We have been thinking about something someone said on a podcast “AI isn’t a tool. It’s a lack of one.” and we agree wholeheartedly.
LLMs, ML and GANs etc aren’t tools. Tools expand creativity, skills, and knowledge etc, they solve problems because they were created by people that understand them.
All ‘AI’ does is make creativity suffer and make people lose their skills and knowledge. Even small things like being able to speak/understand other languages now have gone to ‘AI’ translation instead of learning those languages, that’s a travesty.
Tools are an extension of abilities. ‘AI’ makes us an extension of itself, thus those that use it are the tools of ‘AI’ instead, to be used by a machine that is a glorified predictive text algorithm, and that’s really sad, any way it’s looked at.
So we recommend throwing away these not tools and starting to learn, build back confidence, knowledge, skills, a joy for creating, even if it’s difficult at first. It’s better than letting a glorified predictive text algorithm steal all those things, and lose them to it.
I’ll probably regret commenting.
I’m not an AI fan; current iterations seem like investments looking for problems to solve.
That said, « big loom » replacing hand-weaving or « big washing machine » replacing laundry on a rock in a river certainly eroded skills that became less relavent. I don’t know that it disqualifies them from being devices that can facilitate or do work.
Yes, among all the valid criticism of ai, this doesn’t feel like it. More like “let’s find a definition for tool that excludes AI” (and not even bother checking if it applies to other tools as well)
I got the same impression reading this. The current business around LLMs is terrible, truly abhorrent, but the technology has its uses.