I’m curious to get a general pulse on how people here view the rapid evolution of AI, specifically on lemmy. On one side, there’s growing interest in local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools. On the other, there seems to be a growing list, I can’t keep track of, that are seen as major concerns. I’m not here to pick sides or be biased in one corner. Im genuinely curious what people have to say about AI in general. And maybe it will help me and other get a better handle on how we perceived it in our ever changing world.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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    8 hours ago

    It has its uses. Generative stuff is ok **as long as ** you keep it to yourself. Its sometimes easier to ask llm for explanation on some obscure thing / to take a look at what information on system logs could mean. Its neat gatget. Kind of on par with some kind of useful tool but too unreliable to be of real use. And even if its useful to some, the cost and looming threats are not worth getting on the bandwagon (environment, if its successfull you wont be able to afford it, if its not capabilities will be reduced greatly if not completely and its not much use for you then). And most of all, if its as successfull as they want to sell to investors; have fun being unemployed and looking for job with other couple billion people as once the rich get theirs you wont get yours.

    Other people who lose their minds because of it are the problem imo, though ones that do shouldnt have been on anykind of position that matters in the first place.

  • yyyesss?@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.

    at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.

    gone are the days of “this meeting could’ve been an email” because they won’t (or can’t) read the email.

    so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.

  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
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    10 hours ago

    If we’re really, really lucky, the crash might take a few more industries with it, which could buy us a bit more time with regards to the climate collapse. If we’re rather unlucky, it’s just mindlessly accelerating suffering.

  • AtomicHotSauce@piefed.social
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    10 hours ago

    Just like the damage to our environment, AI is out of control and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’ve used it to great effect on personal projects so, also like the environment, I’m part of the problem.

  • JoeTheSane@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.

  • solitaire404@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    AI itself is not bad.

    But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, …

    Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn’t do that, so I am out.

  • wizbiz@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    I feel like it’s making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that’s the answer and they’re confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.

    • yyyesss?@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      malicious compliance - take what they say as accurate then pass the buck back when shit hits the fan

  • HubertManne@piefed.social
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    21 hours ago

    It has uses but not to the extent its hawked for. Its overused which is using to much power and driving up computer component prices. I would like to see more work with an os flavor that comes with a os optimized to assist with the os and allow for os addons. I envision specialized ais so like you would have a butler type os that is mainly about communicating with the user and then there would be various specialized ais the butler would speak with and you add them as needed. I hope these can be massively optimized and hardware can be made to more efficiently use them such that typical computer use uses no more power than what a typical laptop does that can do gaming.

  • mrmaplebar@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

    And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

    Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

    Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

    Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

    Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

    local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

    Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

    “Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

    I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

    I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

    • ladybugs@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Ethical training data could exit, but I don’t think public domain/creative commons/licensed are quite good enough (almost no one who contributed knew what AI would become until recently, and some of those people are still alive). Although that’s better.

      A truly ethical training dataset for AI would be one that everyone who created the training data opted into. And I don’t mean their employer or photography sharing platform signed a license deal, I mean they personally opted in. If AI is so great, I’m sure plenty of people will be happy to contribute their art, photos, writing, code, social media posts, etc. All the pro-AI people can just band together and make their own dataset to use.

      That doesn’t solve all the other issues with generative AI, but it would make a huge difference.

      • mrmaplebar@fedia.io
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        10 hours ago

        Ethical training data could exit, but I don’t think public domain/creative commons/licensed are quite good enough (almost no one who contributed knew what AI would become until recently, and some of those people are still alive).

        I get what you’re saying, but that is sort of a failure of imagination on the part of the licensor, in my opinion…

        While I can understand some people being surprised by how their explicitly public domain or cc0 works are currently being used, this is inherently part of the risk you take when you opt into giving your work an extremely permissive license in the first place.

        If you put something out there and tell the world “you can use this freely, forever, for whatever you want”, you are committing to all kinds of potential uses, known and unknown, within the scope of that license.

        Contributing someone into the public domain is a nice thought for sure, but it’s also not something to take lightly because you really don’t know what it might one day be used for, and you are relinquishing a lot of your (legal) rights.

      • mrmaplebar@fedia.io
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        10 hours ago

        I don’t disagree with that.

        But a magical, new, clean, and infinite fusion power source could be invented tomorrow, and AI would still be deeply exploitative of human labor.

        So, to me at least, in addition to the environmental impact, the cultural and social impact can’t be overstated. It’s all bad.

    • Asafum@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      As far as the ethical concerns go for “local” models how do you feel about individuals using it for non-commercial use? A toy/hobby/assistant for their own home use? I personally have been enjoying “playing” with it, but I do agree in that I hate how they’ve come to obtain the training data. I hate the companies that create it and profit off of it, but personally I don’t feel too guilty using it as a toy/hobby if it’s a model that was released for free to be used on your own hardware.

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Currently, it’s a skill amplifier. You can’t code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

    Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

    I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn’t going away.

  • Cherries@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    AGI doesn’t exist and is not being developed, but the idiots with all the money and power believe it is. Their stupidity and insistence on feeding all our resources to this stuff is gonna kill us all.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

    Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

    Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

      • dustycups@aussie.zone
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        2 days ago

        They did pretty well with the protein folding. Similar special purpose uses are fine. LLM’s and image/video generation can suck satans rotting arsehole.

        • ladybugs@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          yeah, but the protein folding AI is a totally different kind of technology from what OP is talking about. AlphaFold has nothing to do with Ollama or whatever.

          vaguely related: I kinda think society should scrap the term “AI.” I mean, my washing machine has an “AI” setting that… senses the amount of laundry in the load? Lol. Sure, we’ll call that AI. “AI” is such a mess of a term that it’s practically meaningless.