I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.

Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X

Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.

  • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
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    1 day ago

    Zoomers and gen x that drank the kool aid. What’s worse is they are saying yes to high paying jobs to fuck us all in the ass.

    • bss03@infosec.pub
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      20 hours ago

      As a member of GenX (1980)…

      Yep, that sounds like my peers. Most of them believe the marketing or are at least convinced enough to indulge. The hold-outs are getting more infrequent.

    • Pirate2377@lemmy.zip
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      19 hours ago

      I used to feed AI anything I wrote that I wanted to sound professional to save me time and brain power. Not only do I have no need for that anymore considering I’ve just accepted that my CS degree was truly a waste of my life, but now I realize I’d encourage the building of data centers so now I’m fully radicalized to never use them

      • chilicheeselies@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Dude your CS degree is not a waste. AI is just a tool. Anyone who thinks they can replace their staff with it are in for a rude awakening. I understand how much harder it is to get your foot in the door though. Its not permanent though. I remember when “no code” was going to take the jobs. The job just changes a bit.

        • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I’ve been around long enough to have experienced multiple technologies that were the “end” of programmers and yet they still exist.
          As you pointed out, the job changes a bit, but we are still here. When I started, the job was a lot more about compilation. You had to remember exact syntaxes (spelling, letter cases, line continuation, ect) and code optimization. You couldn’t just look up a function name or something like a win32 API by typing part of it into your code editor. You couldn’t even just go to Google and search because Google and the Internet didn’t exist. You had a literal shelf of books next to your desk that were heavily worn and you referenced constantly. Books got handed down from senior programmers to junior programmers. The senior got a new book that wasn’t held together by a rubber band and the junior got a stack of pages, often partially glued together by coffee stains, that contained invaluable notes in the margins.
          Compilers used to be really dumb. Schooling, blogs, articles, ect, these days are all about “readable code”, but for a long time readability wasn’t even in the top 10 or 20 things that you thought about. Just getting the damn thing to compile was easily half of your job and time spent. Schooling and articles spent a massive amount of time discussing optimizations and memory usage. Things like “if else” vs “switch”, which one was actually better and how you could abuse both. Just in case you were wondering, “switch” was king and the “if else” lovers can get go fuck themselves.
          I have seen massive shifts in the industry, and companies will use any excuse to fire everyone useful and eviscerate themselves in the name of short term profits. People used to talk about IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Compaq, ect, like they talk about Amazon and Facebook now. But those are just brands owned by some new titan that didn’t even exist that long ago.
          CS will come back, it will be a little different, but new companies will rise from the carcasses of all those that tried to replace developers with ai.
          Honestly, given what Facebook is these days, I am more surprised that they still have that many software developers to lay off than I am with the idea that they are laying off people due to AI.

  • FosterMolasses@leminal.space
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    1 day ago

    Same. I noticed that I finally got banned from a few random instances I’d never visited before under my moderation history, and they were all by the same guy who claimed I was an “anti-AI troll” lmao

    The most hilarious part to this is I feel so dispassionate about the subject, I can seldom remember what it was I might have commented, and was probably something like “yeah this looks like slop” hahaha

  • bss03@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    If you ignore or are blissfully unaware of the negatives – and all the companies behind all the major product lines do their best to hide and minimize them – then it’s easy to find utility. Basically everyone I know IRL actively chooses to use AI for something. Both CRAP (Computer-Rendered Artificial Pictures) and code generation are very common.

    When I point out the ethical issues, I am generally dismissed entirely (“they’ll fix that” or “my impact is small”) or counter with something about quality (“it works now” and “it’s getting better”), which I find is beside the point.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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      14 hours ago

      code generation

      You mean Slopware “Development”?

      (I opted to keep the “Development”, putting it in quotes as a sarcastic nod to the fact it’s no longer actual development)

      • bss03@infosec.pub
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        6 hours ago

        Sort of. A friend used it to generate some “tests” of questionable quality, a cousin is using it to help her learn and use a DSL (my term, not hers) for interactive tasks for her students, another friend was using it for source code generation, but I don’t recall the specific results.

