@Techaltar Many consider it a war, and in war you pick a side. You start talking about details after you've won.

@Techaltar It helps to listen to people who actually use it. Not CEOs, not journalists, not activists, not influencers, not i-used-to-program celebrity coders

@Techaltar The techbro's aren't stupid. Of course they know it's no good at all (whether useless or not), they just don't care because it's so damn profitable for them.

@Techaltar

I think that the polarization is primarily because of the two camps being very vocal, while most users simply use it and gets on with their day.

I've got a local Ollama-installation running gpt-oss and mistral, and I generally use them as a souped-up search engine when I need to fetch and organise information from many sources - that saves me a lot of time, compared to doing the searches myself.

Speaking with other people in my professional orbit, that seems to be a common use, together with things like comparing business offers with what has been requested - did we remember everything they asked for, and did we format things in a easily read, informative way, e.g.

I can easily see the problems with AI being used to generate art or work that mimics the work of others, but I acknowledge that it is going to be hard to setup a legal framework that can stop this. Training AI models on things that are on the internet is basically using the open nature of the internet to your advantage, and I really have no idea about how to prevent that.

@Techaltar Lack of nuance? On the internet??

@Techaltar IMO the empirical evidence for option B can't be ignored. I don't think that the tech bros, except a few that are really lost to religious fervor, are to dump to understand that it is useless, they just can't act on that knowledge because that would pop the bubble. Trivial insight, I know.

Notably the few that do speak up note that the central problem of hallucinations can't be fixed with the current approach. I have read statements to that effect out of the Meta and Google camp.

@Techaltar it's not that it's useless, it's that it is dangerous. And I don't mean sci-fi movie dangerous, but "let's centralize all computation and knowledge with a few fascist companies and have the interaction with them be a manipulative chat bot". It scares me that people are relying on LLMs and that they are the ultimate manipulation tool owned by the least trustworthy people in the world. It scares me that they seem to destroy the alternatives to computation before they have a product

@Techaltar it's obviously overhyped, but I like the fact that it will put paparazzi and models out of a job.

@Techaltar AI that is just LLMs is useless because it's only useful if there is someone who checks whatever bs it males.

Neural Networks to adjust white balance of photos, remove background from the video or clean the audio recording is advanced algorithm and not some digital sentient being that can be called AI, but they are the most useful.

@Techaltar
It's hard to be excited about gAI. And when you know more there is less room for it.
AI it's been around for decades but it has always been for specific case/knowledge. Now, this has become a data Nyarlathotep that it's destroying so many things (art rights, economy, technology, nature, human rights e.g. Palantir...). The more you try to fix it the more you accept Dune's solution.

@Techaltar how about it's amazing and also unconscionable?

@Techaltar I think that AI is an incredibly cool technology but the current approach of just using general purpose massive LLMs to answer to prompts and hoping it'll consistently do useful work on its own is a dead end. Specialized models trained to utilize custom logic/plugin scripts (for actual precision and consistency) and relevant inputs set up by people who know what they're doing seems like the most powerful use case to me.
Is there something I'm blind to/missing?

@Techaltar I think the intensity of the hype shoulders much responsibility for creating both positions.

I lean towards the B end of the spectrum, but I'm happy to acknowledge that there do appear to be some genuine uses.

A lot of people in the B camp are just really angry, and even if their position is unreasonably absolutist, their anger isn't without justification. And maybe it's really this that they want to communicate.

Tangled up in this is the question of whether--even to the extent that gen AI has genuine uses--users would be prepared to pay the actual cost to run it. And that might (should?) be feeding into perceptions of whether it is actually useful or not.

@Techaltar I think there are quite a few people who think it has some use cases, and has been shown to be beneficial in those cases. But that nuance is lost in the flood of option A, which means if anyone says anything negative they get lumped into B.

@Techaltar yes, not sure why group A just doesn't realice their mistake

@Techaltar Mine is more that the ethical issues are serious enough that it taints it to the degree that it should not be used until those are resolved.

It also doesn’t help that we call everything AI, because there’s ML stuff that’s ethical and very useful but it’s now called the same as the toxic sludge that is being force fed to everyone.

@Techaltar If it makes you feel better there are some of us that see AI as an incredibly useful tool and the real problem is the lack of regulation on it and the problems with a person's individual data and IP that can be used for training without consent. I wish we could have more nuanced discussions about those things but the moment you start people assume you're on one side or the other, at least in my experience