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.
The resources used are but one of the problems with the modern uses of AI. Others include:
- Copyright and privacy. AI companies use copyrighted content and private data to train their models. Many companies have terms or user agreements that give them permission to use or sell any data on their systems. They collect data where they can, without regard for ownership, copyright or privacy.
- Fakes. We cannot trust what we see or read. Of course fake news and misinformation has been a problem for years, but genAI has turbocharged it, and now even video is becoming unreliable. We cannot trust anything anymore. Even appreciation of real art suffers because artists get accused of using AI even when it was hand made. Although the impact on politics is the biggest threat.
- Companies force employees to use it, even when employees don’t want it and it hurts the quality of their work. AI is often used as an excuse to fire people.
- The AI bubble dominates the economy. This cannot end well.
There are also legitimate and useful ways to use AI, and many of them could be very valuable, but that’s not what the industry or society is focusing on right now.
AI would probably be more acceptable if all of these issues were addressed.
No because dead internet theory and it literally makes humans dumber.
Lower reading comprehension. Less able to write or even explain something.
Lower attention.
Lower proficiency in just about anything ai can do. Lower critical thinking.
There is a ton of research on this.
Ai also tells people they are always right and gives them bad advice. Sometimes fatal advice.
LLM the technology is interesting and impressive. the way companies are shoving it into everything and trying to sell it as a replacement for employees is awful. The way the AI companies are behaving is awful.
AI is great! it just needs a little work on the IP theft, the environmental impact, the dopamine addiction, the cornering of the component market, the reliability, the hidden system prompts, the non-determinism, the push to have everything in the cloud, the enshittification, the empowerment of the billionaires, the reduction in user’s cognitive abilities, the lack of real-world use cases, the reliability, the spying on humans intimate thoughts, the overblown marketing, the bubble impact on the world economy, and the reliability. Other than that, it’s just fine! Trust me, bro!
It’s great! Except for the several teen suicides
The same can be said about LITERALLY every technology ever made. Everything you listed is real, problems that need to be addressed, and the companies responsible for exacerbating them held accountable.
A technologies worst implementations are not representative of its usefulness.
Unless you want to ban the entire field of biology as well for the atrocities committed associated with it.
Yeah transformer models are cool.
But you cannot separate the industry from the tech in this case. The reason it’s so bad is because it’s being misused and it’s everywhere, even where it shouldn’t be.
No, that’s not true. Universities have been making their own models. Private individuals have been making their own models. The most famous ones are, of course, purely corporate. But claiming that the tech is inseparable from the corporation is demonstrably incorrect.
Evo 2 was recently used in a revolutionary antibiotic research paper, which is entirely open source and trained and public data. Is that also corporate?
This is pretty much my thoughts as well. My unsolicited rant:
The technology is good and anyone who says it’s “just autocorrect” are wrong. Having said that, I agree that LLMs are useful really for nothing more than low-risk, personal research and/or signposting to other sources. It’s in no way a replacement for a human (unless your definition of what a human does is that it’s just a thing that produces words at you - in which case, you’re probably a middle manager - very myopic, regardless). It’s also not appropriate for anything financial, professional, or confidential. Here, the first L in LLM is a hindrance. Local, small language models are more appropriate and cost-effective here.
Anyway. I don’t “use AI” like some people but over the last year I’ve used my access to Proton’s Lumo (already included in my subscription) a handful of times and been pleased with the results. The way that I see it is that all the LLM libraries are trained almost entirely on Reddit or websites that stole their content from Reddit anyway, so use it like you would Reddit: “LGBT horror movies before 2000,” “Summarize and cite criticisms of Camille Paglia,” “Was Bioshock 2 well-received at launch?” All very low-stakes. Doesn’t really matter. Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Anyway. More: Call it cope but I’ve been developing a theory/outlook that the internet as a thing is basically dead and that the Pandora’s Box of LLM tech, which can produce a basically infinite amount of what was once the internet’s currency (read: information, but really: text), has killed it. The Fediverse is utopian but I don’t think anyone here really believes it will ever be anything more than a cluster of fringe communities. Having said that, I justify good LLM use (like mine, lucky that) as being the “New Game Plus” mode of the internet. Everything is already there, everything’s unlocked. There is no challenge. It’s kind of cheating and you’re not really supposed to play the game like that. But at the same time, there is no going back to the real beginning, I just have the option of nostalgically re-creating it by going to old.reddit or postfixing before:2022 to all my
GoogleDDG searches. Fun, and game-ish in it’s own right, but also artificially limiting for no reasons beyond that./rant
Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Except a large part of the reason that people used reddit is that you tended to get decent information. The big/good answers would often be some dude who is waay to into football having a 6 post page about who the GOAT player is.
Now, AI is basically so prolific, that a lot of what AI is being trained on…is other AI. Its slop badly reproducing slop, and the answers that AI gives you are either wrong, or are driven largely by somebody making 50 AI chatbots to swarm reddit with their opinion (or more often, to sell their product).
cluster of fringe communities
I was already sold on it, you don’t have to keep buttering me up on the idea.
When everything is so searchable and indexable, obscurity is almost a feature