I’ve found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?
I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.
ChatGPT is incredibly good at helping you with random programming questions, or just dumping a full ass error text and it telling you exactly what’s wrong.
This afternoon I used ChatGPT to figure out what the error preventing me from updating my ESXi server. I just copy pasted the entire error text which was one entire terminal windows worth of shit, and it knew that there was an issue accessing the zip. It wasn’t smart enough to figure out “hey dumbass give it a full file path not relative” but eventually I got there. Earlier this morning I used it to write a cross apply instead of using multiple sub select statements. It forgot to update the order by, but that was a simple fix. I use it for all sorts of other things we do at work too. ChatGPT won’t replace any programmers, but it will help them be more productive.
It’ll also save the programmers questions from the moderately technically-inclined non-programmers at work! Haha
I agree, I don’t really use it but I do like some of the memes that came out of it, case in point:
It helps when writing a lot of boilerplate or if I’m being lazy and want to solve something. However I do not need AI in everything I use. It seems everyone wants AI in their product whilst it’s doing the same thing everyone else is doing.
It can be such a different experience editing/touching something up rather than having to create it wholesale where it can often take on a life of its own and takes so much more time
Regardless of how useful some might find it, there isn’t a single use case that justifies the environmental cost (not to mention the societal cost). None. Stop using it. You were able to survive and function without it 2 years ago, and you still can.
This is like saying you can’t play video games because it costs electricity and you can go without. You can say it about literally everything that isn’t strictly necessary to live. AI isn’t just LLMs and only LLMs have a high environmental cost, and unless you are literally wasting the output like the big tech companies are, even that can be justified for the right reasons.
I was talking about LLMs. If you can find a search engine that still works, and look at where we’re at in the destruction of our planetary life support systems, and the colossal amounts of energy and water required for LLMs, then you might revisit your opinion.
I already know of the stats you speak of, and it’s not nothing. But as I explain below, on the scale of other pollutants and for how widespread it’s usage is, it is a footnote. There are far bigger fish to fry first when it comes to reducing water usage and energy usage.
Lets look up some stats together. Most sources agree that we use about 4 trillion cubic meters of water every year worldwide (Although, this stat is from 2015 most likely, and so it will be bigger now). In 2022, using the stats here Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons per year, and Google 5.56 billion gallons per year. In cubic meters that’s only 23.69 million cubic meters. That’s only 0.00059% of the worldwide water usage. Meanwhile agriculture uses 70%. Granted not every country uses 70%, but a 1% gain there overshadows any current and even future usage.
And even if we just look at the US, since that’s where Google and Microsoft are based, which uses 322 billion gallons of water every day, resulting in about 445 billion cubic meters per year, that’s still 0.00532%. So it’s not hugely significant inside the US either, we can have 187 more Googles and Microsofts before we even top a single percentage.
There are plenty of other hobbies that are also terrible for the environment but we don’t tackle them because like AI it would be a drop in the bucket. Honestly ask yourself, if AI was such a big issue and would threaten lives, why is nobody actually taking serious measures for it? Why are there no public campaigns to get people to stop using AI to save the water? It’s because the stats are concerning, but not significantly so, and if the stats don’t actually back up the position that AI usage is slowly sucking us dry, people don’t stand behind it. If the advancement of AI allows us to save more lives through medical research, or allows us to farm more efficiently, it can easily pay back it’s investment. And those things outweigh the negatives.
However, as I’ve stated multiple times below, I despise the wasteful usage of AI, and therefore you won’t see me praising Bing or Google for their usage of AI in a way that makes no sense and just wastes resources. But the technology exists for everyone, not just those companies. There are more sustainable LLM models than GPT-4, and OpenAI can rightfully be criticized for not prioritizing efficiency rather that bigger and more power hungry models.
