30 year IT Professional here.

The thing about AI that most people do not understand is the sheer amount of processing power required and just how much that requirement impacts everything. Entire data centers dedicated to one thing that can require the output of a power plant and the associated cooling requirement. I believe Microsoft is in the process of reactivating Three Mile Island TMI-1 reactor. TMI-2 was destroyed in an accident in 1979.

For what? What is it actually doing that is truly worth investing those kind of resources?

That’s not even considering the financial investment. Which has resulted in tech companies taking a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” tactic to get it to start making money. Tactics like that usually result in a bubble where the technology is perceived to have more value that it really does. The problem with this is people won’t spend their money on something that does not return their investment. So it’s a matter of time that we have these huge data centers sitting all over the country abandoned.

I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

Actual AI for scientific research I’m OK with.

But AI shit crammed into literally everything. No sir, I hate it sir.

I dont work in IT so I may have misconceptions so I’m open to being corrected. What I dont understand is general AI/LLM usage. One place I frequent, one guy literally answers every post with “Gemini says…”. People just dont seem to bother thinking any more. AI/LLM doesnt seem to offer any advantage over traditional search & you constantly gave to fact check it. Garbage in, garbage out. Soon it’ll start learning from its own incorrect hallucinations & we won’t be able to tell right from wrong.

I have succumbed a couple of times. One time it actually helped (I’m not a coder, it was a coding related question which it did help with). With a self host/Linux permissions question it fucked up so badly I actually lost access to an external drive. Im no expert with linux, Im learning & managed to resolve it myself.

AI answers have been blocked from DDG on all my devices.

I was initially impressed when ChatGPT and Midjourney came out and I was playing around with them. But the novelty quickly wore off, and as I learned more about the flaws in how they operate and the negative environmental effects, the more I came to dislike it. Now, I actively hate and avoid AI.

I disliked it from the moment they called a glorified language database and collator “AI.”

This feels like how Bitcoin was neat for a time, before 99% of the space became pyramid schemes.

…And if “AI” is on the same trajectory as crypto, that’s not great, heh…

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

I’m a musician, and I like to write. I hate it. My husband uses it to help him code (I think; I have zero functional knowledge of his industry) and says it can be used in that capacity in certain ways.

The number of times I’ve heard peers say “I put this into chat gpt and it said…” makes me want to throw up. We think disinformation is bad now? We have no idea what’s coming.

Image generation is fun, and LLMs can be a great way to find a starting point for learning something already known by humanity as a whole, but not known by one in particular. Because they are statistical association machines, they are practically perfect for answering the ‘what word am I looking for?’ question when you can only ‘talk around’ the concept.

However, that’s not what they are being used for, and the user cost does not match the externalized cost. If users had to pay the real cost today, the AI companies would die tomorrow. (This is probably true of a great many companies but we’re talking AI ones here.)

One of the concepts I keep returning to is ‘X was cool, but then the idiots got it.’ Early internet? Absolute nerdity; the only people on there were highly educated, usually intelligent as well, and the new people came at a pace the community could absorb. Then the idiots came, including business majors, kids, and eventually just everyone. Early mass media? Libraries of printed books. It was still expensive, so no one bothered making and distributing 3,000,000 copies of Ted from the pub’s musings on redheads, but as it became cheaper, and eventually even cheaper in electronic form, gates were no longer kept, and the idiots got in.

In this same way, AI in the form of statistical analysis tools has always been fascinating, and kind of cool. AI assisted radiology is great. Data analysis tools are great. But the idiots have the controls now, and they’re using them to put shrimp Jesus on their deep fake pizza, at the top of GPT-generated ‘articles,’ and we’re all paying the price for their fun in the form of uncountable subsidies, environmental damage, and societal damage.

AI is literally banning YouTube creators who have been active for years for no reason.

AI can do great things when it’s fed by actual people for a particular fairly narrow purpose, but that’s it.

I loved the image generation for about 20 minutes.

I’ve been a luddite since long before AI. AI is black box engineering. It’s a shield they can and do use to create a malicious product.

As you pointed out, the most obvious use case is reducing cost of labor regardless of whether total labor is reduced.

I’ve not loved nor hated AI. I’ve been both impressed and irritated by what it can do.

But, one thing has been pissing me off lately. My wife and I often share funny videos throughout the day, and over the past few weeks, about 1/3 of them have been real video, 1/3 of them have been obviously AI (like talking babies), and the other third are deceptive AI. (Something that looks impressive yet believable, until you see the SORA watermark, or find an inconsistency in the background)

There was a time where I could watch a video of a dog doing tricks and just think “that’s adorable!” but now I have to check everything I watch for watermarks, missing teeth, and scrambled text in the background. I have to verify it’s authenticity before I can decide how I feel about it.

There’s a band called Celldweller that I really jammed to in 2018. They got kind of a cyberpunk/robot theme going on that I really liked (it’s just an aesthetic tho, they obviously don’t actually use any AI).
Anyways, they had a song called Pro-bots & Robophobes and when I heard it in 2018 I thought that I’d obviously be part of the Pro-bots. Haha, when actual AI came along I found out I was wrong on that assessment. I don’t think there has been a single explicitly AI thing that I have actually enjoyed. Even the AI code completion that all my coworkers really like has been nothing but a hassle, because it keeps hallucinating up very slight mistakes that are annoying to catch.

I briefly toyed with some of the early image generation stuff. It was a fun toy for making NPCs for RPGs.

But now it’s everywhere and being used as an excuse to squeeze labor harder and deliver dubious value. If it just stayed as a toy I wouldn’t mind it much. I get annoyed at the aggressive “do you want me to rewrite that for you??” shit that pops up now.