Is It Just Me?
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On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT's, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD's. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it's still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don't think I've ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I'm not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It's "oh this is a neat little feature I can use" not "this technology is going to change my life" the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM's being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because "AI" will be ruined.
VR was and is also still a very inaccessible tool for most people. It costs a lot of money and time to even get to the point where you're getting the intended VR experience and that is what it mostly boils down to: an experience. It isn't convenient or useful and people can't afford it. And even though there are many gamers out there, most people aren't gamers and don't care about mounting a VR headset on their cranium and getting seasick for a few minutes.
AI is not only accessible and convenient, it is also useful to the everyday person, if the AI doesn't hallucinate like hell, that is. It has the potential to optimize workloads in jobs with a lot of paperwork, calculations and so on.
I completely agree with you that AI is being pushed very aggressively in ways we haven't seen before and that is because the tech people and their investors poured a lot of money into developing these things. They need it to be a success so they can earn their money back and they will be successful eventually because everybody with money and power has a huge interest in this tool becoming a part of everyday life. It can be used to control the masses in ways we cannot even imagine yet and it can earn the creators and investors a lot of money.
They are already making AI computers. According to some it will entirely replace the types of computers we are used to today. From what I can understand, it will be preferable to the open AI setups we have currently that are burning our planet to a crisp with the amount of data centers that need to keep them active. Supposedly the AI computer will have it be a local thing on the laptop and it will therefore demand less resources, but I'm so fucking skeptic about all this shit that I'm waiting to see how much power a computer with an AI operating system will need to swallow in energy. I'm too tech-ignorant to understand the ins and outs of what this and that means, but we are definitely going to have to accept that AI is here to stay and the current setup with open AIs and forced LLM's in every search engine is a massive environmental nightmare. It probably won't stop or change a fucking lick because people don't give a fuck as long as they are comfortable and the companies are getting people to use their trash tech just like they wanted so they won't stop it either.
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I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.
I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.
I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.
For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".
Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.
And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.
What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine.
I don’t think it’s temporary. That was the whole goal - suck up everybody’s work, dark-magick it into a chatbot and voilá: no more need for anyone’s webpage.
The fact that it's broken what was working is more than just a metaphor for gen-AI in any setting. It’s fundamentally changed it for the worse and we’ll never get the unfucked version back.
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Yes, you're the weird one. Once you realize that 43% of the USA is FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE you start realizing why people are so enamored with AI. (since I know some twat is gonna say shit: I'm using the USA here as an example, I'm not being us-centric)
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population (don't get started on 'hallucinations'...do you know how many hallucinations the average person has every day?!) -- and is stupider than the top 20% of the population.
The top 20%, wonder if everyone has lost their fucking minds, because to them it looks like it is completely worthless.
It's more just that the top 20% are naive to the stupidity of the average person.
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population
"Smartness" and illiteracy are certainly different things, though. You might be incapable of reading, yet be able to figure out a complex escape room via environmental cues that the most high quality author couldn't, as an example.
There are many places an AI might excel compared to these people, and many areas it will fall behind. Any sort of unilateral statement here disguises the fact that while a lot of Americans are illiterate, stupid, or even downright incapable of doing simple tasks, "AI" today is very similar, just that it will complete a task incorrectly, make up a fact instead of just "not knowing" it, or confidently state a summary of a text that is less accurate than first grader's interpretation.
Sometimes it will do better than many humans. Other times, it will do much worse, but with a confident tone.
AI isn't necessarily smarter in most cases, it's just more confident sounding in its incorrect answers.
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On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT's, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD's. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it's still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don't think I've ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I'm not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It's "oh this is a neat little feature I can use" not "this technology is going to change my life" the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM's being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because "AI" will be ruined.
AI's biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza. It's both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that's fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. "Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting," all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
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Billionaires: invests heavily in water.
Billionaires: "In the future there's going to be water wars. You need to invest NOW! Quick before it's too late. I swear I'm not just trying to pump the stock."
Billionaires: "Water isn't accruing value fast enough. Let's invent a product that uses a shit ton of it!"
Billionaires: "No one likes or is using the product. Force them to. Include it in literally all software and every website. Make it so they're using the product even when they don't know they're using it. Include it in every web search. I want that water gone by the end of this quarter!"
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Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don't have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
You're probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don't really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use "AI" to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, though.
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Do you also check if they listen to Joe Rogan? Fox news? Nobody can be trusted. AI isn't the problem, it's that it was trained on human data -- of which people are an unreliable source of information.
AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples. You're not wrong about Fox news and how corporate and Russian backed media distorts the truth and pushes false narratives, and you're not wrong that AI isn't the problem, but it is certainly a problem and a big one at that.
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Do you also check if they listen to Joe Rogan? Fox news? Nobody can be trusted. AI isn't the problem, it's that it was trained on human data -- of which people are an unreliable source of information.
Joe Rogan doesn't tell them false domain kowledge
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
I do agree with them that stealing may not be the right word, isn't plagiarism more accurate? But plagiarism is generally considered theft so it probably doesn't matter. I just found it really interesting that I personally haven't really given much thought to the semantics of theft when no physical object is involved even though it's been discussed for like centuries atp
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You're probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don't really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use "AI" to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, though.
Actually, I am using waistline, but there are some food I can't find and are hard to find nutritional values, and I am bad at guessing anything
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The orphan crushing machine needs its line go up as much as everyone else, don't be mean to it!
Why would you want to stop enhancing it? How else can we get those sweet stories about heroes saving orphans? Have you seen the news lately! We NEED this.
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Me and the homies all hate ai. The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially just snapchat filters. Those people couldn’t muster a single fuck about the harms ai has done though.
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Have you heard of these things called humans? I think this is more a reflection of them. Books ate trees and corrupted the youth, tv rotted your brain and made you go blind, the internet made people lazy. Wait until I tell you about gasp auto-correct or better yet leet speak! The horror. Clearly we are never recovering from either of those. In fact, I’m speaking to you now in emojis. And wait until you learn about clutches pearls Wikipedia— ah the horror!
Is tech and its advancements perfect? No. Can people do better? Yes. Are criticisms important? Sure are. But panic and fighting a rising tech? You’re probably not going to win.
Spend time educating people on how to be more ethical with their tech use and absolutely pressuring companies to do the same. Taking a club to a computer didn’t stop the rise of the word processor or the spread of Wikipedia madness. But we can control how we consume and relate to tech and what our demands of their creators are.
PS— do you even know how to read and write cursive? > punchable smug face goes here. <
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AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples. You're not wrong about Fox news and how corporate and Russian backed media distorts the truth and pushes false narratives, and you're not wrong that AI isn't the problem, but it is certainly a problem and a big one at that.
AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples.
SO DO PEOPLE.
Tell me one of the things that AI does, that people themselves don't also commonly do each and every day?
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Joe Rogan doesn't tell them false domain kowledge
LOL riiiiiight.
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Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don't have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
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Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population
"Smartness" and illiteracy are certainly different things, though. You might be incapable of reading, yet be able to figure out a complex escape room via environmental cues that the most high quality author couldn't, as an example.
There are many places an AI might excel compared to these people, and many areas it will fall behind. Any sort of unilateral statement here disguises the fact that while a lot of Americans are illiterate, stupid, or even downright incapable of doing simple tasks, "AI" today is very similar, just that it will complete a task incorrectly, make up a fact instead of just "not knowing" it, or confidently state a summary of a text that is less accurate than first grader's interpretation.
Sometimes it will do better than many humans. Other times, it will do much worse, but with a confident tone.
AI isn't necessarily smarter in most cases, it's just more confident sounding in its incorrect answers.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah, when I refer to intelligence here I don't mean actual intelligence. AI isn't "smart" (it's not intelligent in the classic sense, it doesn't even think), it's just good at regurgitating what it's been trained on.
But it turns out -- That's kind of what humans do too. It's worth having a philosophical discussion on what intelligence REALLY is.
It's also much less incorrect than your average person would be on a much larger library of content. I think the real litmus test for AI is to compare it to an average person. The average person messes up constantly; also likely covers it up or course-corrects after they've screwed up. I don't think it's fair to expect perfectly correct responses out of AI at all; because there is absolutely no human that could reach those heights at an equal level. Look at competitive knowledge games where AI competes - it stomps some of our most intelligent people, and quite often.
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Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
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AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples.
SO DO PEOPLE.
Tell me one of the things that AI does, that people themselves don't also commonly do each and every day?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Real researchers make up studies to cite in their reports? Real lawyers and judges cite fake cases as precedents in legal preceding? Real doctors base treatment plans on white papers they completely fabricated in their heads? Yeah I don't think so, buddy.
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Actually, I am using waistline, but there are some food I can't find and are hard to find nutritional values, and I am bad at guessing anything
In that case, I'd say just find any food that's just similar enough, and use that. It's better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
