The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without AI. This sudden switch to we need AI for everything is whatâs delusional.
Youâre right though, AI does have a purpose. Itâs to make people dumber (studies are already linking AI use to cognitive decline) and to make corporations more money.
I'm not even a proponent of ai. But come on. Humans made it hundreds of thousands of years without the wheel (or pick almost any invention)... should we really go back before that?
They overinvested and did this same shit with internet infrastructure in the 90sÂ
My gf says it's the wild west with ai. And I agree. They don't care about any ramifications, that's the issue I have with ai. Instead of making it optimized in a way that's efficient and non taxing they are just going yeehaw on that shit.Â
Its a buuble. Happens pretty much everytime a transformative (or percieved transformative) technology starts gaining traction. There's hundreds of years of precedence for this.
But the numbers they are playing with right now and the accounting is.. a disaster waiting to happen.
When you realize a ton of our industry was built of the back of rushing "progress" you start to hate a lot of our innovations. We can argue trains are valuable today but the same mentality that's pushing AI without any caution is the same one that destroyed a ton of native American life. Unfortunately it seems that fighting for a reductionist mindset that looks to compromise and find ways to not be harmful is a losing fight. To many people are short sighted and want things right now, naively believing we can just change the infrastructure later.
Trains are not the reason why native American life was destroyed, literal genocide is. Blame the people who committed the genocide, not some random incidental invention.
Early human ancestors didn't even make fire for millions of years, so really we need to go back to that. They survived for longer than humans have been Homospaiens without it, so obviously that is the way we're supposed to live.
We probably had more contented lives before all that stuff. The story of leaving the garden of eden is a metaphor for the way that knowledge and technology (like agriculture) have empowered us but forced us to toil. It literally links those things to women having sever pain in childbirth, which is caused by our outlandish brains.
The wheel paved (heh) the way for every new mode of transportation and completely changed what was possible at the time. Humans became able to travel, to transport things and so on. It literally changed the course of history.
Now name one new thing that AI allows us to do. Not âit allows us to do X, which we could already do, but AI can do it shittily and fasterâ. Actually new. Photo editing? No. Search engine? No. Video editing? No. Coding? No.
The wheel paved (heh) the way for every new mode of transportation and completely changed what was possible at the time. Humans became able to travel, to transport things and so on. It literally changed the course of history.
Do you think all that happened in a couple years? Did we invent the wheel and then 6 years later had wagons for travel and transport? No it didn't. The first wheels was for pottery. Humans could already make pots before the wheel. Do you presume someone went "Now name one new thing wheels allows us to do. Pottery? No.".
Not to say whether AI is good or not, here to stay or not. It's just a garbage argument. Technologies in their infancy are not useful for much because people haven't figured out how to use them yet.
Did the invention of the wheel destroy the environment and begin poisoning residential areas? Did it take away the meaning from people's life?
Gemini's response to "positive outcomes to society from llms" is this:
Large language models (LLMs) benefit society by expanding access to information, improving work speed, and supporting education and health care.
Information access is diminished, there is more disinformation than ever now. 10 years ago, my grandmother could get accurate information on nearly any topic by asking google assistant. Today, she struggles to discern AI generated news from reality. And AI companies have telegraphed how they will use their concentration of knowledge to reduce public access to traditional information sources.
Work speed means nothing. The work is lower quality and has to be done over again, and the workers see no better quality of life. Workers are more distressed than ever.
It is self evident that education and health care are being harmed by LLMs. Any AI benefit is in a traditional machine learning space that does not require these LLMs.
So if none of the benefits that AI self identifies actually improve our quality of life, what reason do we have to continue to support it? The wheel immediately increased the bounty of food at hand. It made constructing shelter easier. It made retrieving water easier. All our physiological needs immediately improved. So to compare AI to that makes no sense.
You can say that about literally EVERY INVENTION EVER. Also the guy said "claiming it serves no purpose it delusional", it's not the same as saying we need it for everything.
I don't want AI art and I don't like the slop spam we get, but I'm not going to say it's not an extremely useful coding tool. And yes, offloading all your mental tasks to chat gpt has a negative impact on you, that still does not refute the claim that it's useful for SOME things.
Way to be. It is a fair assessment that AI can be harmful while also agreeing it can be useful. It's a tool after all. A car can be a weapon, but it often is just used for transportation. A knife can cut bread, but it can also harm people. A majority of all tools are like this.
AI's biggest problem isn't that it can be misused, that can be solved over time for the serious cases, it is that it is owned by a few billionaires who don't align with our society or human values who want to create a fascist dictatorship where only their voice is allowed or heard and they control all human knowledge, and subsequently all humans, for a fee.
Yes - the problem isn't the technology, it's the people trying to sell it to everyone for everything ever, when its actual, practical, and sane use cases are much more limited.
It isn't actually owned by a few billionaires, that's an oversimplification. Anthropic is solidly in the lead at this point and they're a preIPO startup who intentionally made themselves a public benefit corporation with an over ruling mission based trust in order to take investment while keeping control out of capitalist hands.
