I used to be so excited about tech announcements. Like...I should be pumped for ai stuff. Now I immediately start thinking about how they are going to use the thing to turn a profit by screwing us over. Can they harvest data with it? Can they charge a subscription for that? I'm getting so jaded.

AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want

The current implementation of very large data sets obtained through web scrapping, very aggressive marketing of these services such that the results pollute existing online data sets, and the refusal to tag AI generated content as such in order to make filtering it out virtually impossible is not going to enable great things.

This is just spam with the dial turned up to 11.

Capitalism can ruin anything

There's definitely an argument that privatization and profit motive have driven the enormous amounts of waste and digital filth being churned out at high speeds. But I might go farther and say there are very specific bad actors - people who are going above simply seeking to profiteer and genuinely have mega-maniacal delusions of AGI ruling the world - who are rushing this shit out in as clumsy and haphazard a manner as possible. We've also got people using AI as a culpability shield (Israel's got Lavendar, I'm sure the US and China and a few other big military superpowers have their equivalents).

This isn't just capitalism seeking ever-higher rents. Its delusional autocrats believing they can leverage sophisticated algorithms to dictate the life and death of billions of their peers.

These are ticking time bombs. They aren't well regulated or particularly well-understood. They aren't "intelligent", either. Just exceptionally complex. That complexity is both what makes them beguiling and dangerous.

I was gonna say, of all the things to be upset about AI, not enabling things that I want isn't one of them. I use it all the time and find it incredibly useful for boring tasks I don't care about doing myself. Just today I had to write some repetitive unit tests and it saved me a bunch of time writing syntax so I could focus on the logic. It sounds like OOP either hasn't used it much or doesn't have a use for it.

that doesn’t make the things it ruins intrinsically bad

Hmmm tricky, see for example https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/ where capitalism is very good at transforming everything and anything, including culture in this example, to preserve itself while making more money for the few. It might not indeed change good things to bad once they already exist, but it can gradually change good things to new bad things while attempting to make them look like the good old ones it replaces.

Electricity lead to more profits and eliminated jobs. Fuck capitalism.

I thought echo chambers were a bad thing?

As with anything, hating on AI is a spectrum. It's a love-hate relationship for me.

My head cannon is that AI = LLMS and machine learning = actually useful "artificial intelligence"

Absolutely! I hate cool and useful shit like OCR (optical character recognition for anyone who doesn't know) getting mixed with ~~content theft~~ generative AI

That would be nice. If you're talking about generative AI, then call it "generative AI" instead of simply "AI".

This is really more about what the public considers AI- generative AI bullshit.