Most of the hate is coming from people who don't really know anything about "AI" (LLM) Which makes sense, companies are marketing dumb gimmicks to people who don't need them and, after the novelty wore off, aren't terribly impressed by them.

But LLMs are absolutely going to be transformational in some areas. And in a few years they may very well become useful and usable as daily drivers on your phone etc, it's hard to say for sure. But both the hype and the hate are just kneejerk reactionary nonsense for the moment.

Eh, most of the marketing around ai is complete bullshit, but I do use it on a regular basis for my work. Several years ago it would have just been called machine learning, but it saves me hours every day. Is it a magic bullet that fixes everything? No. But is it a powerful tool that helps speed up the process? Yes.

I've lately tested AI if it can allow me to practice Russian in a natural sounding dialogue. While it didn't sound 100% human (it was too formal and technical), it was a good practice.

So I wouldn't say that it can't be used for good things.

There are plenty of applications for machine learning, logic engines, etc. They've been used in many industries since the 1970s.

This post isn't contributing to a healthy environment in this community.

Well thought out claim -> good source -> good discussion

LLMs helped me with coding and debugging A LOT. I'd much rather use AI than have to try and parse stack exchange and a bunch of other web forums or developer documentation directly. AI is incredible when i get random errors and paste them in to say "fix this" and it does and tells me HOW and WHY it did what it did.

I mean the students around me, that would have failed by now without chatgpt probably DO want it. But they dont actually want the consequences that come with it. The academic world will adapt and adjust, kind of like inflation. You can just print more money, but that wont actually make everyone richer long term.

ITT: LLM helps me with mundane tasks so fuck the enormous energy requirements and its impact on environment!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bethkindig/2024/06/20/ai-power-consumption-rapidly-becoming-mission-critical/

you're leaving out the main question: do they increase profit? YES.

so nothing anyone says matters. prepare your anus

Yeah... who doesn't love moral absolutism... The honest answer to all of these questions is, it depends.

Are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable:

AI doesn't just exist of LLMs, which are indeed notoriously expensive to train and run. Using an image generator for example can be done on something as simple as a gaming grade GPU. And other AI technologies are already so light weight your phone can handle them. Do we assign the same negativity to gaming even though it's just people using electricity for entertainment? Producing a game also costs a lot more than it does for an end user to play. It's all about the balance between the two. And yes, AI technologies should rightfully be criticized for being wasteful, such as implementing it in places that it has no business in, or foregoing becoming more efficient.

The ethicality of AI is also something that is a deeply nuanced topic that has no clear consensus. Nor does every company that works with AI use it in the same way. Court cases are pending, and none have been conclusive thus far. Implying it is one sided is just incredibly dishonest.

but do they enable great things that people want?

This is probably the silliest one of them all, because AI technologies are ground breaking in medical research. They are seemingly pivotal in healing the sick people of tomorrow. And creative AIs allow people who are creative to be more creative. But they are ignored. They are shoved to the side because they don't fit in the "AI bad" narrative. Even though we should be acknowledging them, and seeing them as the allies they are against big companies trying to hoard AI technology for themselves. It is these companies that produce problematic AI, not the small artists, creatives, researchers, or anyone using AI ethically.

but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons?

Who, exactly? You must realize there are far more parties than Google, Meta and Microsoft that create AI right? Companies and groups you've most likely never heard of before, creating open source AI for everyone to benefit from, not just those hoarding it for themselves. It's just so incredibly narrow minded to assign maliciousness to such a large group of people on the basis of what technology they work with.

Maybe you're not being negative enough

Maybe you are not being open minded enough, or have been blinded by hate. Because this shit isn't healthy. It's echo chamber level behaviour. I have a lot more respect for people that don't like AI, but base it on rational reasons. There's plenty of genuinely bad things about AI that have to be addressed, but instead you have to find yourself in a divide between people cuddling very close with spreading borderline misinformation to get what they want, and genuine people that simply want their voice and concerns about AI to be heard.

I've used LLMs to save me hours of time reformatting text and old notes, and restructure explanations so I can better understand and share them, used AI speech to text models to transcribe my voice notes, and used diffusion models to generate better quality mockups for designs that were later commissioned in better quality, with no need for any changes.

I can understand not liking AI, or not needing it yourself, but acting as if it has no use is frankly ridiculous. You might not use it, but other people do.

I think this says more about corporation's attempts to integrate "AI" into everything, instead of it being a user choice, than it does about the technology itself.

I am on an internship with like really nice people in a company that does sustainable stuff.

But they honestly have a list of AI tools they plan to use, to make automated presentations... like wtf?

Most AI is being developed to try to sustain the need for content for social networks. The bots are there to make it feel lived in so they can advertise to you. They are running out of people who are willing to give them free content while they make billions off your art. So then, they just replace the artist.

Ok. Been thinking about this and maybe someone can enlighten me. Couldn't LLMs be used for code breaking and encryption cracking. My thought is language has a cadence. So even if you were to scramble it to hell shouldn't that cadence be present in the encryption? Couldn't you feed an LLM a bunch of machine code and train it to take that machine code and look for conversational patterns. Spitting out likely dialogs?