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.

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.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

I think LLMs are going to cause massive change, not all of it good.

Ultimately, I'm an optimist. I think in the long run, LLMs are going to enable us to do amazing things that we wouldn't have been able to do without them. In the short term... I dunno. It's going to be a rough transition.

I do think the people who think LLMs are going to keep getting better, leading to either some sort of techno-utopia, or kill us all off maybe don't really understand how they work and what the implications are.

I also think the people who are categorically against AI are making a mistake out of fear, but that's pretty understandable.

We've been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.

Well, some dude on youtube said the future is Cyberpunk 2077, and I'm inclined to believe him because he had a lot of likes.

"Rapid Evolution" = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.

When you realize it's just a big average sentence machine starts to make a lot more sense when and where to use it. I think it should be used as an exact problem solver not a general one. Government regulations can't come soon enough because unlike previous tech this one has the ability to deceive and if it gets access to resources we will be in direct competition with the AI.

Sources for a good chunk of my view points:
Spanish prime Minister wondering why AI not treated like nuclear tech at a global level interview with him https://youtu.be/p6XvTconhwQ

AI panel debate, Nate soares and Roman Yampolskiy stand out on this discussion about the inevitable risks we are walking towards with very little action. https://youtu.be/OhOmLqR5nN4

I don't really use it personally (other than times I log in on a work computer, look something up, and Google's AI search defaults). But I also don't really condemn it as strongly as others seem to, I guess. It depends on how it's used.

When it's used to take work done by humans, then regurgitate its own version of that work to replace those jobs, that's a problem. If actual artists, writers, designers, engineers, coders, etc. can no longer earn a living after being replaced by AI, we run the risk of complete cultural and developmental stagnation.

But I think my main point of disagreement with a lot of the AI conversations happening here revolves around how we look at waste and environmental impact. Not in the sense that AI isn't still a problem in those aspects, but that it seems like a very convenient boogeyman for people to blame while ignoring the myriad other wasteful aspects of the world we live in.

Basically, with the environmental impact of data centers and energy costs of hardware in general, why do we focus so much on what that compute is used for, as opposed to addressing those issues in a more comprehensive sense? Does it matter if a data center is built for AI or for any other hosting provider? Or if someone runs a local AI model on their PC, is that any more detrimental to the environment than someone who plays video games for several hours each day?

I feel like there are lines that people who claim to primarily care about the environment are afraid to draw, when it's easier to pin the blame wholly on AI. So if someone says that they used AI to help make their spreadsheets cleaner, to translate a website, or to summarize the content of a book, I don't really jump straight to blanket criticism. Otherwise I'd have to take the same criticism towards people who host a plex server, who play MMOs, or who run Lemmy instances.

I can see that there is some value in using AI in the workplace, but I am hestitant to use it myself until someone can show that it is not damaging the environment, we have a plan for how to ensure people can use it in a healthy way, and that the content which was used to train it was ethically sourced and/or those content makers were appropriately compensated.

Because I just can't shake the sense that the tool is fundamentally unethical to use currently.

Let me try to use an analogy.

We're farmers in ancient times. A shaman tells us that we can increase our crop yields by taking a bunch of kittens and dismembering them alive in the fields. You try it and it actually works. I don't want to do it and I'm disappointed by your choice.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

Well, they did that on purpose, no? To defect criticism.

To distinguish them I would call the other stuff machine learning, which is what we already called it before, and the LLMs as AI, since that's what the common people think of when they say that word.

It can't analyze either

I didn't start using AI (the LLM kind) until this year.

I use AltTexty.org sometimes for making alt-text of images that are text dense.

Aside from that, I use a chatbot (copilot at work, Kagi at home) for some information retrieval, mostly on things related to programming, but I don't use it to "vibe" code. Like I'll ask it for general programming examples, and to compile reference manuals on the basics of this or that programming language that I'm learning, and to help out with error messages that have me stumped, but I don't have it generate whole programs for me (I did that once, felt gross, then asked it to teach me how it works in the form of a tutorial; I didn't use the program until I felt like I understood it).

Edit: Regarding my view of AI, I'm pretty conflicted. I'm trying to use it just as a reference tool to help me learn, and not a replacement for thinking and creativity. I think that's what I'm doing with it? But maybe I'm deluding myself.

I hate the environmental impacts though from what I've read it's image and video generation which are the energy hogs and I never use it for those. In any case I intend to try local LLM for my narrow use cases once I learn how.

