Lots of people on Lemmy really dislike AI’s current implementations and use cases.

I’m trying to understand what people would want to be happening right now.

Destroy gen AI? Implement laws? Hoping all companies use it for altruistic purposes to help all of mankind?

Thanks for the discourse. Please keep it civil, but happy to be your punching bag.

  • Jeffool
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    171 month ago

    Like a lot of others, my biggest gripe is the accepted copyright violation for the wealthy. They should have to license data (text, images, video, audio,) for their models, or use material in the public domain. With that in mind, in return I’d love to see pushes to drastically reduce the duration of copyright. My goal is less about destroying generative AI, as annoying as it is, and more about leveraging the money being it to change copyright law.

    I don’t love the environmental effects but I think the carbon output of OpenAI is probably less than TikTok, and no one cares about that because they enjoy TikTok more. The energy issue is honestly a bigger problem than AI. And while I understand and appreciate people worried about throwing more weight on the scales, I’m not sure it’s enough to really matter. I think we need bigger “what if” scenarios to handle that.

  • @[email protected]
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    161 month ago

    Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.

    I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.

    Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.

    Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.

    I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.

    I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.

    Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.

    I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.

    • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍
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      1 month ago

      Fwiw, I’ve been getting called an alarmist for talking about Trump’s and Republican’s fascist tendencies since at least 2016, if not earlier. I’m now comfortably living in another country.

      My point being that people will call you an alarmist for suggesting anything that requires them to go out of their comfort zone. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, it just shows how stupid people are.

        • It wasn’t overseas but moving my stuff was expensive, yes. Even with my company paying a portion of it. It’s just me and my partner in a 2br apartment so it’s honestly not a ton of stuff either.

  • @[email protected]
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    151 month ago

    TBH, it’s mostly the corporate control and misinformation/hype that’s the problem. And the fact that they can require substantial energy use and are used for such trivial shit. And that that use is actively degrading people’s capacity for critical thinking.

    ML in general can be super useful, and is an excellent tool for complex data analysis that can lead to really useful insights…

    So yeah, uh… Eat the rich? And the marketing departments. And incorporate emissions into pricing, or regulate them to the point where it only becomes viable to non-trivial use cases.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 month ago

    Serious investigation into copyright breaches done by AI creators. They ripped off images and texts, even whole books, without the copyright owners permissions.

    If any normal person broke the laws like this, they would hand out prison sentences till kingdom come and fines the size of the US debt.

    I just ask for the law to be applied to all equally. What a surprising concept…

  • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍
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    1 month ago

    I’m perfectly ok with AI, I think it should be used for the advancement of humanity. However, 90% of popular AI is unethical BS that serves the 1%. But to detect spoiled food or cancer cells? Yes please!

    It needs extensive regulation, but doing so requires tech literate politicians who actually care about their constituents. I’d say that’ll happen when pigs fly, but police choppers exist so idk

  • @[email protected]
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    1 month ago

    For it to go away just like Web 3.0 and NFTs did. Stop cramming it up our asses in every website and application. Make it opt in instead of maybe if you’re lucky, opt out. And also, stop burning down the planet with data center power and water usage. That’s all.

    Edit: Oh yeah, and get sued into oblivion for stealing every copyrighted work known to man. That too.

    Edit 2: And the tech press should be ashamed for how much they’ve been fawning over these slop generators. They gladly parrot press releases, claim it’s the next big thing, and generally just suckle at the teet of AI companies.

  • @[email protected]
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    101 month ago

    That stealing copyrighted works would be as illegal for these companies as it is for normal people. Sick and tired of seeing them get away with it.

  • @[email protected]
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    101 month ago

    I’m not against it as a technology. I use it for my personal use, as a toy, to have some fun or to whatever.

    But what I despise is the forced introduction everything. AI written articles and AI forced assistants in many unrelated apps. That’s what I want to disappear, how they force in lots of places.

  • z3rOR0ne
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    91 month ago

    There’s too many solid reasons to be upset with, well, not AI per say, but the companies that implement, market, and control the AI ecosystem and conversation to go into in a single post. Sufficient to say I think AI is an existential threat to humanity mainly because of who’s controlling it and who’s not.