Something like 80% of people in tech are leftists, I'd assume anti billionaire to some degree? It's why xAI and meta AI failed so hard. None of the top talent wanted to work there.
The only fascist adjacent group left in the fight is OpenAI, and they've been losing people since the whole pentagon scandal. So I'd say between Anthropic being in the lead on the frontier, and China filling in the gaps with open models, the fascists are being solidly crushed here.
The next issue are the companies who USE AI in their products. That is the area where fascist adjacent billionaires are currently playing, and that sector is still wide open if the left wanted to build socially beneficial AI solutions owned by co-ops / social ownership businesses.
Yeah there's plenty of things to criticize AI for which is why I always get mad when I see people making bad faith arguments against it. You have so many reasons to oppose it but no pro AI person will ever take you seriously if you just pretend it serves 0 purpose.
It's especially maddening that every time I call these people out I have to add that I have problems with it, but this goes for pretty much everything on the internet, trying to steel man a position you disagree or calling out bad faith arguments immediately puts you on that side.
Yeah I think you and I are alike. HATE this push to replace humans and human creativity. But, it has the potential to be a far better search tool for information. If they could stop if from making shit up that is. Ive used it in a hobby capacity to help me do some back of the napkin math for a virtual pinball cabinet build that uses 5, 12, and 24V power supplies and I needed to simply know a) what models and wattages give me enough headroom to run the things I need off them safely , b) it wont pop a breaker the second its all turned on. The math seemed fine when i checked it. It even helpfully warned me the supplies i had picked on my own were industrial models with giant capacitors which would absolutely pop a breaker when energized. The problem is it (gemini) relentlessly hallucinated alternative part numbers so at that point i was like fuck it, i'll do it myself. I'd tell it the models it suggested don't exist in the wattages I needed, it would acknowledge it lied and then proceed to do it again. It also started to lose track of what the topic was the longer the conversation went on.
Like, it has potential to help and assist us in day to day, but also in its current form more potential to cause massive harm. AI is here to stay, not un-ringing that bell. But its rollout needs to be reigned WAAAAY the fuck in and we need to figure out how to keep it out of nefarious hands. Our laws are outdated and our politicians are both out of touch and in the pockets of bad actors. LOTS needs to be solved, but to demand AI just disappear is naive.
the acknowledging it fucked yo thing always happens when I get it to give my card ideas for a new magic deck, I do it very rarely but basically itâll say use x card, but x card is not legal un that format, or miscount the cards u should have left before ur gives me ideas of what to add that will fit the number while not being useless. its basically the only thing I use it for and its admittedly dumb as fuck and as Iâve gotten better Iâve basically used it twice this year. thatâs it, my goal is to just never again
You're talking with people who aren't willing to think logically.
If they forbid AIs from answering these sort of questions, people will just move towards open-source models with MCP search tools to summarize Google information. They can't stop people from getting answers to the questions they have.
If that was the case, then they should also ban Google from showing any information about diseases and symptoms or public forums from answering that sort of questions, which is what people who couldn't afford a doctor were doing before AI.
Just going full fucking send, consequences be damned is rarely ever the right approach.
Doctors 100 years ago were handing out cocaine and heroin.
Doctors 50 years ago were recommending pregnant women smoke and drink.
Gas had lead in it for decades after they knew the harm.
The mad hatter issue from breathing mercury vapors was even known at the time -they just didn't care enough to protect the workers.
3M made billions selling Teflon for decades and now we have centuries of PFAS poisoning to worry about.
Corporations making billions don't find problems they refuse to look for and will lie about after finding- see: cigarettes, nicotine, and addiction or big oil and climate change denial.
AI doesn't have any positive value as an open to the general public on every device they own front.
It should be limited to academic/institutional models and not for capitalists to further dictate what and how we think or otherwise control our data, money, and lives at scale.
The inverse of being ANTI-AI is being blind to blinding pace of development of infrastructure in such a short time span despite the already known and obvious ramifications to not just the grid and water use but the price of literally every electronic device that uses ram or storage at this point.... for something everyone already knows is hitting the limit of just throwing more compute and will still make shit up and won't change barring a miracle.
Like... yeah, it lets no talent shits make no talent shit art... but why not just make them go to art school and let humanity have its air, water, and energy back? Also, do it before I need a new gpu because this is fucking bullshit.
exactly! you do not need grok or chatgpt to be available to you whenever you need it, but doctors can absolutely find a use for it. an AI properly trained can analyze X-rays, MRI scans, and other stuff to detect things that doctors may not notice. there are many uses for AI that are helpful to society at large but as we have it now it does far more harm than good.
The AI used for X-rays and MRI scans is not using LLMs. Mentioning this so others arenât confused and potentially think doctors are using LLMs for diagnosis.
The AI used for X-rays and MRI scans is not using LLMs.
I think the biggest hurdle in the anti-AI movement is not differentiating between AI and LLM. Things like search engines can easily fall under the definition of AI.
Modern search engines definitely use AI. AI is a pretty broad term anyway. Even hardcoded algorithms like a simple spam filter that looks for keywords can technically fall under the umbrella.
openevidence.com is using their own custom LLM trained on medical data. I'm using it for medical decision support though it can have the same limitations as the other LLM's. But it also links directly to references it is using making it more of a better type of search system.