I have bigger things to worry about. Like affording food and all my bills.

For a point against AI, I think you should consider the way in which LLMs reduce cognition in people.

Arguably it's not necessary for people to do all of their cognition themselves, but that definitely does make people's thinking ability weaker. I suppose you could look at it like how when we automated physical labour away from most people - and now most people do not do nearly enough exercise. If we automate thinking away from most people, I feel like that will lead to worse health outcomes as well

My take: Run what you want on your own damn hardware. If you feel the need to make it a 'service' in order to run it, think very carefully about WAY more than just the money it will cost you to do so. If you feel the need to take a massive IOU to buy the hardware or LAND to put that hardware, go die in a hole. If you feel the need to reserve the world's entire manufacturing supply for hardware to put on the land you put out an IOU for, I sincerely hope that you get a pineapple up the ass as you're getting beheaded in whatever town square.

I think LLMs are useful for some things, but not as useful as people think overall.

I suspect the major LLMs will follow the enshittification trend, prices will go up, and people will abandon them for smaller open weight models

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.

It reminds me of early 90s PCs...

Everyone was convinced if you "knew how to computer" that's all you needed. Every school bought a shit ton, and kids would get an hour a day to just dick around and play games.

None of the adults understand any of it, so we grew up learning to be thech support for the people teaching it to us.

AI will eventually end up like PCs, it won't be a magic solution, but it will drastically cut down on available jobs and transfer wealth to the wealthy.

The smart move is to sit it out till someone actually makes it profitable, then we could dump billions into it now. We can't beat China because their companies actually have to compete with each other.

We should wait till the dust settles over there, then dump the money on copying what they do. Just manufacturing whatever chips design they settle on.

Racing R&D with zero manufacturing just isn't logical.

Fuckin A

Despite the apparent speed of advances, AI is a technology that is still in its childhood. It's as if tech companies found a way to create a 6-year-old out of GPUs and way too goddamn much electricity. If you can overlook the resource usage required, that's kind of cool.

The problem is that those same tech companies (and some governments) have decided that they all need their own synthetically created 6-year-old and that they should give it unlimited funding and the ability to make life-changing decisions for everyone else, and anyone who isn't jumping at the chance to have their life overseen by a machine-generated child with poor impulse control and a propensity to hallucinate is just "getting in the way of progress".

This is my biggest concern for sure.

Currently? Frank Herbert

Its shit and I'll be glad when it gets flushed.

Before asking what AI can do for you,

Ask how many kidneys do I need to sell, when my SSD fails?

Are humans, 3rd degree citizens on the internet now?

How many proof of work rounds do I need to keep my website from getting eaten by scrapers?

Are you a bot or am I?

It’s going to destroy human culture via homogenizing our arts and entertainment into a formless unappealing landscape of generic and easily digested slop.

People will stop bothering to learn music, writing, etc, because the idiot hacks in their school are able to create entire albums with absolutely no skill.

I mean… the data centers are already paying dividends to the lawmakers that enable their existence, and we’re rushing full-speed toward a computer industrialization of our environment that it cannot sustain.

Everything about it is going to be disastrous in the long run.

Unfortunately. It won’t.

"Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions."

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren't) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a "truth machine". A speaker I heard put it simply: "AI cheats." It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

it's sort of mixed.

overall i hate how it's being made, advertised, brainwashing people, used for fake images/propaganda, reducing signal to noise ratio with meaningless slop, environmental concerns etc.

OTOH there's some genuinely great things (imo) being made because of it. like people making drivers for long obsolete hardwares, reverse engineering proprietary blobs. maybe it isn't something very advanced technically but it's still something i find very interesting. most recently i saw someone got iOS 7 running on a HTC HD2 (leo), 17 years after that phone first released.

i still don't use llms yet other than short testing back a few years ago, but i might start using them soon. i really want to get volte working on my phone, i don't know how to reverse engineer the vendor's IMS implementation, and i've seen people with not much knowledge get it working on their phones with llm help.

maybe i'm justifying immoral things.. idk. something to think about.

"Generative AI" is a bullshit scam with no future. The sooner it dies, the better. And to call the bubble "unsustainable" is to understate.

"AI" is way too vague a term to give a "take" on.

I've been doing scientific software development for 20 years, and here's my personal experience:

• Software development as it had been is already over due to AI. There's no reason to write code yourself anymore in 99% of cases. Even highly technical stuff (GPU algorithms, for example) are no problem for the AI.

