I believe AI is going to be a net negative to society for the forseeable future. AI art is a blight on artistry as a concept, and LLMs are shunting us further into search-engine-overfit post-truth world.

But also:

Reading the OOP has made me a little angry. You can see the echo chamber forming right before your eyes. Either you see things the way OOP does with no nuance, or you stop following them and are left following AI hype-bros who'll accept you instead. It's disgustingly twitter-brained. It's a bullshit purity test that only serves your comfort over actually trying to convince anyone of anything.

Consider someone who has had some small but valued usage of AI (as a reverse dictionary, for example), but generally considers things like energy usage and intellectual property rights to be serious issues we have to face for AI to truly be a net good. What does that person hear when they read this post? "That time you used ChatGPT to recall the word 'verisimilar' makes you an evil person." is what they hear. And at that moment you've cut that person off from ever actually considering your opinion ever again. Even if you're right that's not healthy.

My issues are fundsmentally two fold with gen AI:

1. Who owns and controls it (billionares and entrenched corporations)

2. How it is shoehorned into everything (decision making processes, human-to-human communication, my coffee machine)

I cannot wait until finally the check is due and the AI bubble pops; folding this digital snake oil sellers' house of cards.

I work at a company that uses AI to detect repirstory ilnesses in xrays and MRI scans weeks or mobths before a human doctor could.

This work has already saved thousands of peoples lives.

But good to know you anti-AI people have your 1 dimensional, 0 nuance take on the subject and are now doing moral purity tests on it and dick measuring to see who has the loudest, most extreme hatred for AI.

the fact that it is theft

There are LLMs trained using fully open datasets that do not contain proprietary material... (CommonCorpus dataset, OLMo)

the fact that it is environmentally harmful

There are LLMs trained with minimal power (typically the same ones as above as these projects cannot afford as much resources), and local LLMs use signiciantly less power than a toaster or microwave...

the fact that it cuts back on critical, active thought

This is a usecase problem. LLMs aren't suitable for critical thinking or decision making tasks, so if it's cutting back on your "critical, active thought" you're just using it wrong anyway...

The OOP genuinely doesn't know what they're talking about and are just reacting to sensationalized rage bait on the internet lmao

Do y'all hate chess engines?

If yes, cool.

If no, I think you hate tech companies more than you hate AI specifically.

Generative AI and their outputs are derived products of their training data. I mean this ethically, not legally; I'm not a copyright lawyer.

Using the output for personal viewing (advice, science questions, or jacking off to AI porn you requested) is weird but ethical. It's equivalent to pirating a movie to watch at home.

But as soon as you show someone else the output, I consider it theft without attribution. If you generate a meme image, you're failing to attribute the artists whose work trained the AI without permission. If you generate code, that code infringes the numerous open source licenses of the training data, by failing to attribute it.

Even a simple lemmy text post generated by AI is derived from thousands of unattributed novels.

I'm just sick of all this because we gave to "AI" too much meaning.

I don't like Generative AI tools like LLMs, image generators, voice, video etc because i see no interests in that, I think they give bad habits, and they are not understood well by their users.

Yesterday again i had to correct my mother because she told me some fun fact she had learnt by chatGPT, (that was wrong), and she refused to listen to me because "ChatGPT do plenty of researches on the net so it should know better than you".

About the thing that "it will replace artists and destroy art industry", I don't believe in that, (even if i made the choice to never use it), because it will forever be a tool. It's practical if you want a cartoony monkey image for your article (you meanie stupid journalist) but you can't say "make me a piece of art" and then put it on a museum.

Making art myself, i hate Gen AI slop from the deep of my heart but i'm obligated to admit that. (Let's not forget how it trains on copirighted media, use shitton of energy, and give no credits)

AI in others fields, like medecine, automatic subtitles, engineering, is fine for me. It won't give bad habits, it is well understood by its users, and it is truly benefical, as in being more efficient to save lifes than humans, or simply being helpful to disabled people.

TL,DR AI in general is a tool. Gen AI is bad as a powerful tool for everyone's use like it is bad to give to everyone an helicopter (even if it improves mobility). AI is nonetheless a very nice tool that can save lifes and help disabled peoples IF used and understood correctly and fairly.

First of all, intellectual property rights do not protect the author. I'm the author of a few papers and a book and I do not have intellectual property rights on any of these - like most of the authors I had to give them to the publishing house.

Secondly, your personal carbon footprint is bullshit.

Thirdly, everyone in the picture is an asshole.

AI is a marketing term. Big Tech stole ALL data. All of it. The brazen piracy is a sign they feel untouchable. We should touch them.

I do use AI (mostly like Google), but I don't think it's justified or OK, lol - I'm the problem, and I know it.

I like to read the anti ai stuff, because ultimativly a lot of criticism is valid. But by god is there a lot of adolescent whining and hyperbole.

It’s so surreal when someone posts a meme about That Guy™ doing That Thing™ and then all of a sudden That Guy™ shows up in the comments, doing That Thing™

Like, can I get your autograph? You’re famous, bro!

I sure am glad that we learned our lesson from the marketing campaigns in the 90's that pushed consumers to recycle their plastic single-use products to deflect attention away from the harm caused by their ubiquitous use in manufacturing.

Fuck those AI users for screwing over small creators and burning down the planet though. I see no problem with this framing.

So I'll be honest. I use GPT to write Python scripts for my research. I'm not a coder and I don't want to be one, but I do need to model data sometimes and I find it incredibly useful that I can tell it something in English and it can write modeling scripts in Python. It's also a great way to learn some coding basics. So please tell me why this is bad and what I should do instead.

I would not to get close to bike repaired by someone who is using ai to do it. Like what the fuck xd I am not surprised he is unable to make code work then xddd

AI saved my pets life. You won't convince me it's 100% all bad and there's no "right" way to use it.

The way it is trained isnt intellectual theft imo.

It only becomes intellectual theft if it is used to generate something that then competes with and takes away profits from the original creators.

Thus the intellectual theft only kicks in at generation time, but the onus is still on the AI owners for not preventing it

However if I use AI to generate anything that doesn't "compete" with anyone, then "intellectual theft" doesn't matter.

For example, when I used it to assist with diagnosing a serious issue my pet was having 2 months ago that was stumping even our vet and it got the answer right, which surprised our vet when we asked them to check a very esoteric possibility (which they dubious checked and then they were shocked to find something there.

They asked us how on earth we managed to guess to check that place of all things, how could we have known. As a result we caught the issue very early when it was easy to treat and saved our pets life

It was a gallbladder infection, and her symptoms had like 20 other more likely causes individually.

But when I punched all her symptoms into GPT, everytime, it asserted if was likely the gallbladder. It had found some papers on other animals and mammals and how gallbladder infections cause that specific combo of symptoms rarely, and encouraged us to check it out.

If you think "intellectual theft" still applies here, despite it being used to save an animals life, then you are the asshole. No one "lost" profit or business to this, no one's intellectual property was infringed, and consuming the same amount of power it takes to cook 1 pizza in my oven to save my pets life is a pretty damn good trade, in my opinion.

So, yes. I think I used AI ethically there. Fight me.