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Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

frank.computer

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Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#81

Post by bruce511 »

crote wrote: post #58
bruce511 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the power, nor cooling, requirements are necessarily environmentally harmful. As always ymmv. First water; there are plenty of places on the planet where water is bountiful. If you site a data center well (say on a big lake in a rainfall area) then water is not an issue. An "using" water in this way doesn't affect water scarce areas. Equally lots of electricity can be generated in environmentally harmless way…

Sure, it's possible , but we don't seem to live in a world where that is actually the case in practice . The large AI companies are perfectly happy to draw water to the point that local residents no longer have access to clean tap water, and they are perfectly happy using dirty "temporary" gas generators for power. We should judge it for its actual use, not its ideal use.

I agree. In the long run some AI providers will be "greener" than others.

Once AI becomes a commodity this is the sort of thing that will become a differentiating factor when consumers choose one over the other.

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#82

Post by foresterre »

jimkleiber wrote: post #11

It seems the author is instead arguing that we should say that AI is a destructive tool and we should not use it. I was hoping the article would not label it purely good or bad, but 1) highlight that AI is not just a tool but a very powerful tool and 2) and therefore it very much matters how we all use it and how it uses us. In this framing, we can see the things where it helps and hurts us and society and many level…

I don't think the article tries to argue against the good sides.

In my opinion it asks us to not just look at individual gain of using LLM's (which can be powerful), but also place it in context how we as humans built long-term sustainable societies. Most societies are currently ignoring that part for the most part, because they fear missing out.

Probably the hardest problem of LLM's is their ethics. As the author put it:

> Modern multi-billion parameter AI models are scaffolded on and made possible by the largest heist in human history: theft of everything that could be scraped from every corner of the digital spaces we share. Without prevention of and justice for this damage caused by current models, their use is highly fraught, ethically. We, as human beings, have developed complex social forms of intelligence when it comes to dealing with things like credit and provenance, two things that modern models are incapable of.

No one currently seems to have serious solution for this. Solving it the right way would be choosing the hard path. While some artists or writers are fighting for their rights, us programmers are collectively ignoring the issue. It is funny how most companies (and some individuals) only want to use LLM's of they don't train on their code. But is just fine to use some 40 years of collective open-source without any compensation or even acknowledgement.

This side of the story doesn't make LLM's less technically impressive, nor does it make the tools themselves less powerful. But unlike the industrial revolution, which some like to compare the AI boom to, during the industrial revolution humans built stronger productivity solely on innovation without strip mining all intellectual property in human existence.

I can see the benefits of LLM's, enjoy the technical capabilities and be impressed by the technology, and at the same time find these tools wholly unethical in their current form.

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#83

Post by witx »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #80
witx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, no? The point of open source was to help other developers and communities. Not allow corporations to slurp them on a huge scale and sell you a subscription. Corporations always took advantage of open source but never at this scale. A couple of years ago I used to work for a pretty soulless company and even them were very very adamant of filling all the forms and software BOMs, and respecting licenses when using…

Don't buy a subscription baby, get an open weight model and go about your day. Your complaint is equivalent to Amazon selling hosted postgresql...

> and go about your day.

That's the attitude that got us here. Just shrug along

> Your complaint is equivalent to Amazon selling hosted postgresql...

It's not. It's the equivalent of them copying the code, making small changes and calling it something else that they for sure developed in house, just believe

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#86

Post by zombot »

pj_mukh wrote: post #66
apparent wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guns don’t have numerous other positive use cases, so AI is simply not a fair comparison. They may not have numerous positive use cases, but the one where they save your life is a pretty good one. People who live where police are nearby don't appreciate how different things are out in the country.

Digression, but gun laws (or lack thereof) apply equally to cities where most people live and where guns wreck most of their havoc and cities are banned from passing any laws to help fix. Different issue entirely. In fact this kind of case-by-case handling is exactly what I’m asking for in AI as opposed to blanket laws.

No case-by-case handling can negate the energy costs and other side effects of datacenters, for instance. Your arguments are sophistry.

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#87

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

jimkleiber wrote: post #32
truncate wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes think its somewhat like opioid. Has its use, reduces pain, but then after extended use you also likely get addicted to it and starting having issues.

I mean I think sometimes it reduces pain. But it can also increase pain? I've definitely stayed up later than I've wanted to, or got into a fight with someone because I paid more attention to the AI coding agent than them, or had it convince me that I had made deep scientific breakthroughs only later to tell me everything was obvious and maybe tautological. I just think it's a very powerful and complex tool that can…

The article expresses this effect nicely in the line:

> A hammer isn’t just made of wood and iron, then. A hammer is a hammer because of what it does and who we become when we use it.

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#88

Post by _superposition_ »

pj_mukh wrote: post #61
michaelt wrote: post #45

As I understand it, in America "it's just a tool" is shorthand for "guns should be regulated like hammers, i.e. barely at all, responsibility lies with the user not those who make, market and sell it" Needless to say a lot of people disagree with that, because of the shootings. And internationally, a lot of societies regulate guns a great deal. I'm not saying this to steer the conversation towards gun control, or to…

You’re not doing this but to your example: Guns don’t have numerous other positive use cases, so AI is simply not a fair comparison. And in the case of AI, given the media environment the fact that it’s being used to save millions of hours doing back office automation is never covered. So yes this is a prime argument for AI. It’s just a tool with a myriad of uses that no one covers cuz they’re boring. As to the rest…

It's NIMBY all the way down. Murica...

Re: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

#89

Post by jdw64 »

hardbass wrote: post #54
jdw64 wrote: post #20

Right. AI is a tool that helps some people "make their situation better." I don't believe technology is value neutral either. Say a tractor does the work of ten farmers, and the farm owner lays off those ten farmers. Is that the tractor's fault? It's just the farm owner's fault. But we usually say the tractor took the ten farmers' jobs, because the farm owner trusted the productivity gain and made the cuts. That's th…

Who is stopping the third world from using and forking open source tools? I think its a nonsense excuse. Many of their people become accomplished developers when they immigrate to first world countries so foss is not the one at fault but crappy governments and crappy cultures are.

The core of the issue is that you need to make money to get into the IT industry. Have you ever stopped to think about why the Anglosphere is so dominant in IT in the first place? That's exactly the point. If the quality of what you make falls below what open source tools already offer, does it even have any commercial viability? When people from third world countries immigrate to developed countries, get a proper education, learn English, and then pick up the skills to climb the social ladder, that's when they learn programming.

The entire programming industry belongs to Anglophone culture. That's basically the heart of it. I'm not saying we should stop anyone from using or forking open source tools. But when anything less valuable than those tools can't command any money, do you honestly believe a country with no industrial foundation can suddenly produce tools that surpass decades of accumulated open source?

And here's another thing. From for loops to while loops, the phrasing, the word order, all of it. People say programming is machine language, but the truth is most of it is structurally dependent on English syntax.

This is exactly what people mean when they talk about the problems of globalization. Knowledge blocks vary wildly from region to region, but what gets established as a viable product is always tailored to the end consumer market, which is the U.S. Developing countries just can't keep up.

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