Fuck AI

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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

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Google's AI enables scammers. (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 5 days ago (3 children)

This is why "AI" should be avoided at all cost. It's all bullshit. Any tool that "hallucinates" - I. E. Is error strewn - is not fit for purpose. Gaming the AI is just the latest example of the crap being spewed by these systems.

The underlying technology has its uses but its niche and focused applications, nowhere near as capable or as ready as the hype.

We don't use Wikipedia as a primary source because it has to be fact checked. AI isn't anywhere as near accurate as Wikipedia.so why use it?

[–] brbposting 18 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The underlying technology has its uses

Yes indeed agreed.

Sometimes BS is exactly what I need! Like, hallucinated brainstorm suggestions can work for some workflows and be safe when one is careful to discard or correct them. Copying a comment I made a week ago:

I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.

Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.

In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/

A good read about ai summarizing.

[–] brbposting 1 points 4 days ago

Super interesting, I have to get into all those links. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

Because some are lazy fucks

[+] [email protected] -10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Gotta tell you, you made a fairly extreme pronouncement against a very general term / idea with this:

"AI" should be avoided at all cost

Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? It sounds, to me, like this - "Vague idea I poorly understand ('AI') should be 'avoided' (???) with disregard for any negative consequences, without considering them at all"

Cool take you've got?

Edit to add: whoops! Just realized the community I'm in. Carry on, didn't mean to come to the precise wrong place to make this argument lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Listen, I know that the term "AI" has been, historically, used to describe so many things to the point of having no meaning, but I think, given the context, it is pretty obvious what AI they are referring to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Well, fair enough, folks seem to agree with you and that commenter. I'm not being deliberately uncharitable, "avoid AI at all costs" seems both poorly defined and hyperbolic to me, even given the context. Scams and inaccuracy are a problem in lots of situations, Google search results have been getting increasingly bad to the point of unusable for a while now (I'd argue long before LLM saturation), and I've personally been getting mileage with some LLMs, already at kind of an early stage, over wading through every crappy search result.

I wouldn't call myself an enthusiast or on the hype train, I work in the industry. But it's clearly useful, while clearly having many tradeoffs (energy use maybe much worse than inaccuracy / scam potential), and "avoid at all cost" is silly to me. But cheers, happy to simply disagree!