How Does Anyone Take AI Seriously?
No, honestly. How does anyone take it seriously? How can you be credulous about this technology? Do you talk to actual human beings or do you only talk to your AI girlfriends and other chodes who have AI girlfriends? Literally no one I know is even curious about the technology because it's unimpressive and uninteresting. Everyone I know ranges from apathetic to hostile on the subject and as it gets incorporated into more things against the will of the users, more and more move to the other end. I met a new coworker last night, who's like 18, who also is like "yeah, it's all bullshit. It's not attached to reality."
It's just truly unreal to me how AI boosters treat this "tech innovation" as credulous. It's transparently not! It is inaccurate, costly to run and make, and overall, not even intelligent! Ed Zitron's analyses of just the financials of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic demonstrate how truly unhinged from reality the whole fucking thing is. But still there are articles published on what, the daily, that proclaim that this will "change the world" or "replace 90% of the workforce" or whatever the fuck Sam Altman and Dario Amodei tell the tech circuit to write so their stock price will go up.
None of it is fucking true. None of it is backed up by anything but hype. It is maddening. Last year, an actual professor at my college said "this is the future, we can't bury our heads in the sand" and I was very glad we didn't need to be on cam or voice because the noises and faces I pulled in response would've probably gotten me in trouble. To believe that something which is wrong up to 80% of the time and constantly fawns over how cool and smart you are is the future is akin to trusting the guy at the casino who tells you "you oughta bet more because you're about to hit it big, I can tell!" I simply do not get it.
But, at least I can prove my point. I think that Zitron has said this as well, but why is the burden of evidence on me, the skeptic? Why do I have to prove to people that this tech is bullshit when the technology itself has yet to prove itself useful? We are held to different standards for not chugging the sludge that the tech industry is currently pumping out and it drives me nuts. But what the hell, I'll play the stupid fucking game.
My decision to not use, endorse, or even tolerate AI is not "sticking my head in the sand." I'm fully aware that many people believe this "the next big thing" and I think they're all fucking stupid. LLMs and all forms of generative AI are fundamentally based on the inputs that they are given. This means, among other things, that nothing new or innovative will come from them. If I build a model and only feed it posts from reddit, it will probably say some vile shit just look at Grok. If you feed an art model only art from white people, it will only create art that has been palatable and valuable to white people (which I am, in the interest of full disclosure). So, among other questions: who gets to decide what's included? And given that there is a weighting process to the various inputs, who is determining the various weights and values?
As one example, there was a trend a few years ago when one of the first image generators came out where someone would put "give me x doing a selfie." So, there were AI-generated images of soldiers in WWI, Samurai, Vikings, and other such shit doing selfies. But, because the conception of selfie, at least in the West is several people taking a picture together, frequently having a good time, all of these images were of people smiling. Because of the way the images are weighted and what's considered a selfie, a very specific version of that appeared regardless of context. Now, this is not something I've experienced because I'm a filthy USAmerican I don't have a passport, but people in other countries are generally much less smiley than USAmericans. We smile all the time. Hell, I'm sure in Europe I'd be a freak and not just because I'm fat. What I'm getting at is that to accurately represent a version of what a selfie might look like in Sengoku Japan, it's actually statistically likely that those guys wouldn't be smiling. All this to say because of the biased nature of the inputs that went into that image generator, that's what you get, samurai sporting a big smile showing all their teeth, a thing you would almost certainly never see because it's a warrior class in a distinctly stoic culture.
And again, the shit just makes things up frequently. Like, very frequently. Besides that, it homogenizes writing. There was an article in Verge called "You Sound like ChatGPT" and the top comments are all "you also sound like chatGPT." Do they sound like chatGPT or do you not realize that the style ChatGPT steals from resembles the same type as this person's? Side note: I think if someone said some shit like that to me, especially in person, I'd be in fucking prison. Like, I think I'd black out and only come to after the fact.
I don't know where to end this. I'm just fucking tired of AI. I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of seeing people use it. I'm tired of it being integrated into fucking everything. It will not add anything to my life and won't add anything to yours. It will make you intellectually lazy and ultimately cripple your brain. I've said this before, but if you don't use a muscle, it atrophies over time. I hate to think how many people don't consider that this is how it will work with AI. Are there interesting and creative ways to use it? Maybe. But, fucking prove it. Show it to me. I have yet to be impressed. It is on the AI boosters to prove the tech is more than line go up.
Worth noting that I haven't even touched on the environmental impacts, which from what we can tell, are probably really bad! But, as I said in a previous post, we don't quite know. Silicon Valley has never been known for their desire to consider things carefully and so, while OpenAI and others could release the actual power usage they go through and the actual costs of their data centers, this will be an incomplete picture. We won't know the actual effects of those things for some time. Though, it is worth noting that Grok has already essentially poisoned a community. But, ya know, "move fast, break stuff", i fucking guess.