        I disagree that it is no longer development, I see LLMs as yet another tool for generating code, and we’ve had generated “source” code since before C was standardized. I think the any code output by most LLMs is derivative of so many works under so many licenses that it is likely not possible to distribute it at all without violating some copyright and is certainly unacceptable for any Free Software project.; I think this is ethically true even if courts find LLM outputs are not derivative works or not subject to copyright protection at all – at least as long as copyright protects Disney. But, I know people that are working on a Free Software LLM, and “the Stack” provides enough information that you could provide all the necessary attributions for works derived from it.

        While LLM hallucinations are a real concern, they can be less impactful when doing code generation because of all the automated static checks plus the culture of peer-review. But, I also tend to favor languages with static type systems.

        • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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          4 hours ago

          I disagree that it is no longer development, I see LLMs as yet another tool for generating code, and we’ve had generated “source” code since before C was standardized.

          Fair. There is a difference between using LLMs to generate boilerplate code customised to your context or provide a starting point if you’re stuck on a given problem and struggle to find a different perspective for approaching it, and using it to get around having to do mental work.

          My term is intended for the kind of vibe coding where there is little, if any, technical skill involved and people are just letting LLMs slop together code without meaningful code quality assurance. In those cases, I don’t think it warrants recognition as development. If it produces workable results, cool. Call it software generation.

          Using it as a learning assistant would probably be the most justified use case in my opinion. I have my reservations whether it is suitable for that purpose but I don’t know enough about the specific way it is applied to comment on that. If it produces training code that isn’t directly published you dodge the legal iffyiness, and if it helps build skills, that solves the “relying on AI makes you unlearn skills” issue.

  • DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    AI (LLMs) is/are a fantastic tool.

    But that’s what it is, a tool that can make some tasks easier.

    It’s not world-changing like some tech bros and CEOs think it is because they don’t actually understand the technology.

    It’s also not the apocalypse or The Matrix or Skynet coming to end civilization. It’s just a tool.

    After the AI bubble bursts, AI will still be there, as a tool for humans to use.

    I think it’s possible that some of the people you see on Lemmy may have started using AI a little more in their lives and see it for what it is.

    • FosterMolasses@leminal.space
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      1 day ago

      You know what’s crazy is that everyone has begun rebranding things that existed before AI as AI.

      The algorithm summary of a common question in Google results? Now it’s AI.

      Trello’s automation tasks moving items marked as “Done” to archive? Now it’s AI✨

      It’s idiotic lol

    • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      LLMs are neat, and useful for some things - but as with practically everything in modern society, capitalism is ruining it.

    • III@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      To be fair, given the power consumption it requires, it definitely leans towards civilization ending.

      • DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        We also have “the Internet” slurping up massive amounts of energy.

        Current Global Electricity Breakdown:

        • Total Data Center/Infrastructure Demand: Approximately 2.0% of global electricity.
        • AI-Specific Share: Roughly 0.5% of global electricity.
        • “Traditional” Internet/Cloud: Roughly 1.5% of global electricity.

        The Internet is also a tool that humanity uses. Should we shut that down too? (I would argue yes considering how the “Information Superhighway” somehow made the average person dumber, but that’s a different discussion.)

        • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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          Except the Internet is actually useful. AI has not shown that it deserves to use that insane amount of energy. It’s actually insane that you think AI isn’t an issue when it’s using 1/3rd as much energy as the ENTIRE INTERNET

    • imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Google at some point also was a great tool. Wikipedia also joins the rankings. LLM chatbots are great but certainly not the primary source of information.

      What annoys me is that people began to use them to not to do simple things like writing their own posts about their own things. They began to generate content instead of making it. It is obvious that anything what takes time to be produced, will most certainly be automated once tools are given. But this annoys the hell out of me.

      Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people. I can automate chats with my family, friends, colleagues, children. But that wont be me. That will be perfect grammar sentence generator, not me - real, tons of mistakes, typos, mostly renting about everything, passionate, bored, funny, witty, dull me.

      It saddens me that LLMs are exedcuting (almost?) final blow to a society that is sustaining social media terminal damage.

      • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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        12 hours ago

        They began to generate content instead of making it. […] [This] annoys the hell out of me.

        Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people.

        That is probably the greatest irritation I have with my wife right now. I don’t wanna start fights over it, but I also don’t make a secret of my disdain that she uses LLMs for her work. I get it, she has to, because her business requires churning out a lot of text quickly to stay competitive and I want her to succeed, but I hate what the internet has come to and I hate that she participates in that race to the bottom.

        typos, mostly renting about everything

        That is either a wonderful coincidence or a clever joke, but I love it either way.

      • DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Unfortunately we will always have problems explaining to people how to use the right tool for the right job.

        The old “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” saying still applies.

        Using LLMs to automate your social media is dumb as shit and I don’t understand why people are doing that. It is actively destroying social media. Which may be the natural end-state of a social media platform. Isn’t that why most of us are on Lemmy right now? Because of the state of Reddit and Xitter?

        Also, generative AI making art and music and literature is dumb as shit too. Why would you make an AI that does the fun stuff that humans actually want to do? I can’t wait to have AI finish playing BioShock for me…

    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      24 hours ago

      It’s also not the apocalypse […] It’s just a tool.

      So, the problem with tools is that their existence still affects the systems they’re a part of.

      For instance, war between the US and Russia is much more dangerous now (yes, it used to be dangerous before as well) because now we have nuclear bombs. We did a whole cold war thing about it. Nuclear bombs change the world even when they’re not being used.

      Similarly, meth is just a tool. It is entirely possible to smoke meth, not become addicted, have a great time, vacuum your entire house I guess, come down, chill, and move on with the rest of your life. But, that’s not what we would say meth’s effect on society is, is it?

      I am so happy that you are capable of using AI without becoming a psychopath. I am concerned about the psychopaths.

  • zeroConnection@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.

    They’re both “annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality” and they are spreading propaganda they picked up elsewhere.

  • Tiral@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I think AI has positives to help people, that being said I think it’s out of control currently. I hope the bubble burst soon and we can actually get to a reasonable balance.

    • deadymouse@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I hope the bubble burst soon and we can actually get to a reasonable balance.

      In fictional stories yes, in reality no. The only application that AI will find is to replace all employees, and people will be thrown out into the street.

  • GarboDog@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Humans are social animals, in the United States especially where people are severely separated- they’ll look for and find any kind of easy access towards social interactions: including but not limited to Chat bots. It’s a sad reality that they would dismiss the negative affects it has on our social brains, dismiss the environmental effects it has on our planet, dismiss the social warmings because they’re too involved with LLMS “AI”.

    That’s right, it’s not even AI; it’s only large language models or some agentic systems. Way smaller ones existed in the past, think Dr. Sbaitso (1992) or A.L.I.C.E. (1995.) it’s actually not hard to make a chat bot, just have it echo what the user says with some key phrases. That’s the whole existence of chat bots and today’s current “ai” only they have a LOT more variables that were generated off of huge randomly generated data sets (both off of free open sources and stolen data) and that’s what causes it to hallucinate: it’s the randomness that humans don’t have the ability to change or update simply because it’s such a huge list of variables. It’s so massive people think it’s real intelligence! PEOPLE WERE FOOLED ON 1990’s CHART BOTS TOO! 😭 😂

    Anywho we recommend the movies Desk Set, Space Odyssey, pi and even Alphaville. They’re related to the subject and they’re pretty good at pointing out the bruhs.

      • GarboDog@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If your point was to say “LLMs are good because it can hack into people’s PCs and make the world worse” I think you gotta start setting priorities towards finding some empathy.

        Besides it was not discovered by an LLM or AI. It was discovered by Taeyang Lee, researcher at Theori and then later refined into an exploit chain by the Xint Code Research Team, whom both used an “AI”-assisted analysis. So no LLMs didn’t magically find a decade old exploit, LLMs simply was used as a search function based on its trained module of the past coding assets and the logic bug in the Linux kernel.

        So yeah it’s basically a glorified search function at that point and if you can find peace fucking a search bar- hey man that’s your thing 🤷🏻‍♀️

        Our sources:

        • mirshafie@europe.pub
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          Holy shit, are you a professional strawman builder? Because you’re really good.

          An LLM helped fix a bug. That’s all we need to know. It’s useful. Saying so has nothing to do with empathy, lack thereof, or robosexuality or whatever the shit kids are in to these days.

          • GarboDog@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            idk about being a straw-man, but regardless the reply was addressing the misleading and not giving proper credit to the researchers and further giving that LLMs were used for analysis, not full on finding the exploit, so no LLMs aren’t good at finding exploits without clear search inquires by humans.

