My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.

Don't thrown all crypto under the bus. Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient.

Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything

lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.

Eh I’m fine with the illegal harvesting of data. It forces the courts to revisit the question of what copyright really is and hopefully erodes the stranglehold that copyright has on modern society.

Let the companies fight each other over whether it’s okay to pirate every video on YouTube. I’m waiting.

They're not illegally harvesting anything. Copyright law is all about distribution. As much as everyone loves to think that when you copy something without permission you're breaking the law the truth is that you're not. It's only when you distribute said copy that you're breaking the law (aka violating copyright).

All those old school notices (e.g. "FBI Warning") are 100% bullshit. Same for the warning the NFL spits out before games. You absolutely can record it! You just can't share it (or show it to more than a handful of people but that's a different set of laws regarding broadcasting).

I download AI (image generation) models all the time. They range in size from 2GB to 12GB. You cannot fit the petabytes of data they used to train the model into that space. No compression algorithm is that good.

The same is true for LLM, RVC (audio models) and similar models/checkpoints. I mean, think about it: If AI is illegally distributing millions of copyrighted works to end users they'd have to be including it all in those files somehow.

Instead of thinking of an AI model like a collection of copyrighted works think of it more like a rough sketch of a mashup of copyrighted works. Like if you asked a person to make a Godzilla-themed My Little Pony and what you got was that person's interpretation of what Godzilla combined with MLP would look like. Every artist would draw it differently. Every author would describe it differently. Every voice actor would voice it differently.

Those differences are the equivalent of the random seed provided to AI models. If you throw something at a random number generator enough times you could--in theory--get the works of Shakespeare. Especially if you ask it to write something just like Shakespeare. However, that doesn't meant the AI model literally copied his works. It's just doing it's best guess (it's literally guessing! That's how work!).

Oh, and it also hallucinates.

Oh, and people believe the hallucinations.

I see the "AI is using up massive amounts of water" being proclaimed everywhere lately, however I do not understand it, do you have a source?

My understanding is this probably stems from people misunderstanding data center cooling systems. Most of these systems are closed loop so everything will be reused. It makes no sense to "burn off" water for cooling.

most LLM's for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.

As for practical use, the things can't do math so they're useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can't imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.

I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it's reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.

I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.

I mean, it's our work the result should belong to the people.

This is where "universal basic income" comes into play

Dead Internet theory has never been a bigger threat. I believe that’s the number one danger - endless quantities of advertising and spam shoved down our throats from every possible direction.

The real issues are capitalism and the lack of green energy.

If the arts where well funded, if people where given healthcare and UBI, if we had, at the very least, switched to nuclear like we should've decades ago, we wouldn't be here.

The issue isn't a piece of software.

Welcome to every technological advancement ever applied to the workforce