EDIT: Added US comparison EDIT2: Double checked some of the math
Governments aren’t taking measures for a whole bunch of things that threaten lives. Infinite (exponential) growth on a finite world isn’t possible and we’re hitting or overshooting several planetary boundaries. We should be scaling things back (if we want a livable world), not pushing down harder on the gas pedal, which LLMs are doing. And Sam Altman went to the emirates asking for Trillions to scale LLMs. All of this for a little more convenience when tackling mostly mundane tasks.
Again - if this is your argument - then the vast majority of things humans do would be “pushing down harder on the gas pedal”. Excluding AI, more people get born every year, water usage also increases every year, electricity usage too. Even if you got rid of all AI right now you would have to overcome those much more significant increases to make a difference. It just doesn’t even make a dent. And it has to, if you want it to actually reduce the impact of climate change and resource depletion.
The world does not stand still, even if we did everything we should to stop climate change. Technology that can change the world and facilitates happier, healthier humans is not a bad thing for a reasonable price. And as I just explained in detail, that price is not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Hence why there is no significant public outrage from this.
If you’re going to hold this position, you should really stick to the biggest polluters, which as you agree, are not getting enough pushback. I agree with that as well, and I would happily stand by your side here. But if someone is handing out pie, and you think everyone should be angry at someone taking 0.00532% of the pie, that is horribly ineffective at actually getting the change we need. Since basically nobody reasonable is going to agree with you. While for the larger polluters it is easily self evident they need it, and we still have a lot of trouble with that.
And Sam Altman went to the emirates asking for Trillions to scale LLMs. All of this for a little more convenience when tackling mostly mundane tasks.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but I don’t like the big tech companies use of AI. That does not say anything about the technology at large though. Screw OpenAI and Sam Altman. If your criticism is purely aimed at wasteful conduct by big companies, I’m all there with you. But there are so many smaller companies that also use AI and LLMs.
I created a funny AI voice recording of Ben Shapiro talking about cat girls.
Yes. Ai art is great. It’s a new medium and pretty much every argument against it was made against photography a century ago, and most of them against pre-mixed paints before that. Stop believing the haters who don;t know what it actually is.
My main argument againt it is that I could not care less about something generated by a machine. What I like about art is seeing the world from the perspective of another human. Machines could make music albums or movies in seconds, to me it’s just a bland mashup of previous works created by humans and I have no interest in that. AI is only capable of creating variations of human art, not innovation like real artist can. We are on the edge of infinite content, I chose to give my time to human creation, not generic spin-off of it. My two cents.
Do you think computers are making pictures for computers to look at with no human interaction?
Do you think I’m an idiot? See the my reply to the other comment if you care, I’m sure you do lol.
Yes. If you hate AI for those reason I think you’re an idiot. In fact if you hate ai art for any reason other than it’s content (and to be fair a lot of it is shite, but then a lot of stuff created by humans without computers is shite as well) you are wrong.
Lol, why don’t you go fuck yourself you stupid fuck? You haven’t even articulate half the beginning of an idea and yet you feel you can call others idiots? The other user in this comment has been able to explain why he doesn’t agrre whith me, meanwhile, you can only bark an insult like 12 years old bully without adressing any of the points I’m making. You’re a nuisance to the internet, why dont you go jerk to some ai porn and pretend to be smart on reddit?
Wow, that’s a response. You clearly know literally nothing about the subject at hand and are wilfully ignorant, so yes I will call you an idiot because it’s accurate. Maybe calm down and do some reading and thinking.
Lol. I don’t need advice from you, go fuck yourself. Bisous bisous
You know those people who have no creative skills or drive, but want to be thought of as a creative?
You know those people who have this really neat idea for an app, but they don’t plan on making it themself because they’re “just an ideas guy”?
You know those people who will offer to pay in exposure? I mean, do you really need to be paid just to draw some pictures anyway?
You know those guys who send you a picture they got from google images and claim this to be a girl they know?
That’s the vast majority of the AI audience. I could probably sum that up with the word “parasite”, but I wanted to be thorough.
