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AI is like a hammer (sh.itjust.works)

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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[-] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 63 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] ieatpwns@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

Without ads for now

[-] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Then it WAS worth it.

[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

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

[-] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 2 months ago

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

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] vzq 17 points 2 months ago

Even if it hurts the product

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

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 19 points 2 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.)

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 17 points 2 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...

[-] suzune@ani.social 7 points 2 months ago

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."

[-] snooggums@midwest.social 7 points 2 months ago

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

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

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

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago

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

[-] 0laura@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

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

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

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

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Software developer, here.

It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.

I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.

[-] celliern@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

LLMs are part of AI, which is a fairly large research domain of math/info, including machine learning among other. God, even linear regression can be classified as AI : that term is reeeally large

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I mean, I guess the way people use the term "AI" these days, sure, but we're really beating all specificity out of the term.

[-] celliern@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

This is a domain research domain that contain statistic methods and knowledge modeling among other. That's not new, but the fact that this is marketed like that everywhere is new

AI is really not a specific term. You may refer as global AI, and I suspect that's what you refer to when you say AI?

[-] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

it's always been this broad, and that's a good thing. if you want to talk about AGI then say AGI.

[-] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I know that they're "autocorrect on steroids" and what that means, I don't see how that makes it any less ai. I'm not saying that LLMs have that magic sauce that is needed to be considered truly "intelligent", I'm saying that ai doesn't need any magic sauce to be ai. the code controlling bats in Minecraft is called ai, and no one complained about that.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

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

[-] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

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

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

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Descriptivism advocates when AI smhingmyheads

[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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.

[-] lmaydev@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

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

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

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

uhm no, AI is relaying on neural networks (which are just weighted gates) but Neural Networks are not by definition AI.

[-] lmaydev@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

I'm sorry but they absolutely are.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

sorry, but I disagree.

[-] aaaa@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

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)

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 2 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.

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

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

[-] hahattpro@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I am really piss off when Reddit use AI to shadowbanned my account. They never tell the reason. They just hide my interaction to outerworld, assuming that i am dumb and never found out.

As a result, all subsequent accounts i try to create are shadowbanned after 5 minutes because my phone in blacklist.

[-] hahattpro@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Appeals everyday but never get responded. I am sure all of this is handling by AI.

this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
136 points (100.0% liked)

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