            As for the empathy and the robo-sexuality- It was the intentional point of the original comment that people find heavy social relation towards LLMs or other objects that are able to communicate back to them. Even in our examples of the movies they touch on romantically/sexual relations towards robots and a couple others point towards the empathy of them as well. PS these are topics from 1950’s not “whatever the shit kids are in to these days.” Most people affected by this are older generations and young adults without social netting.

            Turning it around phrasing that LLMs are useful towards finding exploits makes it sound more like your wanting to use LLMs for using said exploits rather than using LLMs for better use cases. Regardless its still not possible nor ever will be because again LLMs can only use predetermined variables based on its previous learning data set and random variables (PS those random variables that are undesirable are what is commonly called hallucination, its just unwanted variables in a huge spaghetti code.) Its even on the site your sourced:

            “Was this AI-found? AI-assisted. The starting insight — that splice() hands page-cache pages into the crypto subsystem and that scatterlist page provenance might be an under-explored bug class — came from human research by Taeyang Lee.”

            If we misread your interpretation then our mistake, however the phrasing felt more that you were praising AI for finding exploits and not for actual good use and it read out to us like an ethical issue.

            If making this stance clear that LLMs make more harm than good in the case of chat Bots and being used as full on replacements of people makes us a Straw-man than IG we’re a straw-man or whatever lol.

            Though we can probably agree that Machine Learning can, should and have been used since the 1950s as glorified search and calculation engines for complex equations and datasets. They can make really good use for generating and categorizing random protein molecules, find patterns in cancer research and even filter out examples astronomers find in the night sky; however its overall useless without a qualified and passionate researcher who knows their stuff and can double check their ML sifters.

            Sources for the saucy beans:

            ^edit, fixed a bit of formatting lol^

            • mirshafie@europe.pub
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              3 hours ago

              The strawman-building is that you’re extrapolating really, really far based on a tiny comment, and so you’re making wild assumptions that aren’t relevant to the conversation. The accusation that I’m hoping to be able to use LLMs to find bugs for nefarious reasons is far out. In fact, ironically, your text reads like something a badly (or maliciously) configured LLM would produce.

              I never claimed that somehow, unprompted, an LLM went out and found a bug. But LLMs are increasingly used as important tools in finding all kinds of problems in code. Going forward, as we get better at how to use these models, more bugs will likely be found. And if we can train other ML models on other kinds of data but with similar size, I think we’d be right to expect a lot.

              I have no doubt that misuse of LLMs and other machine learning models is widespread. The parapsychology aside, I’m worried about how it’s being used in war and targeting, which will only get worse.

              However I think it’s a bit disingenuous to portray LLMs as glorified search engines or autocorrect. It’s not wrong, it’s technically correct, but the utility is way beyond find-and-replace. It’s a bit like calling humans glorified tapeworms. Doesn’t really make for an interesting discussion.

              I also think you’re wrong in asserting that LLMs or other ML models can only be useful for researchers on the edge of their fields. I guess we’ll see.

  • RoddyStiggs@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    If people weren’t fucking stupid, these scams would eventually stop working.

    What’s it been, 4 years since NFTs? And AI morons are already falling for this shit.

    • bbb@sh.itjust.works
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      I lean anti-AI, but comparing generative AI to NFTs is very strange to me. Even if you didn’t intend to imply any similarity beyond both being scams, surely generative AI is at least a much more compelling scam.

      LLMs can now understand, to some extent, almost any text humans can. They might not be able to reason about it well, but they can at least translate it, summarize it, etc. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I’d have told you there was a near-zero chance of that happening within our lifetimes. NFTs were just “if we put baseball cards on the blockchain, people might buy them because of that same quirk of psychology.”

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        Transformers are like blockchain: an interesting use of mathematical principles to solve certain problems in a novel way, where the hype around that core attracts charlatans and scammers and combinations of the two traits who claim that it will go on to solve totally different problems in such a way as to revolutionize the world we live in.

        NFTs were the end of that line for blockchain where the machine started to eat itself. I can see a future, stable use of blockchain in some limited contexts, but cryptobros have always overstated the contexts in which that particular type of digital ledger can be more useful than other types of digital ledgers.

        We’ll see where the end of the road is for transformers, and what’s left at the end. I believe that computer inference will always be useful in some contexts, and that the advances in huge models with absurdly large numbers of parameters have unlocked some previously impractical tasks, but I could also see that settling into a general background existence as just another technological tool for doing things in a world that still looks pretty similar to the world today.