• Scientific work is very different than it used to be. The AI doesn't have the initiative to just do it for you yet the way it can with writing software, but it's an expert in every field so it provides an excellent foundation for your own novel ideas and it can often suggest new ideas from fields you aren't personally knowledgeable about.

• Socializing is going to be very different soon. Right now the AI is already more interesting to talk to than most humans, but talking to it doesn't feel like talking to a human and doesn't satisfy the need for interpersonal interaction. I expect that to change. (I suspect that the current absence of a human-like AI is more because developing it is not good business than because it's technically difficult.)

• A lot of AI critics have objectively false ideas of how well AI works. I think they either haven't tried cutting-edge models recently or they have deliberately tried to make those models fail. You can break most things if you try; that doesn't mean they don't work well.

As I type this, an AI is working on a tricky problem in molecular dynamics for me. It has already found and fixed issues with the algorithm that my co-worker spent a month on, but it thinks that a different algorithm it came up with can do even better. After coming up with the idea, it's independently implementing it, unit testing it, running simulations with it, and doing statistical analysis of those simulation results. If it gets errors, it can debug them on its own. If the results aren't as good as it expected, it can iterate over different variants on its own. If the algorithm ends up not working, it can reason about why, from a scientific perspective. What the AI does in hours would have taken me weeks if I came up with the idea, which I didn't.

Right now human experts can still do what AI does, just slower. I expect that in less than 5 years, that will probably no longer be true. Predicting the future after that point is nearly impossible. Will we all die? Maybe.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but, IMHO, most of the problems I see being voiced by anti-AI (actually, anti-LLM) people, seem to have less (if anything) to do with the tech per se and more to do with capitalism's and corporations' usurpation of it.I mean, if LLMs were something exclusively made and maintained by, say, a not-for-profit academia (as in a "Libre and Open Science" kind of academia where scientists are working for the entire Earth rather than working for profit/egoistic goals), like the Machine Learning field kind of already was back in the dawn of perceptrons, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be experiencing this whole dystopia, no?!asklemmy@lemmy.world

First of all, it isn't going away. Stop telling yourself that lie. If you hate it, then compare it to herpes or mosquitoes. Not going away. People love to talk about sensational things like bubbles or how it will end humanity. Stop being hysterical. It is software. You don't have to use it, you don't have to like it, but be informed. Saying it will go away is about as ignorant as saying the internet is a fad and smartphones are on the edge of failing out of the market. You just sound like a Luddite.

In the end, it is a tool. It can be used for stupidity, waste and nonsense, or it can be used for something good.

You can use a hammer to build something or you can murder someone with it. Any tool can be misused.

It is terribly inefficient in its current form. It needs to be refined just like any other technology. We used to have cars that got single digit mpg. Now you can buy a cheap car that gets 30+, a hybrid that can crack 50 or straight electric. Like anything, it will improve over time.

Society did not revert to riding horses, we did not give up mobile phones for land lines and ai isn't going away. There is solid historical precedent to demonstrate this. You can be the old man yelling at the clouds, but it won't do anything but make you look silly.

You are not going to get a general pulse here. This is a fuck ai echo chamber. I am not saying that the sentiment is wrong, but it isn’t representative of the general public.

I think that LLMs are very useful for specific tasks, but they're being pushed as if they're useful for almost everything.

I also have huge ethical concerns over LLM-peddlers' treatment of the environment.

I'm alarmed by some people's susceptibility to falling for obvious slop and worried about what will happen if and when the slop gets less obvious.

I'm frustrated with many people who share those concerns conflating LLMs with the general concept of intelligence that is artificial.

Fuckin Amen

I think it's ethically indefensible, but because of the environmental impact of data centers.

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.

It's like a calculator.

• it costs more than doing it yourself
• it seems faster
• it's accurate but you have to do it right and check the shit after
• it makes you stupid for the basics
• it robs kids of important fundamentals.
• it's pervasive. Soon it may be ubiquitous.

My niece can't make change for a dollar, nor multiply numbers above 12. She struggles with writing and reading, and I wonder at her reasoning skills. She's 27.

She's fine with a calculator and hard facts. But the "two trains leave on coursetl to pass each other" kind of "make math from description" part that exercises the brain's ability to select the right equation and use it? Not great.

We'll be like this, but with building digital things. Our BEST hope is to become the fat and lazy pampered pets of the robots like in WALL-E. The alternative is a little too Matrix for me.

