If LLMs used very little RAM and processing power, was light weight even for Mythos or Sol, would people be as opposed? Like no data centers, no memory shortages, like it was able to run on a calculator with the same performance.
Well if that was the case tech bros would just strap 1000000 calculators together, call it mega AI and proceed to claim it is the next best thing that ever happened to humanity and billionaires would fund them. It is these opportunistic vultures that enshittify everything and make them anti-human.
If the AI today always proceeded with the mind set of openness and locality it could still produce very useful tools for a fraction of the environmental impact it causes now but they instead, as always, have chosen thr most aggressive possible method because it can be hyped more.
I suspect yes. Even if you take these considerations out of the equation, AI is largely still just a glorified plagiarism machine being shoved down our throats.
LLM and AI are two circles in a Venn diagram.
If it were truly actually accurate maybe not… but the issue is it is a syncophancy machine being obtusely oversold as capable of multitudes of things it cannot intrinsically do accurately or as well as a person with critical thinking and is being trained on fallible data sets that include human error and now hallucination from LLMs.
If it actually were capable of doing everything the people selling you on AI are trying to get you to believe it would be an incredible tool, but it isnt, and it isnt being treated as a tool.
I think it also does us a disservice as human beings because we are at risk of losing the ability to do our own problem-solving and process of logic bedause it can be offloaded to something else and that imho can manifest as a learned helplessness.
it cannot intrinsically do accurately or as well as a person with critical thinking
Yeah…we’re running out of those people.
There are 3 reasons people hate AI right now:
- Being used poorly and mostly resulting in slop, or malicious/unethical/deadly uses, and psychosis
- Being forced down the public’s throat and put into places where it adds no value, job losses, quality drops, plagiarism
- Datacenter/environmental concerns, part prices
So switching to local AI fixes problem 3 (mostly). But we also need the hype bubble to pop so number 2 goes away. Unfortunately the first problem will be hardest to fix and right now requires the public backlash as new norms are being formed and bad actors need to be called out.
That said, I think we’re about 1 to 3 years away from the bubble popping and everything starting to balance out to where AI is treated more like just a tool rather than a genie in a box. The hype will fade out and one or two of the big players will die, but at this point I don’t think generative AI use is going away
The problem is it’s designed to bullshit you. Why would I trust a foundational problem?
It’s also designed to eliminate your job and leave you for dead.
My buddy works for the government in contracts and he’s mid level. Anyways he has like 5 people directly under him, and they’re younger, were low 40s they’re like upper 20s. He said sometimes he gets things written for multimillion dollar contracts that are fucking crazy because they use AI sometimes. He’s like “I don’t care if you do, but for the love of God read it once or twice”.
If it wasn’t terrible for the environment and the data it was trained on were ethically sourced, is hate it less. I still would use it or trust it, but at least I could live in a world with it.
I would still hate it for being jammed into everythibg it doesn’t need to be and being a shittier version of searches that used to work and being completely unreliable.
So slightly less.
It’s designed to be scalable. You can already run basic models on home hardware, but available resources determine speed and power.
If you could get today’s results on 1/10 the RAM/electricity, that would be good, but the big companies would just scale up to use the same resources anyway.
Yes, because of the way its used, the way its presented, and how bad it is.
Different people would hate it for different reasons tho
The most common use for AI seems to be Nazi/Fascist/Republican propaganda. Basically anywhere you go is an endless number of bots pushing to defend neo-nazis, tell people that Trump totally isnt a pedophile, make posts about “If he had just complied he would have lived” etc etc etc.
The subset of people who recognize this, would hate AI because its really only good as a propaganda mill.
The next set would be because of the way its being pushed to replace workers, AI doesnt actually make the remaining workers jobs easier, and it doesnt do work more efficiently, its just another excuse to cut headcounts, make a shittier service and charge more for it.
Finally is because its A) Very often wrong and B) Being used to replace actual critical thinking.
Its a growing problem, especially in academia. Students are coming into college or high school with absolutely no idea how to do actual research, how to write a paper in a logical way, how to follow basic logic chains etc. And there is so much bad information being produced by AI now that its becoming harder and harder to find actual good information. For every doctor telling you to vaccinate kids, there are a dozen AI driven videos that have some person being confidently wrong about everything to do with vaccines.
Are there still students who didnt cheat their way through high school with AI? yes.
But they are becoming more and more rare.
And given how wrong AI usually is (AI is very good at being confidently wrong), this means that we have a whole generation growing up who cant tell the difference between “Measles can kill you if you dont get vaccinated” and “Shooting gay people is a fun weekend activity”
It would probably be hated even more as all of those points would be magnitudes higher in volume than they are today. It’s what is wanted by corporations, a cheap surveillance tool that closely monitors everyone to keep everyone in line. There are multiple dimensions to this issue. I think AI should have stayed in R&D for a while longer. It is so half baked, but unfortunately trusted as an “expert” by people who may not be familiar with hunting down primary trustworthy sources. Though that last point is nothing new. I think it should have never been used for things like scanning private/personal files or to accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit. These companies are buying their own bullshit and are trusting/betting on AI to reduce the most costly component of their company, the labor force. It’s all just smoke and mirrors though, always has been. It’s not like these things are gods among us, but they are sold that way. In the end, not matter what, with the current state of AI or if they were cheaper to use computationally, the bubble will burst. At least when that happens, maybe some of the left overs can be repurposed for actual useful things for society, but I don’t have my hopes up at the moment.
Resource intensive is one thing, theft is another. Pay all the artists for using their art and we’ll begin to talk about whether destroying the planet further is worth it.
The question has already been asked yesterday. It makes people lazy and stupid, that’s my main issue.
And it makes people who were already stupid think they’re smart.
Nothing quite like arguing against a second-hand LLM conversation in your area of expertise, being proxied by someone who doesn’t understand what either you, or it are saying.
The hardware and power shortages piss me off in particular because I’m a computers guy. But I also have friends who are writers and digital artists so I hate it for how it impacts them too. So ‘as much’? No, but it’d still be hated.
edit: also I play TTRPGs so i hate it for polluting image aggregators too
I was at a scientific conference a while ago and someone said “did you know there’s a piece of software that can check if any of your papers have been scraped by AI?” So everyone checked. And everyone’s papers had been scraped. Everyone’s.
Any good thing is ruined once it’s co-opted by capitalism.
AI and LLMs (In my very very personal and completely subjective opinion) is the coolest shit humanity has ever invented and under the right system would’ve been unanimously celebrated.
But noooooooo, capitalism had to go and fucking turn a miraculous tool for human creativity and knowledge into a relentless driver of layoffs, corporate slop and copyright theft because some greedy fucks want more money for themselves than they know what to do with.
But, well, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.It would still be anti-labor and a force multiplier for confident stupidity.
