I get some of the surface level reasons, and those annoy me too. Cramming AI into everything is dumb and unnecessary.

However, I do feel that at a deeper level, it has a lot of useful applications that will absolutely change society and improve the efficiency and skills of those who use it. For example, if someone wants to learn to code, they could take a few different paths. There are the traditional paths, just read or go to school and learn to code that way. Or you could pay for a bootcamp or an online coding education platform. Or, you could just tell an AI chatbot you want to learn to code, and have them become your teacher, and correct any errors you make in real time. Another application is in generating ideas or quick mock ups. Say I’m playing a game of d&d with friends. I need a character avatar so I just provide a description to the AI and it makes it up quick. It might take a few prompts, but it usually does a pretty good job. Or if I have a scenario I need to make a few enemies for, I could just provide the description of those enemies and have a quick stat block made up for them.

I realize that there are underlying issues with regard to training the AI on others work, but as someone who is a musician myself, and a supporter of open source as often as possible, I feel that it’s a bit hypocritical for people to get upset about AI “stealing” work with regard to code or other stuff that people willingly put out there for free for others to consume. Any artist or coder could “steal” the work of others for inspiration for their work, the same as an AI does, an AI is just much more efficient about it. I do think that most of the corporations that are pushing some new AI feature or promising the world or end of the labor force is full of shit, and that we are definitely in some sort of an AI bubble, but the technology itself is definitely useful in a lot of ways, and if it can be developed on a more localized and decentralized scale (community owned AI hubs anyone?), it could actually be a really powerful and beneficial technology for organizations and individuals looking to do more with less.

  • manuremy@sopuli.xyz
    26·
    18 hours ago

    I loathe AI for multiple, personal reasons;

    1. When I need to contact customer support of some sort, there is an AI bot that is no use and there are no real humans, because the AI is cheaper. I won’t get the help I need or it’s too difficult to reach.

    2. My mother language is a bit more difficult one and many stores (especially online) are starting to translate everything with AI and that makes the text absolutely incomprehensible. Hard or even impossible to understand even the basic descriptions or the manuals.

    3. Browsers have those forced AI-summaries when you try to look for something and those are often both wrong and impossible to turn off. (Or if it’s possible to turn off, they keep turning back on.)

    4. People I know are literally believing everything from those summaries and such and are very confidently wrong/misunderstanding whatever basic thing. It’s very annoying. (“Let’s ask STSÄTKEEPEETEE!”)

    5. Being parasocial online is becoming frustrating as I have been accused of being an AI bot on multiple occasions just because of the way I write in English. Knowing even basic grammar makes you a bot these days.