On one side…

On the other…

I’m a shameless local LLM shill. I have one loaded right now, experimenting with it.

I also thought Sam Altman was a psychopath before that was the popular opinion, and have never subscribed to OpenAI or even used their free UIs. Not once. Not even the “original” GPT 3.5.

I don’t plan on ever doing it. I will rail against them.

In other words, the sides aren’t mutually exclusive.

One can hate “AI” with a burning passion, using the term AI pejoratively. And be passionate about local ML.

Ohh. Yeah. It's a concern.

People said the same things about TV. I don't know that they were wrong.

But it is here to stay, and I think it will do more good than harm on balance. The sheer access to information LLMs can provide to someone who knows how to sort fact from hallucination is staggering.

But, yes. I do share your concerns. My view is that, at this point, people who don't make an effort to exercise their minds are already a lost cause. I'm not sure how much worse LLMs can make it.

She’s fine with a calculator and hard facts. But the “two trains leave on coursetl to pass each other” kind of “make math from description” part that exercises the brain’s ability to select the right equation and use it? Not great.

We’ll be like this, but with building digital things. Our BEST hope is to become the fat and lazy pampered pets of the robots like in WALL-E. The alternative is a little too Matrix for me.

We talk about the "K-shaped economy" where there was an inflection point and our society diverged into two groups: one doing well financially and getting richer and the other continuing to decline financially.

I'm personally seeing separate unrelated K-shaped divergence between one part of our society that continuing to increase in technical knowledge and execution skills and the other falling further away being slaves to digital products designed to separate them from as much of their money as possible.

The first group are avid users of 3D printers and other fabrication techniques. They love a good RESTful API. They'll chop the back half off of one product and stitch it together with interface electronics and code to the other half of another device just to make their lives slightly better.

The second group will pay $5 for an app that will take Instagram pictures and apply them to some digital in-game item while the app sells their location and personal information to brokers and their car insurance company to jack up their premiums.

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.

We have it at work.

I'm not going to lie, it has made my job a lot easier. My fear is it'll make me stupid so I do most of my work myself and then get the LLM to tweak it.

As an example, I've had to create a number of policies and procedures.

I've done the content, the LLM has done all the formatting etc. Something that would have taken me several hours to do. I'd prefer an assistant to do it for me but thats not gonna happen.

My opinion is well... I'm sure it may have some use, but I see it pushed in the dumbest and least useful ways. It is fundamentally incapable of creating art in any shape or form. Use it to summarise things? I don't trust it enough to correctly summarise the text. Use it to write/reply to emails? I'd myself just feel insulted if someone sent me a generated email. Why should I expect someone to read a text I didn't even bother to write?

LLMs were fascinating and I very rarely use one if I can't find information online for the life of me.

I hate what OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok etc are doing to get the training data. Whatever I put only is likely scanned and gobbled up by some AI Agent. I am an Artist. Uploading art has always been uncomfortable to me, now with scraping I truly hate it. i am glad there are services like Glaze and Nightshade, but there are some shitheads working on cracking these.
I worry about missing legislation.
I worry about the security breaches. I am not sure if they are mere marketing, but regardless, it shows how capable AI Agents are, and how much damage they can cause.

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.

It works for basic tasks like correcting grammar, sorting lists, etc, but it makes too many mistakes when you try to use it for a complex task.

• How come the most memory-inefficient ML model we have ended up being the most powerful one. Can we rewrite the universe so modern advanced AI is based on network inference or ensemble models or sth
• How come AI has taken over the economy, and it doesn't seem like a bubble (or at least not the crypto type of bubble)
• I'm a bit surprised that the most predominant use of AI/LLM seem to be... as a search engine wrapper. Thankfully ChatGPT is getting better at it, their default model has a built-in search engine integration now. This is kind of important since the company is getting big enough that their model bears social responsibilities...
• I have an asshole-ish work environment where the head honchos only cares about professionalism and efficiency... so I have no shame using AI for work. They don't deserve my best tbh
• In terms of actual usage for my work, AI outputs can be anywhere from very good to very bad in an instant, and sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart...
• It's surprisingly helpful as a primer to help me with things I'm not good at; researching niche information, finding resources
• For personal usage, I'm still hoping that there is a way to work AI into some type of a home automation loop... I haven't found that sweet spot yet. Maybe it's just my lack of skill at the moment. Hopefully I can hook together some shitty models with search engine skills (on my own SearXNG) as a semi-useful agent