we got now is just dumb.
I firmly believe we won’t get most of the interesting, “good” AI until after this current AI bubble bursts and goes down in flames. Once AI hardware is cheap interesting people will use it to make cool things. But right now, the big players in the space are drowning out anyone who might do real AI work that has potential, by throwing more and more hardware and money at LLMs and generative AI models because they don’t understand the technology and see it as a way to get rich and powerful quickly.
I firmly believe we won’t get most of the interesting, “good” AI until after this current AI bubble bursts and goes down in flames.
I can’t imagine that you read much about AI outside of web sources or news media then. The exciting uses of AI is not LLMs and diffusion models, though that is all the public talks about when they talk about ‘AI’.
For example, we have been trying to find a way to predict protein folding for decades. Using machine learning, a team was able to train a model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold) to predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy. Other scientists have used similar techniques to train a diffusion model that will generate a string of amino acids which will fold into a structure with the specified properties (like how image description prompts are used in an image generator).
This is particularly important because, thanks to mRNA technology, we can write arbitrary sequences of mRNA which will co-opt our cells to produce said protein.
Robotics is undergoing similar revolutionary changes. Here is a state of the art robot made by Boston Dynamics using a human programmed feedback control loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ
Here is a Boston Dynamics robot “using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44_zbEwz_w
Object detection, image processing, logistics, speech recognition, etc. These are all things that required tens of thousands of hours of science and engineering time to develop the software for, and the software wasn’t great. Now, freshman at college can train a computer vision network that outperforms these tools using free tools and a graphics card which will outperform the human-created software.
AI isn’t LLMs and image generators, those may as well be toys. I’m sure eventually LLMs and image generation will be good, but the only reason it seems amazing is because it is a novel capability that computers have not had before. But the actual impact on the real world will be minimal outside of specific fields.
yeah this shit’s working out GREAT
AI isn’t LLMs and image generators
Oh I have read and heard about all those things, none of them (to my knowledge) are being done by OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic, or any of the large companies fueling the current AI bubble, which is why I call it a bubble. The things you mentioned are where AI has potential, and I think that continuing to throw billions at marginally better LLMs and generative models at this point is hurting the real innovators. And sure, maybe some of those who are innovating end up getting bought by the larger companies, but that’s not as good for their start-ups or for humanity at large.
AlphaFold is made by DeepMind, an Alphabet (Google) subsidiary.
Google and OpenAI are also both developing world models.
These are a way to generate realistic environments that behave like the real world. These are core to generating the volume of synthetic training data that would allow training robotics models massively more efficient.
Instead of building an actual physical robot and having it slowly interact with the world while learning from its one physical body. The robot’s builder could create a world model representation of their robot’s body’s physical characteristics and attach their control software to the simulation. Now the robot can train in a simulated environment. Then, you can create multiple parallel copies of that setup in order to generate training data rapidly.
It would be economically unfeasible to build 10,000 prototype robots in order to generate training data, but it is easy to see how running 10,000 different models in parallel is possible.
I think that continuing to throw billions at marginally better LLMs and generative models at this point is hurting the real innovators.
On the other hand, the billions of dollars being thrown at these companies is being used to hire machine learning specialists. The real innovators who have the knowledge and talent to work on these projects almost certainly work for one of these companies or the DoD. This demand for machine learning specialists (and their high salaries) drives students to change their major to this field and creates more innovators over time.
The currently hot LLM technology is very interesting and I believe it has legitimate use cases. If we develop them into tools that help assist work. (For example, I’m very intrigued by the stuff that’s happening in the accessibility field.)
I mostly have problem with the AI business. Ludicruous use cases (shoving AI into places where it has no business in). Sheer arrogance about the sociopolitics in general. Environmental impact. LLMs aren’t good enough for “real” work, but snake oil salesmen keep saying they can do that, and uncritical people keep falling for it.
And of course, the social impact was just not what we were ready for. “Move fast and break things” may be a good mantra for developing tech, but not for releasing stuff that has vast social impact.
I believe the AI business and the tech hype cycle is ultimately harming the field. Usually, AI technologies just got gradually developed and integrated to software where they served purpose. Now, it’s marred with controversy for decades to come.
If we develop them into tools that help assist work.
Spoilers: We will not
I believe the AI business and the tech hype cycle is ultimately harming the field.
I think this is just an American way of doing business. And it’s awful, but at the end of the day people will adopt technology if it makes them greater profit (or at least screws over the correct group of people).
