I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much.

Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent. “Sure, people are suffering because of this, but two friends of mine are better off for it” – is that really worth it?

I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them.

Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.

Are they overhyped? Probably.

LLMs in particular, and dangerously so. People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing. They deliver a convincing imitation, but there have been too many instances of that imitation not holding up to any reasonable standard. For a more benign example, Ford had to hire back its fired engineers because it turned out that GenAI can’t actually do their job. Less benign are things like giving harmful “health advice” or reinforcing their users’ delusions and psychoses to the point where they commit violence against themselves or others.

They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.

Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes.

This is where we need to specify just what we mean by AI.

Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient. Specialised models may make decent assistants for certain types of specialists.

They certainly aren’t capable of the type of “nobody has to work any more” utopia that conmen like Musk and Altmann are selling to the gullible. They’re fundamentally unreliable and their consumption of resources dwarfs their sloppy utility.

So while some form of AI might hold a key to a radically better world, LLMs and generative AI aren’t it.

Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes.

Probably? Have you taken a look around or read the whole list you replied to? The hype already is destroying lives, and there’s a slew of experts calling out the fraudulent scheme they’re pulling on the stock market.

The one point I’ll concede to the scammers is that it has fundamentally altered our world.

Just not for the better.

I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.

It starts with being honest and clear about what “this” actually is, understanding what it isn’t and not making excuses for a deeply destructive technological complex just because the mathematical parrot emits some useful responses now and then.

That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.

We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.

Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.

I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?

Cory has been that “crazy” guy warning of all sorts of grift, exploitation, privacy fuckery and security forever like a modern-day Kassandra. Now that we start to see the direction the technology sector is headed more clearly, his warnings finally start to ring true.

Ignorance and isolation can do that even to smart people. If you’re stuck in a bubble, it can be hard to even see a reason to step out.

I used to hold to some kind of biological essentalism. It seemed obvious to me that people with male physique should be considered male, people with female physique female and while I saw no problem with wanting to get their phsyique surgically and hormonally altered and was on board with respecting the wishes of people on the way to that, I (privately) believed that people weren’t “a real {gender}” until they got that “switch”. NBs, of course, were firmly outside that binary view.

Without anyone around to actually challenge that biological premise, I don’t really see how I could have broken out of it on my own. I also don’t think being smart is a prerequisite for being respectful. It’s just that I grew up with certain preconceptions and never had a reason to challenge them until someone close to me came out.

It’s the confrontation with the unfamiliar and how you handle it that separates tolerance from bigotry, but dumb people can be respectful just as smart people can be narrow-minded.

If we can pull it off before they manage to manipulate us into fucking up our world, sure. If we let their slopgenerators produce the drafts for the station, I’m sure they’ll love the breathtaking result.

Me, please. I’m wilting under the sun, and I’m pretty sure wilting under your insults can’t be qoese.

and made way for one that will.

I think that’s the problem. Have you seen how hard it can be these days to rally volunteers to a common cause? Even if people were to back up and preserve all the content of Wikipedia, WM Commons, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata etc., getting enough of the original contributors on board to found some new organisation without a thousand splinter factions pulling away over some issue or other is a long shot.

And in the meantime, for-profit corporations now bereft of their largest, free competitor would rush to fill the void and try to become the “new Wikipedia” (now with ads, spyware, premium features and blatant corruption, selling control of truth to the highest bidder).

WMF is a behemoth, kept moving through its own momentum. Letting it break in hopes of building something new is a dangerous gamble, unless we can get the successor up and ready to step in beforehand

…but no less popular

it’s still harder to live in space or on Mars than to try to fix Earth

Hush, unbeliever. We just gotta invest more in the technologies that let us escape from the consequences of our greed. Well, some of us. The most greedy, actually. The rest still get to bear the consequences, but they don’t matter.

Point is: pour more money into training machines to imitate all the things we don’t actually understand the complexity of, and surely we’ll no longer need those people when we finally escape to a better future where our serfs don’t need such petty things as rights and payment. And if you help us get that, you just might get a ride on our escape too!

(You won’t, but I’m hoping you’re gullible enough to fall for it.)

It is run by a complete idiot.

And enabled by other idiots. Musk doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Pretty sure turning off supply is easier than getting an arrest warrant against a person whom the corporate system intentionally makes it hard for them to be held criminally accountable.