this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.

A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.

If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Some hammers use enough energy to power a small country in order to show you a cake recipe without an entire backstory and 50 ads.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

Without ads for now

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Then it WAS worth it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

A cake recipe that instructs you to put non-toxic glue in it, and some small pebbles on top of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

This hammer does the same without using the energy of a small country https://theskullery.net

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Welcome to capitalism.

AI is the new thing, so cramming it into a product increase funding and/or stock price.

Even if it hurts the product.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

Even if it hurts the product

Because the product is not the product. The stock valuation is the product.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

It's more like Jefferson's dumbwaiter, in that it was created by someone who verbally supported an egalitarian utopian vision of society, but the device itself is a scale model of an exploitative social system. At one station of the device, unpaid/low-paid labor operates out of view of the user, and then at the other station, the user enjoys an almost-magical appearance of an answer to their request.

No tool is "just a tool", after all. In that way, AI is like a hammer.

(That section of the video leans heavily on Do Artifacts Have Politics?, which is a pretty short and accessible essay. If you're not convinced that artifacts do have politics, and you don't want to watch the video, just read a few paragraphs of the essay.)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Nope. It's more like that weird thing you brought at 3 am off of the Home Shopping Network because you were in a really bad place and thought it would make you feel better.

Now it's taking up space and you don't want to throw it out because that would mean you're a failure...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

It's not good at replacing your job, but good at convincing your boss that it can

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Basically what I said to people who asked me about my opinion on AI.

Exactly it was: "AI is a tool like a hammer. If you hit your finger, don't complain about the tool, but because you simply used it wrong."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Except AI is a pipe wrench pretending to be a hammer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

True.

And I get where you're going, but pipe wrenches are still way too useful in too many situations. AI is a like a disc brake compressor hand tool, being sold as the solution to everything else.

When I mention how much I like it for compressing a disc brake, I feel like people look at me like I'm crazy for falling off the hype train.

Edit: And by people, I mean AI hype shill bots, probably.

[–] ironhydroxide 2 points 5 months ago

Yes, but your disk brake compressor tool could also be a hammer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Sometimes it is more like "AI is like a hammer in a world full of screws."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (4 children)

calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.

Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.

It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.

Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.

Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (10 children)

you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Or called our mobile phones "cell phones", despite not being organic. Tsk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Except cell phones or cellular phones refer to the structure a mobile network is built on: a mesh of cell towers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

pretty sure that they were and still are called Bots though, atleast in the context of first person shooter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

look at the NBT tags for bats for example. it means artificial intelligence.

https://www.digminecraft.com/data_tags/bat.php

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

next thing you gonna say that boids are AI too...

just because Mojang decided to name that flag noAI doesn't mean it uses AI to govern its behavior.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Descriptivism advocates when AI smhingmyheads

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

They are neural networks which are some of the oldest AI tech we have.

You can hate them, but they are by definition AI.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.

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