this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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AI
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.
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I guess it's fine as long as AI can be productive. Maybe one day we'll find out. The LLMs that are widely available have not gotten there yet.
I think they have some objective use. It's been a long while since I've had to front-to-back a device manual. Now I just dump it into the llm and use it as a easy natural language search indexer for the content with built in summary features.
I meant productive in the sense that they add more value than their cost. I don't think they are useless.
Considering the cost, at least in a vacuum, is a few hours of my time setting up a local model to run on a gpu I already had (pretty pixels make me go "Ooooooo Aaaaaahhh") vs 8+ hours of reading a manual for an appliance I'm going to configure once; I'd say it's objectively a productive tool in it's current capacity. If you mean to say productive for society I've no clue, and I think there's far too many variables for any person to reasonably know.
I can think of lots of individually useful and productive cases, yours included, but i mean more the widespread adoption and integration of the current generation of llms may cost more in resources than it puts out economically. Actual intelligence will come when we advance, not by throwing ever greater amounts of compute at what are just slightly better versions of what was available 3 years ago, but by radical and as yet unseen changes to the way the models function.