But where the Americanized AI seems to suffer most is in their marketing fully eclipsing their R&D. People seem to have forgotten how DeepSeek spiked the football on OpenAI less than a year ago by making some marginal optimizations to their algorithm.
The field isn’t suffering from the hype cycle nearly so much as it suffers from malinvestment. Huge efforts to make the platform marketable. Huge efforts to shoehorn clumsy chat bots into every nook and cranny of the OS interface. Vanishingly little effort to optimize material consumption or effectively process data or to segregate AI content from the human data it needs to improve.
Spoilers: We will not
Generative inpainting/fill is enormously helpful in media production.
Implicit costs refer to the opportunity costs associated with a firm’s resources, representing the income that could have been earned if those resources were employed in their next best alternative use.
I don’t see the relevance here. Inpainting saves artists from time-consuming and repetitive labor for (often) no additional cost. Many generative inpainting models will run locally, but they’re also just included with an Adobe sub.
I don’t see the relevance here
Anthropic is losing $3 billion or more after revenue in 2025
OpenAI is on track to lose more than $10 billion.
xAI, makers of “Grok, the racist LLM,” losing it over $1 billion a month.
I don’t know that generative infill justifies these losses.
The different uses of AI are not inexctricable. This is the point of the post. We should be able to talk about the good and the bad.
We should be able to talk about the good and the bad.
Again, I point you to “implicit costs”. Something this trivial isn’t good if it’s this expensive.
Wait to power tripper db0 sees this. Crying that their ai photos in all their coms are cringe
Yeah it is bad
It’s actually a real problem
The reason most web forum posters hate AI is because AI is ruining web forums by polluting it with inauthentic garbage. Don’t be treating it like it’s some sort of irrational bandwagon.
It Is true thou, ai bad
Not all that glitters is gold. 🤷
AI is bad and people who use it should feel bad.
Would love an explanation on how I’m in the wrong on reducing my work week from 40 hours to 15 using AI.
Existing in predatory capitalistic system and putting the blame on those who utilize available tools to reduce the predatory nature of our system is insane.
Because when your employer catches on, they’ll bring you back up to 40 anyway.
And probably because those 15 hours now produce shit quality.
My employer is pushing AI usage, if the work is done the work is done. This is the reality we’re supposed to be living in with AI, just conforming to the current predatory system because “AI bad” actively harms more than it helps.
The current predatory system will raise the limit on the 40 work week if they’re allowed to. 60. 80. You might not even get a weekend. Unions fought for your weekend.
AI does not fundamentally change this relationship. It is the same predatory system.
So cancer cell detection is now bad and those doing it should feel bad?
The world isn’t black’n white.
Me to burn victims: “You know, without fire, we couldn’t grill meat. Right? You should think more about what you say.”
???
it’s not in the least confusing lmao, you know damn well what they mean and are just acting confused as a “gotcha”
If it tries to be smart about that bad and good ai exists, then it’s a very poor take.
It actually proves my point by showing that everything is not black and white (emg AI has lots of good uses, and also lots of medium uses and also bad uses).
You also tried to put words in my mouth, that isn’t looking very smart instead of explaining what the metaphor was all about.
Don’t be obtuse, you walnut. I’m obviously not equating medical technology with 12-fingered anime girls and plagiarism.
You still mix all AI stuff in, what about hating LLMs and image generators?
When people say this they are usually talking about a very specific sort of generative LLM using unsupervised learning.
AI is a very broad field with great potential, the improvements in cancer screening alone could save millions of lives over the coming decades. At the core it’s just math, and the equations have been in use for almost as long as we’ve had computers. It’s no more good or bad than calculus or trigonometry.
No hope commenting like this, just get ready getting downvoted with no reason. People use wrong terms and normalize it.
It’s funny watching you AI bros climb over each other to be the first with a what about-ism.
Providing a counterexample to a claim is not whataboutism.
Whataboutism involves derailing a conversation with an ad-hominem to avoid addressing someone’s argument, like what you just did.
AI use = small dick energy.
Yeah, go cry about it. People use AI to help themselves while you’re just being technophobic, shouting ‘AI is bad’ without even saying which AI you mean. And you’re doing it on Lemmy, a tiny techno-bubble. Lmao.
No one is crying here aside some salty bitch of a techno-fetishist acting like his hard-on for environmental destruction and making people dumber is something to be proud of.
So is eating meat, flying, gaming, going om holiday, basically if you exist you should feel bad
How does one feel bar?
No but see we need machibes to do all the art for us, and averaging machibes to tell us wjat is and isnt true!
