https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-is-a-mass-delusion-event/ar-AA1KKUeN

Fuck Acosta btw.

I don't know if there's data out there (yet) to support this, but I'm pretty sure constantly using AI rather than doing things yourself degrades your skills in the long run. It's like if you're not constantly using a language or practicing a skill, you get worse at it. The marginal effort that it might save you now will probably have a worse net effect in the long run.

It might just be like that social media fad from 10 years ago where everyone was doing it, and then research started popping up that it's actually really fucking terrible for your health.

I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.

I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.

I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.

For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".

Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.

And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.

Yeah, well, one can be an ML tinkerer/enthusiast and still despise all this shit.

I'm quantizing a few variants of a new 36B LLM to test now. I love it! Its great, and puts some closed source stuff to shame, and it's my hobby.

...Doesn't mean I want AI slop posters shoved in my face either, or shoehorned into every crevice it doesn't belong.

That doesn't really matter because I'm like a microscopic part of the population, but still, I hate being grouped as 'pro AI' when I hate tech bros even more than whoever's reading this, probably.

Have you heard of these things called humans? I think this is more a reflection of them. Books ate trees and corrupted the youth, tv rotted your brain and made you go blind, the internet made people lazy. Wait until I tell you about gasp auto-correct or better yet leet speak! The horror. Clearly we are never recovering from either of those. In fact, I’m speaking to you now in emojis. And wait until you learn about clutches pearls Wikipedia— ah the horror!

Is tech and its advancements perfect? No. Can people do better? Yes. Are criticisms important? Sure are. But panic and fighting a rising tech? You’re probably not going to win.

Spend time educating people on how to be more ethical with their tech use and absolutely pressuring companies to do the same. Taking a club to a computer didn’t stop the rise of the word processor or the spread of Wikipedia madness. But we can control how we consume and relate to tech and what our demands of their creators are.

PS— do you even know how to read and write cursive? > punchable smug face goes here. <

I may dress like an android, but I’m humanist as all hell. Down with AI slop, jail those responsible for wildlife destruction and theft from artists, and banish this slop to the history books!

A lot of people also mix generative AI with predictive. Like they will mention the hurricane predictor or cancer cell finder AI as a "good use case for chatgpt."

I gotta be honest, I'm neither pro nor anti AI myself. I don't use it as much as I used to these days, but when I do use it, it can be pretty fun and helpful. And I can't help but admire the AI images and videos, even if it is AI slop. (Maybe I'm an idiot for being very easily impressed/entertained by almost anything.)

Yes I know there's a bunch of problems with it (including environmental), but at the same time, I don't feel like I'm contributing to those problems, since I'm just one person, and there's so many other people using it anyway.

One thing I don't get with people fearing AI is when something adds AI and suddenly it's a privacy nightmare. Yeah, in some cases it does make it worse, but in most cases, what was stopping the company from taking your data anyways? LLMs are just algorithms that process data and output something, they don't inherently give firms any additional data. Now, in some cases that means data that previously wasn't or that shouldn't be sent to a server is now being sent, but I've seen people complain about privacy so often in cases where I don't understand why AI is your tipping point, if you don't trust the company to not store your data when using AI, why trust it in the first place?