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Festival crowd boos at video of conference speakers gushing about how great AI is
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Technology
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Sadly it's still ragingly popular in the tech start up / tech bro / LinkedIn cringe world.
My job is, among other things, ML related...I try to warn them off of this rhetoric all the time but they can't stop being distracted by the shiny jingling keys.
I also work in ML, and it's really hard to convince people that generative AI is just a gimmick and does not have the same value as other kinds of models like classification models. Computers should do utilitarian things, not social things.
Using AI to automate simple tasks is the future. Using AI to automate complex human tasks that involve socialization should not be the future.
Even some non-generative graphics AI like GroundingDINO and SAM have excellent uses for graphic artists and photographers that don't betray the creative process or remove the human from the process of creation.
But once you get the AI to try to be original, or perform a social task, you're headed the wrong direction. This is all short term hype. In the long term, either the bubble pops, or we find ourselves locked in a prison with our monsterous creation.
As you say, responsible ML is an interpretable scalpel, not a black box hammer. These ocean boiling LLMs purporting to be a tool with universal generalism are such a categorical disaster--for ecology, for the health of the field, for public understanding.
It's hard to go to work and have these conversations over and over again, to be honest it's depressing, wearing me down. I suspect I'll say no one too many times to "putting AI in our product" (by which they mean destroying simple well designed navigation by putting everything behind a chatbot search etc) and be let go.
I had a conversation with one of my mates, who was convinced, "AI is creative in the same way humans are creative. Therefore AI is actual intelligence."
It was a struggle to try to explain how LLMs aren't creative at all, can't conceptualize understanding, and are unable to determine whether they know something or not. I think I used painting terms, and AI being unable to consistently categorize a new color without being re-trained. He disagreed. Full blown nutter with no more understanding of the tech than you can find on FB, but he's certain he knows best.
Unfortunate thing is your mate is on par with the working knowledge of big venture capital swilling CEOs, CTOs, not to mention the other departments trying to get in on that sweet sweet prompt "magic"