i was under the impression that were explicitly against genAI but i found that some people are actually VERY pro genai and quite dismissive of its risks. this happened on lemmy but i saw people getting downvoted for saying that genAI in its current state is harmful to the environment. i saw the old bullshit of how ”i use AI for art because i cant draw”, it was crazy. i called someone a Promptitute and someone unironically told me not to say that, just so much. so can everybody pls affirm you dont support that crap.
another user straight up admitted that they use AI as a friend and to gn to… i dont care how much we have in common ideologically, i cant support you gning to chatgpt and thinking its your friend…
The few use cases for which they actually kinda work:
The first two can be fully performed locally for negligible costs; the same is mostly true also for the third one, which is immoral on top of it.
The main ongoing use case/need they currently answer though is that of the capitalists: pretending to have discovered a new Internet in terms of economic growth (the VC morons still don’t seem to get that the web was a one-time thing) to make a new bubble and try and make the whole disgusting circus continue a little longer.
Previous attempts - none of them as successful, many of them a lot less: ‘web 3.0’, ‘big data’, ‘smart cities’, ‘crypto/NFTs’, and ‘the metaverse’. Likely next one once the AI bubble pops (assuming the world economy doesn’t collapse with it): ‘quantum computing’ - the quick ones among the shitheads have already started drumming that beat; and once we’re in a new AI winter I also fully expect them to connect the two - ie, ‘the only reason we didn’t get AGI is the lack of quantum computing’.
LLMs are a lot more successful than previous attempts specifically due to the appearance of working; if you don’t look at it too closely / are not even slightly well-versed in the tech itself you could believe what the people selling them are saying. It’s the perfect grift vector.
Disinformation is a big one. Not only can images be faked easier, but also the replacing of wikipedia and serious sources with an LLM giving the answer to search engine queries.
Grok shoehorning White Genocide in South Africa into everything was a poor attempt, but there’s no reason to believe similar things aren’t being done more competently to push answers in a certain direction or with a certain spin.
At a minimum, LLMs using sites like reddit and published books written in English as their main data set sources means they will always inherit previous anglosphere disinformation and biases
I am convinced that this is the real reason for the major push for AI data centres in the US. The corporate media is desperate to retake control of the narrative. They want to be able to convincingly fake photos and video in support of their propaganda goals.