Let me preface that I hate AI on what it could do to arts, especially I hate its bland writing style. A third of the music on Spotify is AI and majority can’t tell if it’s AI. But LLM/AI or however one calls it, only in Lemmy do I see seething hate and refuse to acknowledge its potential. Most people I spoke to outside of the platform also dislike AI but see its potential and agree that the current models are overrated. Many agree it will probably take years or decades to see bigger improvement.
Lemmy, on the other hand, as much as I love the community, is an echo chamber of pure dismissal and rage on AI believing it will amount to nothing. It’s only in Lemmy I see this behaviour. One person even said bacteria has more consciousness than AI, which is ridiculous because bacteria clearly don’t have the same level of consciousness and context as AI, however the latter has little of. I see many dismissive scoff and straw man arguments that it will never improve; but the same was told of automobiles, planes and renewable energy. Their initial models were terribly bad because of the limitations of the time but now huge strides of improvements are made despite taking years. The AI also clearly has limits but don’t see any reason why the same hurdles won’t be surmounted in years to come.
Again, I hate AI on what negative impact it could do to human society, especially because many of the models are owned by select few. But it’s burying in the head not to see its potential. Because if there isn’t any, techbros or not, governments across the world would not be racing to adopt them. AI had been effectively used in the war in Ukraine. And governments would not want race to implement AI surveillance. So, if there is no potential, why are the big wigs wasting time and energy on AI at all?
I’m convinced that many Lemmy is experiencing the uncanny valley on AI and doesn’t realise it. Plus, and I’m going to be blunt, a huge portion of Lemmy are of older demographics so there is probably a disdain on novelty that many Lemmy folks are not self-aware of.
Those are valid criticisms. But most Lemmy think AI as technology is dead end, which is unreasonable.
LLMs are, in fact, a dead end. They cannot produce more than autocorrect. The summation of all written works of humanity has turned out to be average sycophancy at best. They fail the most basic tests of competency in language, and the most basic tests of competency in all other things. Do other GAN and GAN-like Machine learning algorithms we’ve all lumped into the poorly termed “AI” have some promise? Sure.
Pattern recognition will always be useful to some extent as a first-line diagnostic tool for further human intervention, e.g. Cancer-finding image GANs. But this is “AI” in the same way your smart toaster that “learned” to just turn off the heating element early since you press cancel way too soon is “AI.”
The absolute best case scenario for AI at the moment, given all indicators of its capability and limitations, as scientifically proven and tested, is the mass genocide of a large part of the lower classes via AI weaponry gone wrong, since we’re officially at the point of western armies using autonomous “AI” to target and kill humans. That’s the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is we continue to waste massive amounts of resources and energy basically creating the weapons of our own oppression that the ruling class will use to crush any possible resistance once they realize AI cannot, objectively, do any possible useful work for them.