I’m curious to get a general pulse on how people here view the rapid evolution of AI, specifically on lemmy. On one side, there’s growing interest in local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools. On the other, there seems to be a growing list, I can’t keep track of, that are seen as major concerns. I’m not here to pick sides or be biased in one corner. Im genuinely curious what people have to say about AI in general. And maybe it will help me and other get a better handle on how we perceived it in our ever changing world.
everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.
at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.
gone are the days of “this meeting could’ve been an email” because they won’t (or can’t) read the email.
so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.
The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.
Broadly speaking, fuck AI
AGI doesn’t exist and is not being developed, but the idiots with all the money and power believe it is. Their stupidity and insistence on feeding all our resources to this stuff is gonna kill us all.
I refuse to use AI as a tool for anything other than making tools.
I can’t write LISP but I use AutoCAD. I use an LLM to write LISP routines.
I spent MONTHS looking for a way to catalog my plant collection. Tried a dozen open source projects and none did what I wanted it to do. So I used Claude to make a simple database website…and it was able to add a ton of pipe dream features.
Nothing I make is for sale and I don’t claim it as my own. They’re tools for ME to use. And the important part is that once the tool is done, the LLM gets closed.
There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.
Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.
Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.
Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.
If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.
The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.
It reminds me of early 90s PCs…
Everyone was convinced if you “knew how to computer” that’s all you needed. Every school bought a shit ton, and kids would get an hour a day to just dick around and play games.
None of the adults understand any of it, so we grew up learning to be thech support for the people teaching it to us.
AI will eventually end up like PCs, it won’t be a magic solution, but it will drastically cut down on available jobs and transfer wealth to the wealthy.
The smart move is to sit it out till someone actually makes it profitable, then we could dump billions into it now. We can’t beat China because their companies actually have to compete with each other.
We should wait till the dust settles over there, then dump the money on copying what they do. Just manufacturing whatever chips design they settle on.
Racing R&D with zero manufacturing just isn’t logical.
I think LLMs are going to cause massive change, not all of it good.
Ultimately, I’m an optimist. I think in the long run, LLMs are going to enable us to do amazing things that we wouldn’t have been able to do without them. In the short term… I dunno. It’s going to be a rough transition.
I do think the people who think LLMs are going to keep getting better, leading to either some sort of techno-utopia, or kill us all off maybe don’t really understand how they work and what the implications are.
I also think the people who are categorically against AI are making a mistake out of fear, but that’s pretty understandable.
On one side…
On the other…
I’m a shameless local LLM shill. I have one loaded right now, experimenting with it.
I also thought Sam Altman was a psychopath before that was the popular opinion, and have never subscribed to OpenAI or even used their free UIs. Not once. Not even the “original” GPT 3.5.
I don’t plan on ever doing it. I will rail against them.
In other words, the sides aren’t mutually exclusive.
One can hate “AI” with a burning passion, using the term AI pejoratively. And be passionate about local ML.
“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”
In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.
The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.
Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.
It works for basic tasks like correcting grammar, sorting lists, etc, but it makes too many mistakes when you try to use it for a complex task.
I don’t really use it personally (other than times I log in on a work computer, look something up, and Google’s AI search defaults). But I also don’t really condemn it as strongly as others seem to, I guess. It depends on how it’s used.
When it’s used to take work done by humans, then regurgitate its own version of that work to replace those jobs, that’s a problem. If actual artists, writers, designers, engineers, coders, etc. can no longer earn a living after being replaced by AI, we run the risk of complete cultural and developmental stagnation.
But I think my main point of disagreement with a lot of the AI conversations happening here revolves around how we look at waste and environmental impact. Not in the sense that AI isn’t still a problem in those aspects, but that it seems like a very convenient boogeyman for people to blame while ignoring the myriad other wasteful aspects of the world we live in.
Basically, with the environmental impact of data centers and energy costs of hardware in general, why do we focus so much on what that compute is used for, as opposed to addressing those issues in a more comprehensive sense? Does it matter if a data center is built for AI or for any other hosting provider? Or if someone runs a local AI model on their PC, is that any more detrimental to the environment than someone who plays video games for several hours each day?
I feel like there are lines that people who claim to primarily care about the environment are afraid to draw, when it’s easier to pin the blame wholly on AI. So if someone says that they used AI to help make their spreadsheets cleaner, to translate a website, or to summarize the content of a book, I don’t really jump straight to blanket criticism. Otherwise I’d have to take the same criticism towards people who host a plex server, who play MMOs, or who run Lemmy instances.
You are not going to get a general pulse here. This is a fuck ai echo chamber. I am not saying that the sentiment is wrong, but it isn’t representative of the general public.
“Generative AI” is a bullshit scam with no future. The sooner it dies, the better. And to call the bubble “unsustainable” is to understate.
“AI” is way too vague a term to give a “take” on.
Currently? Frank Herbert
