I don’t hate AI itself, but the amount of AI slop ruining the internet gives me a negative feeling about it whenever I see it. I used to enjoy fucking around with the early pre-2021 GANs, diffusion models and GPT3 playground before ChatGPT was around and actually liked the crazy dreamlike nonsense they made, but now it all feels like dead soulless crap getting used to replace humans. Probably going to get super downvoted for admitting to ever liking AI image gens lmao
The history of the field has made important contributions to how modern computing works. Optimizing compilers, multitasking, and virtual machines all directly comes out of work that started with AI. Even if you don’t use all of these directly, you benefit from them just by using a computer built after 1980.
If you’re interested, I’d recommend Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, particularly the first two sections that are about MIT CSAIL. The third section is about the Sierra games studio, which has its own historical interest, but not really relevant here (and for various reasons, that part of the book hasn’t aged as well, IMO).
I don’t like the part of the field that has been weaponized against the working class. Which is almost everything that gets headlines right now. There are still good researchers doing good work who should be praised. They’re just not the ones “publishing papers” on Anthropic’s web site.