    We have no regulation on AI, we have no respect for artists, writers, musicians, actors, and workers in general coming from these AI peddling companies, we only see more and more surveillance and control over multiple aspects of our lives being consolidated around these AI companies and even worse, we get nothing more in exchange except for the promise of increased productivity and quality, and that increase in productivity and quality is a lie. AI currently gives you the wrong answer or some half truth or some abomination of someone else’s artwork really really fast…that is all it does, at least for the public sector currently.

    For the private sector at best it alienates people as chatbots, and at worst is being utilized to infer data for surveillance of people. The tools of technology at large are being used to suppress and obfuscate speech by whoever uses it, and AI is one tool amongst many at the disposal of these tech giants.

    AI is exacerbating a knowledge crisis that was already in full swing as both educators and students become less curious about subjects that don’t inherently relate to making profits or consolidating power. And because knowledge is seen as solely a way to gather more resources/power and survive in an ever increasingly hostile socioeconomic climate, people will always reach for the lowest hanging fruit to get to that goal, rather than actually knowing how to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before or inherently understand a problem that has been solved before or just know something relatively useless because it’s interesting to them.

    There’s too many good reasons AI is fucking shit up, and in all honesty what people in general tote about AI is definitely just a hype cycle that will not end well for the majority of us and at the very least, we should be upset and angry about it.

    Here are further resources if you didn’t get enough ranting.

    lemmy.world’s fuck_ai community

    System Crash Podcast

    Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast

    Better Offline Podcast

    • @[email protected]OP
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      21 month ago

      I love the passion! Was this always our fate? Can we not adapt like we have so many times in human history?

  • @[email protected]
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    91 month ago

    Regulate its energy consumption and emissions. As a whole, the entire AI industry. Any energy or emissions in effort to develop, train, or operate AI should be limited.

    If AI is here to stay, we must regulate what slice of the planet we’re willing to give it. I mean, AI is cool and all, and it’s been really fascinating watching how quickly these algorithms have progressed. Not to oversimplify it, but a complex Markov chain isn’t really worth the energy consumption that it currently requires.

    A strict regulation now, would be a leg up in preventing any rogue AI, or runaway algorithms that would just consume energy to the detriment of life. We need a hand on the plug. Capitalism can’t be trusted to self regulate. Just look at the energy grabs all the big AI companies have been doing already (xAI’s datacenter, Amazon and Google’s investments into nuclear). It’s going to get worse. They’ll just keep feeding it more and more energy. Gutting the planet to feed the machine, so people can generate sexy cat girlfriends and cheat in their essays.

    We should be funding efforts to utilize AI more for medical research. protein folding , developing new medicines, predicting weather, communicating with nature, exploring space. We’re thinking to small. AI needs to make us better. With how much energy we throw at it we should be seeing something positive out of that investment.

  • @[email protected]
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    91 month ago

    I want disclosure. I want a tag or watermark to let people know that AI was used. I want to see these companies pay dues for the content used in the similar vein that we have to pay for higher learning. And we need to stop calling it AI as well.

  • @[email protected]
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    81 month ago

    People have negative sentiments towards AI under a captalist system, where the most successful is equal to most profitable and that does not translate into the most useful for humanity

    We have technology to feed everyone and yet we don’t We have technology to house everyone and yet we don’t We have technology to teach everyone and yet we don’t

    Captalist democracy is not real democracy

  • @[email protected]
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    81 month ago

    I don’t dislike ai, I dislike capitalism. Blaming the technology is like blaming the symptom instead of the disease. Ai just happens to be the perfect tool to accelerate that

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand
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    81 month ago

    Part of what makes me so annoyed is that there’s no realistic scenario I can think of that would feel like a good outcome.

    Emphasis on realistic, before anyone describes some insane turn of events.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      31 month ago

      Some jobs are automated and prices go down. That’s realistic enough. To be fair there’s good and bad likely in that scenario. So tack on some level of UBI. Still realistic? That’d be pretty good.

  • @[email protected]
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    71 month ago

    I am largely concerned that the development and evolution of generative AI is driven by hype/consumer interests instead of academia. Companies will prioritize opportunities to profit from consumers enjoying the novelty and use the tech to increase vendor lock-in.

    I would much rather see the field advanced by scientific and academic interests. Let’s focus on solving problems that help everyone instead of temporarily boosting profit margins.

    I believe this is similar to how CPU R&D changed course dramatically in the 90s due to the sudden popularity in PCs. We could have enjoyed 64 bit processors and SMT a decade earlier.