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.
Here’s another fun piece you can read.
The incoming AI apocalypse isn’t about Skynet drones or malicious AGI, it’s about creating generations of vastly less educated and cognitively deficient lower classes and restricting traditional education to the wealthier echelons of society, gatekeeping the poor out by cost alone, undoing decades of hard-fought socialist efforts to bring education to the masses.
Fully agree that children should not be exposed to ai content, and age restrictions would be warranted (which ironically I think a lot of people on the fediverse would not be happy about).
That’s the thing.
Your specific opinions on how LLMs should be used or not use don’t affect how they are being used.
A system is what it does, plain and simple, and LLMs look like they’re doing serious damage to our societies to really just benefit the wealthy.
The whole “doing serious damage” part is where I disagree. The damage attributed is usually due to the ultra wealthy and capitalism, not due to AI itself.
I fully believe that the US government plans on replacing teachers with AI. It is all part of a grand plan to eliminate the Department of Education and defund schools nationwide. Once this crisis comes into full view we will be presented with this plan and we will no longer have a choice unless you have enough money to send your kid to private school.
I don’t disagree, the current administration is that dumb. Hopefully their popularity continues to drop like a stone and in an election cycle we will be off dumb island.