  • Lasherz@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    It’s usually bots. Unfortunately it’s not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn’t have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it’s usually enough evidence to ban. It’s just one of their current tells, I wouldn’t base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.

  • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Honestly, the problem when talking about “AI” is how many different things that can mean.

    • General AI chats
    • Coding agents
    • Automated pentesting/vulnerability discovery
    • Image/video/music generation
    • Grammar checking
    • Automated support agents (phone or chat)
    • Autonomous weaponry

    and so many more. Being Pro-AI could mean you like one or two application of the AI, but be against it in the others. I know very few people that like it for the use of media generation. However, there have been a lot of long time vulnerabilities in very popular open source projects that was only just discovered. That seems like a pretty undeniable use case demonstrating its usefulness.

    Then of course there’s governments that want to get their greedy blood thirsty hands on it to create autonomous weaponry. So now if you try to defend AI for a use case like defensively finding program vulnerabilities you somehow also have to defend AI weaponry?

    For a generic AI model, it is very powerful and can either be used to grow yourself or abused so your brain doesn’t have to work at all. You can use AI to do the hard work for you, or use it as a personal tutor to guide you into what to learn. People will of course mention hallucinations as why it can’t be used to learn, but you don’t have to take AI at its words. If you were to ask it to create a lesson plan on what you should study for a subject, in what order, and resources are available, you can do all of the actual learning using content the AI has no control over. So what you do with that is going to be up to the person, and opinions on it are going to vary wildly.

    Some people argue any use case is not okay given the various concerns of energy and water usage, and where those models sourced their training data. Not to mention if you support AI you must be supporting the AI companies. I agree there are concerns for the environmental impact, and the training data discussion is a long one on its own. However, I do think you can support AI as a technology, and not be okay with the way the technology is being done in regards to environmental impact. And given AI can be done on a local machine, I don’t think it has to be tied at all with the big tech at all.

    “AI” is such a wide and immense topic. And what we talk about with AI today will not be relevant come next year with how quickly it is developing. We shall see if some form of Moore’s law applied with the growth of AI as far as efficiency and quality of the AI goes.

    • clif@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      One of the first things I say when non tech people ask me about ““AI”” is :

      “The term AI here is just marketing wank”

  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    Current AI is unsuitable, but automation of some kind (maybe not AI) will be necessary for a nearly workless future. Life is kind of dumb as is, it’s better if we spent time in the gym, or doing yoga, or learning something, instead of spending life in the pesticide factory, then dying after 3 years of retirement from a horrific disease.

    • bss03@infosec.pub
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      1 day ago

      We already had (pre-2020) all the automation we needed to work less than 20 hr/wk and produce all the necessarily calories, fresh water, and housing for everyone. But, instead we chose to turn a few people into decabillionaires and continue to bicker over the scrap like we weren’t in a post-scarcity society.

      LLMs, transformers, convolution layers, characteristic tensors, etc. all have some legitimately novel uses, but all the big “AI” product lines are unethically developed, irresponsibly deployed, and dishonestly marketed.

      If you want an ethical chatbot, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM) .

      I don’t know of a ethical model that’s good for images or code, yet, but I know people are working on them. The IBM Gemini models are getting close, but I don’t know if IBM will ever get the training data completely “clean” / open / free.

      I’ve been told that StarCoder is an ethically-trained free software model, but some of my research ( https://mot.isitopen.ai/model/StarCoder ) contradicts that assertion, and I’ve not looked into it deep enough to resolve that conflict myself. (IMO, we don’t actually need automated code generation, we need to write less code in better languages with better tests and more reuse; but you may not agree.)

  • lovingisliving@anarchist.nexus
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    3 days ago

    People have different opinions on AI, not everyone is vehemently opposed, and some view it as useful if used on the appropriate configuration.

    • Fmstrat@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      The big difference for me is that “pro AI” is very different from “recognizing where AI is useful”.

      Can my little Intel B70 help me code faster? Yes. Super helpful.

      Can a cluster help analyze MRIs to catch things doctors don’t? Also yes.

      Can a giant data center replace writing 1MM easy emails while destroying the environment? Yes, but it probably shouldn’t.

      You can recognize value and the importance of regulation at the same time.

