I wish they would quit calling it AI. It’s not.

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.

I played around with it when it was a lot more abstract. I remember wombo had some neat art styles you could create images in. I didn’t realize home much shit was plageriszed though

The one thing I continue to love AI for is it is absolutely cracked at image recognition. Whats this plant? An aerial yam, duh! What’s this shower head? Well, the original manufacturer is gone but the exact same part is still being sold without a label - here’s the webpage we found a match on. That still amazes me.

But in general I hate how AI is just slowly rotting not just the internet and social media but just human talent and general. In 20 years we are not gonna have nearly as many young artists and writers because they have to compete with AI able to crank out slop for free. AI cannot (and in my opinion, almost by definition will never be able to) equal the very best artists and writers, but how are up and comers supposed to get to that level? Think of all the all time great creative people who started off just grinding as a cartoonist, background character, or pulp fiction writer. Those are gonna be the ones to go first. Instead of a, for example, 2 year pipeline to be able to scrape by pursuing a creative profession it could be a 10 year pipeline.

I liked AI before GPT3

It was fun playing with a terrible image/word generator

There’s a band called Celldweller that I really jammed to in 2018. They got kind of a cyberpunk/robot theme going on that I really liked (it’s just an aesthetic tho, they obviously don’t actually use any AI).
Anyways, they had a song called Pro-bots & Robophobes and when I heard it in 2018 I thought that I’d obviously be part of the Pro-bots. Haha, when actual AI came along I found out I was wrong on that assessment. I don’t think there has been a single explicitly AI thing that I have actually enjoyed. Even the AI code completion that all my coworkers really like has been nothing but a hassle, because it keeps hallucinating up very slight mistakes that are annoying to catch.

Generative AI always felt soulless to me, the only creative thing I use it for is RP since the days of dungeon AI before chat gpt was a thing.

I loved the image generation for about 20 minutes.

I use to watch neural learning videos on YouTube and found the work they were doing really interesting and over all good for computers. Then I saw OpenAI come out with their LLMs and chat bots and I wasn’t really a fan of them but I used them early on to get some familiarity with it and didn’t like that I had to Google everything and then feed it to the AI for it to get a somewhat decent answer. I don’t like that everyone is turning to AI to generate advertising and make ai slop memes. Also my sister had a psychotic episode after the bot affirmed her deepest insecurities and turned her against her family and friends. So like the sooner we run out of power to feed these monsters the better

I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

I am not against AI but I am against how it will be used. Bit of back story I have worked with “AI” type of learning software for the last decade and have seen how business evolve the software.

Great example is working with UCaaS and CCaaS, phone systems if you aren’t familiar. There is a little function known as metrics that providers can use to score agents and users calling in. By itself this is great knowledge to have as you can isolate what what is commonly said, build frequently asked questions for example or have an AI that can tell you those. However in the last five years or so I have seen this technology being used to abuse workers and not provide help to customers. These same metrics can now measure voice levels, frustration, activity level to extreme detail, verbiage, emotions, etc. It can build a spreadsheet report on who is a good worker vs bad. Now what it doesn’t consider is if the employee is having a bad day, going through a divorce, or something terrible that may be affecting them. Tech doesn’t care and will flag you as a bad employee if you drop below a threshold. And it remembers.

On the flip I have seen a demo of AI being used for emergency routing. Say someone calls with their cell to report a fire. The same AI tool with the right integrations can look where the caller is calling from. Pull up cctv or activate police cameras near. Identify if other calls in the immediate area are reporting issues. An example I saw within a minute of calling in the system would be able to provide all the info that the dispatcher needs to know even if the caller couldn’t tell them where. This tech could help save hundreds of thousands from accidents to domestic abuse.

What it boils down to is not the technology itself but WHO and HOW it will be used. So for all these people willy neely installing AI on every device because it is free look at recent example of tech being obsolete once it is no use to companies. You are being fed slop to make you comfortable with AI having access to everything, even intimate moments in your house. In the next decade when companies change how they are using AI it will be to late to claw back those freedoms.

Look up what is happening to Nest and Ring right now. Companies want to earn your trust with cheap products and fun but your best interest is not at the top of that list.

I don’t hate AI. It can be quite helpful when I go to where IT lives and ask it a question sometimes.

What I don’t want is that AI to have unlimited access to my devices and just be a ‘thing’ that is constantly watching me in the background.

It’s like if my neighbour is a mathematician, and I’m having trouble figuring out a complex equation. It’s very helpful that I can go next door and knock on his door to ask him. But that doesnt mean I want him sitting in my house forever looking over my shoulder.

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

I disliked it from the moment they called a glorified language database and collator “AI.”

Generative AI was vaguely funny when it created trippy, acid hallucination images and incoherent druggy ramblings of text. I know an author who fed their own content into an early LLM (small language model?) and the bizarre, yet undeniably “his” stuff it produced was worth a laugh. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, but it was kind of amusingly quirky.

What was depressing is how quickly people began to claim AI content was “theirs”. As someone who ran a fiction-creating community, people were so eager to latch on to what AI would spit out that they began to create convoluted things for the early models to “depict”.