this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
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This is a strawman argument. AI is a tool. Like any tool, it's used for negative things and positive things. Focusing on just the negative is disingenuous at best. And focusing on AI's climate impact while completely ignoring the big picture is asinine (the oil industry knew they were the primary cause of climate change more than 60 years ago).
AI has many positive use-cases yet they are completely ignored by people who lack logic and rationality.
AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.
AI is helping doctors to expedite cancer screening rates.
AI is powering robots that can do the dishes.
AI is also helping to catch illegal fishing, tackle human trafficking, and track diseases.
Obviously by AI they mean stuff like ChatGPT. An energy intensive toy where the goal is to get it into the hands of as many paying customers as possible. And you're doing free PR for them by associating it with useful small scale research projects. I don't think most researchers will want to associate their projects with AI now that the term has been poisoned, though they might have to because many bigwigs have been sucked into the hype. The term AI has basically existed nebulously since the beginning of computing, so whether we call one thing or another AI is basically personal taste. Companies like OpenAI have successfully attached their product to the term and have created the strongest association, so ultimately if you say AI in a contemporary context a lot of people are hearing GPT-like.
Yeah, but it doesn't really help that this is a community "Fuck AI" made as "A place for all those who loathe machine-learning...". It's like saying "I loathe Dijsktra's algorithm". The term machine learning has been used since at least the 50's and it involves a lot of elegant mathematics which all essentially just try to perform optimizations of various functions in various ways. And yet, at least in places I'm exposed to, people constantly present any instance of machine learning as useless, morally wrong, theft, ineffective compared to "traditional methods" and so on, to the point where I feel uneasy telling people that I'm doing research in that area, since there's so much hate towards the entire field, not just LLMs. It might be because of them, sure, but in my experience, the popular hating of AI is not limited to ChatGPT, corporations and the like.
It is a sad thing to see. The education system especially here in the US has really failed many people. I was always super curious and excited about machine intelligence from a young age. I was born in the mid 90's. I've been dreaming about automation myself out of work so I could create and do what I love and spend more time with the people I love, and just explore and learn and grow. As a kid I noticed two things that made adults miserable:
I went to school for CS and eventually had to drop because of personal life and mental health struggles, but I'm still interested in joining the field and open source. People sometimes make me feel really sad, and misunderstood, plus discourages me from even bothering because they're so negative. I know how we got here, but it's sad it's this predictable a reaction.
By 2014-2015 I was watching a lot of machine learning videos on YouTube, playing with style GANs etc. The fact a computer could even "apply a style" and keep the image coherent was just endlessly fascinating and it made for a lot of cool photos etc. Watching AlphaGo beat a world champion in Go using Q-learning techniques and self-play was incredible. I just love it. I love future tech and I think we can have social and economic equity and much less wealth and income inequality with all this.
A lot of people don't realize labor adds a lot to the cost of what they buy and there are only so many workers. Having even today's LLMs fully implemented and realized as agents (this is very quickly coming about) things will slowly get cheaper and better, then likely more rapidly. Software development will be cheaper. Engineers, game designers and artists will bring to life incredible things that we haven't thought up yet, and will likely use these tools/entities to enhance their workflows. Yes there will be less artist grunt work, and there will be affects on jobs. It's just not going to stop anyone from doing what they love however they like to do it. It's so odd to me.
Cheers and keep your head up. If we get this right I think people will change their tune, but probably not until they see economic and quality of life improvements. Though, I'd say machine learning and machine intelligence has added a great deal of value and opportunity in my life. I wish everyone a good future regardless of how your feel about this. I just hope people who aren't in the field or weren't enthusiastic before will at least remember there are a lot of real, kind, and extremely intelligent people working really hard on this stuff, and truly believe they can make a substantial positive impact. We should be more trusting and open. It's really hard to do it, we can get burned, but most people want decent things for most others despite disagreement and don't strife. We've made it this far. Let's go to the stars 🤠
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