      • lovingisliving@anarchist.nexus
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        9 hours ago

        The problem is that there is a current developing dogma around AI that, because the last example you gave exists, then it must be opposed in all cases. There is a lack of nuance. That is why there may be some “pro-ai” posts, to point out this nuance. The only reason they exist is due to the bias against it as a whole.

      • lovingisliving@anarchist.nexus
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        3 days ago

        What part of what I said implies that I want bots to take the place of humans on social networks? What a very strange conclusion to jump to. I just think that AI has some useful applications.

  • mrmaplebar@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. Anecdotally, I think that the vast majority of people are indifferent about AI, some of them may find it to be a novel replacement for web searching, but almost nobody is interested in paying for generative AI (as evidenced by the AI companies hemorrhaging cash). If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.

    Sadly, there is a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.

    But for as many people as there that claim to be pro-AI, you simply don’t see people actively seek out AI-generated art, music, videos, or stories. I would argue that most of the consumers of AI content are people who have been unwittingly duped into reading/watching/listening to it

    For reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.

    AI psychosis is a documented problem.

    Finally, pro-AI people are infinitely more likely to use AI to generate spam and proganda in support of their worldview than people who are against it. Are we supposed to believe people that have AI girlfriends are above using AI to write bogus posts and comments?

    • finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.

      Elon Musk is making his typical wild promises again, this time about AI leading to UBI and abundance for everyone … as he makes money from xAI, of course.

      • Zos_Kia@jlai.lu
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        2 days ago

        They are all saying that since someone threatened to molotov Altman’s house, but at the same time they’re doing everything in their power to make sure nothing resembling ubi ever happens.

    • Malyca@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      My husband works with it, at an ai company, in an ai data center. He gushes about it 24/7. It’s even getting hard for him to defend.

    • Starya67@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I think the majority of people are pro AI and don’t give it a single thought. Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated and people don’t understand why you would point out that the guitarist had three arms.

      • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        24 hours ago

        I think it’s more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.

        People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don’t want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it’s being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it’s forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.

        Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn’t use AI features or didn’t find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.

        Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don’t believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or “fake news,” and using “slop” liberally and frequently.

        Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There’s been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it’s too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn’t matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.

        It’s probably safe to say that people don’t really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.

      • Cherry@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        I agree. It’s lazy and makes me hate it more. I don’t trust a content user doing it.

      • batshit@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated

        But why do you care? I don’t get it, when was the last time you cared about how a restaurant advert looked? It either has good food or doesn’t, who cares about their marketing? It has always been fake anyway

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    3 days ago

    This is nothing new actually, the same thing happend during the crypto boom.

    There’s slop users (autoclankers) and then there’s researchers or developers actually doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for 5+ years.

    I think it just seems that way because there’s always a clash on practically every post.

    Some people don’t see the inherent flaw in outsourcing their physical thoughts to a cloud model, or the massive economic bubble they are helping to create.

    But some people are doing some genuinely interesting things that would have otherwise been impossible several years ago just because AI and model training research got a huge boost for everyone the past few years.

    My personal favorite is a drone that rapidly identifies and counts produce plant quality, output, issues, etc for large farms with some brand spanking new image models, and it costs about as much as maybe a new toolbox. No one wants to manually weed through hundreds of acres to count buds and try to catch problems before its too late. It’s a great upgrade from doing random samples that misses a lot of data.

    On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.

    It’s like when you throw world and ml users into one post. They both think the other is louder, and also the big dumb lol.

    • audaxdreik@pawb.social
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      3 days ago

      On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.

      This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t really see anything inherently wrong with this. The scientists and engineers will continue doing their serious work regardless of public opinion, and while some of them may have tangentially benefited from from increased interest and funding in the field, most of it is going to these corporate LLM models which are taking up all the oxygen in the room.

      That’s a bubble that needs to burst. I think it’s more important to keep public sentiment rightfully focused in that direction. Let’s face it, you’re really not going to be able to educate the general public on these nuances. The field at large will persist regardless.

      • benjirenji@slrpnk.net
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        2 days ago

        If you don’t differentiate and keep the two in the same pot you won’t be able to fund research into the useful stuff. It’s true that consumer hype and research funding decisions are not the same, but they may be indirectly linked. A public fund may fear public outrage if it continues funding X millions of AI projects even if they’re not LLM related.

        So the reputation damage may affects viable, net positive applications.