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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

#21

Post by foinker »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #12

I’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 bee…

Yes, it's going to excel at understanding programming languages, which have rigid structures and clearly defined commands whose inputs and outputs could never be misunderstood by a computer. And more power to ya if it saves developers a bunch of time, but it's being built and hyped as something that can do everything for everyone, which it very clearly can't. It has already pushed the customer service industry into a far, far more irritating direction, for example.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#22

Post by mat0 »

nulld3v wrote: post #9

Basically the same talking points that have been repeated to ad-infinitum, quotes from article below: - "generative AI is a mimic of human action, parroting back our words and images" - "[AI] take[s] computing capacity away from other, potentially more useful activities" - "[AI] requires an enormous amount of energy", "environmental costs are well-known" - "AI is underpinned by significant capital investment in compu…

funnily enough, the author is parroting something that a lot of people could consider spam

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#23

Post by CuriouslyC »

thousandautumns wrote: post #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.

He's Canadian, after all.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#24

Post by hello1234567 »

lbrito wrote: post #5

Many zeitgeist things are a waste of time and money, like electric vehicles. Generative AI is definitely not one of them.

it's a not a waste of time but imo it's also not going to be disrupting. it could be a good sounding board when you know the subject otherwise it's mostly useless. it does makes things convenient but how much value it add, that's yet to be seen.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#25

Post by RecycledEle »

hello1234567 wrote: post #24
lbrito wrote: post #5

Many zeitgeist things are a waste of time and money, like electric vehicles. Generative AI is definitely not one of them.

it's a not a waste of time but imo it's also not going to be disrupting. it could be a good sounding board when you know the subject otherwise it's mostly useless. it does makes things convenient but how much value it add, that's yet to be seen.

Generative AI is a wonderful tutor.

Source: I'm a teacher.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#26

Post by orwin »

totallyhuman wrote: post #19

That 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.

> Therapy, medical diagnosis

Please no. I agree with the rest (imnproved workflow too), but leave social tasks to humans.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#27

Post by protastus »

Author conflates utility with social cost, as if they were equivalent terms. Everything that follows is a mess.

Opinion columns of newspapers are largely platforms to publish nonsense with no review or editorial accountability. This seems to fit the pattern.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#28

Post by LightHugger »

orwin wrote: post #26
totallyhuman wrote: post #19

That 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.

> Therapy, medical diagnosis Please no. I agree with the rest (imnproved workflow too), but leave social tasks to humans.

It is very hard to get good medical diagnosis. Doctors are overworked and can barely spend more than 10 minutes thinking about you. People with long complex medical histories get completely fucked over, so basically these social tasks already are not being performed properly by humans because the humans doing it are stretched way too thin.

AI is going to quickly surpass the quality of medical diagnosis by doctors, at which point hopefully people can see a the right kind of specialists faster and get treatment quicker.

Re: Generative artificial intelligence is simply a waste of our time and money

#29

Post by xk_id »

As a consumer, I'm devastated by how AI is destroying the quality of services I used to rely on. As a tech professional, I'm stoked about everyone who is investing their time and energy into gambling on text generators, instead of developing their technical skills. The technical debt it creates will just make those skills even more valuable in the future.
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