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Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#12I’ve been developing software professionally for over 20 years now, and ChatGPT/GH Copilot are the biggest productivity enhancers I’ve seen since code completion.
Earlier today, I used ChatGPT to help me bang out a Ruby script to clone a repository, extract its documentation, and add those docs to another site that will serve as a centralized documentation source for a collection of projects.
I know Ruby and have been using it since 2007, but I still have to look things up with it all the time. By giving ChatGPT a bunch of poorly worded, lazily proofed commands, I was able to cut the time of development probably in half.
It wouldn’t be nearly as good with a language I didn’t know, but saying it’s a waste of time and money feels like it’s really missing the sea change that’s happening.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#13Many zeitgeist things are a waste of time and money, like electric vehicles. Generative AI is definitely not one of them.
What benefits have we gained from generative AI (really ML) that currently outweigh the cost of researching developing, and running them? Or do we stick with an expected value based on what generative AI may be able to do and the next step technologies that come after it? The article is making pretty clear arguments for costs of generative AI, and raising the author's opinion that it isn't worth it. Just claiming it…
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Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#14> generative AI is a mimic of human action, parroting back our words and images. It doesn’t think, it guesses – and often quite badly in what is termed AI hallucination.
Human thinking is also guessing to a large extent. It is guessing with many feedback loops until a resolution that is good enough, is found. It indeed mimics human behavior and is quite good at it. What counts is, how well can it guess? Since I use AI quite frequently for things where my output is part of the feedback loop, I must say, AI's guesses are very often spot on.
About parroting: I'm very sure AI does not simply parrot, I'm very often still amazed by how well my questions are understood, it gets what I'm actually asking for. A parrot never will even process my question.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
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Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#16Many zeitgeist things are a waste of time and money, like electric vehicles. Generative AI is definitely not one of them.
What benefits have we gained from generative AI (really ML) that currently outweigh the cost of researching developing, and running them? Or do we stick with an expected value based on what generative AI may be able to do and the next step technologies that come after it? The article is making pretty clear arguments for costs of generative AI, and raising the author's opinion that it isn't worth it. Just claiming it…
A few billion moderately interesting images, and a collection of slightly weird nearly-free marginal cost interns who studied literally every subject but somehow still only act like freshly minted graduates with no real-world experience.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#17> We urgently need the expertise of social scientists to be able to make much-needed collective decisions about the future of generative AI that we want; we can’t leave it to business, markets or technologists.
> Kean Birch is director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society at York University.
Academic sociologist argues that AI should be controlled by academic sociologists. Color me surprised.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#18LLMs are amazing for basic coding tasks. Codeium was able to do about 30% of my programming, before I realized it was why my laptop was overheating and turned it off.
Maybe that says more about how low-entropy code really is than it does about AIs intelligence, but in any case it works.
I'm not sure what else I'd ever use it for though. I have no interest in Replika or anything similar, and I want it to stay out of creative writing and personal communication.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#19That the author does not think generative AI can solve social problems shows a serious lack of imagination. Therapy, medical diagnosis, improved machine translation, and better information retrieval are all social benefits. There are social costs, too, but that doesn't mean the technology is a waste of time -- it means the technology needs to be regulated.
Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money
#20Many zeitgeist things are a waste of time and money, like electric vehicles. Generative AI is definitely not one of them.
What benefits have we gained from generative AI (really ML) that currently outweigh the cost of researching developing, and running them? Or do we stick with an expected value based on what generative AI may be able to do and the next step technologies that come after it? The article is making pretty clear arguments for costs of generative AI, and raising the author's opinion that it isn't worth it. Just claiming it…
Last November, DeepMind released the results of a generative AI model that created theoretical molecular structures for over 2 million undiscovered synthetic materials. Within days, materials science researchers were able to confirm 700 of them. The sheer number of these new potential materials discovered is greater than has been created in the rest of human history combined. These are materials that can be used in manufacturing, energy production, and other objectives that are critical not just for advancing human society, but avoiding the impending crisis we are already facing.
Similar AI endeavors have been underway for medicine and human health.
The author is making extremely shallow, flawed arguments that hinge on an ignorant (or possibly, deliberately narrow-minded) understanding of what generative AI is, how it is already being used, and the magnitude of what is already being achieved with it.