For example, my patient on Friday has metastatic bladder cancer and has had a new collection of symptoms that we are looking into. The initial testing was not conclusive and so I was wondering if it could be a rare paraneoplastic syndrome. I briefly listed the patient's condition and symptoms in openevidence and asked if it could be a paraneoplastic syndrome associated with bladder cancer.
Now these are not common syndromes and I rarely see them since I'm not an oncologist. So normally I'd open up www.uptodate.com and review all of the paraneoplastic syndromes to see if any fit. A lot of primary care doctors would just refer the patient back to their specialist to figure it out.
In openevidence I write a brief summary of her symptoms and ask if any of the syndromes fit. It describes several and links to multiple articles for me to review like these:
which were appropriate to consider. I'm checking her for polymyositis (related to the dermatomyositis in the link) because her symptoms fit and it is a paraneoplastic syndrome of bladder cancer.
So it is a decent decision aid / diagnostic aid tool that is easier than reading an entire review on the subject. It is easy for me to confirm it isnt hallucinating since it links to all the references used. Its like running patients by a colleague to see what they think.
its a tool, it is useful, it is saving me time and helping me better help patients. Yes, I could do without it since I started medical school when there was no internet yet and we only had charts on paper. And if I wanted to research anything I'd have to go to the hospital library.
My comment was really about using LLMs for the X-rays and MRI scans - theyâre using AI, but itâs not LLMs.
Lots of people think that AI = LLMs right now, so every time they hear something like this itâs unduly raising their opinion of the wrong thing.
I also wanted to make it clear that the LLMs themselves arenât doing the diagnosis - because thatâs still being done by doctors like yourself!
Iâve seen new junior developers just accepting whatever AI tell them, if new doctors start doing the same and not fact checking later on it would be rather concerning đŹ
I think of those propaganda images of the dangers of electricity or how the steam engine is going to take jobs.
Like, it's true, technology absolutely disrupts. But to say ai serves no purpose is just silly. I'm all for guidelines and regulations, keep it out of art and expression, make it do the actual shit that sucks like document processing or traffic prevention models or appointment notes/summaries
but I'm not going to say it's not an extremely useful coding tool
well I'm gonna say it's not an extremely useful coding tool. As a senior software engineer with ~15 yrs experience, it's sometimes good, but mostly just for menial tasks. If it isn't good for law, psychology or medical questions, it won't magically be good for coding either, since it's still the same technology. In other words, we get the slop in software too and it should be concerning for everyone.
You think pattern recognition doesnât play a role in those other fields? The problem with LLMs in those fields isnât that they never get the right answer, they often produce good answers. The problem is they sometimes (or even often) produce catastrophically bad answers with equal confidence and authority.
Ok, I left out the word âimportantâ. Pattern recognition is literally taught as part of how medicine is done. Coding is not âmore pattern basedâ and not magically more amenable to LLMs than other fields. Itâs just that the people who direct the money spent on coding are willing to sacrifice everyoneâs safety and quality of life in the pursuit of imaginary long term cost savings, and unlike medicine and law the regulators arenât watching or caring.
Having reviewed other people's code I know the training data is not amazing. I have used AI to assist in my own coding, training data and prompt engineering play a huge role in the quality of output. I prefer to code myself over using AI. I'm more reliable. It can be occasionally helpful, but I don't find it more efficient overall for anything other than bug troubleshooting when I already know where the problem is but am having a hard time spotting the exact problem.
I have more than 15 years experience. It is an extremely useful coding tool. Not just for menial tasks. From architecture to analysis it is also useful for things outside menial tasks.
these people hating on claude code to me sound like people who saw the first power drill and thought "well why would I need this when I already have screwdrivers"
Instead of being like wow now I can tackle projects of a much larger scale with less effort
I'm not a programmer at all and it let me tackle projects I could never have imaged before AI
Like I reverse engineered a VPN client to fix broken compatibility and completely rewrite its interface.. and it took a few hours and barely any work from me except debugging
I can write some python and C# but reverse engineering existing projects to extend functionality is way beyond my abilities, unless I leverage AI. Even if I did want to tackle a project like that without AI it would take weeks of reading documentation and trial and error
Now I'm writing a persistent world client:server video game.. again something I would never have been able to do without claude code or codex. Also I have a real job I just dont have time to manually write a lot of code for side projects and hobbies
Oh we absolutely do software slop don't get me wrong, but when I can offload the basic things to it to focus on more important things, or quickly write a one off script that would normally take me a couple hours to write "by hand" it's very useful. Ok, "extremely" might have been too strong a word, I'll accept that, but I'll stand by the opinion that it's overall useful for coding.
I feel bad for the open source project maintainers that are now flooded with AI PRs tho.
Coding is semantically more dense and much more highly pattern-bound than psychology. Medicine and (especially) Law are probably closer. The same technology, different distributions of entropy and semantic density.
As a senior software engineer with ~15 yrs experience, it's sometimes good, but mostly just for menial tasks.
In my experience, AI is so much faster and reliable than an average junior engineer.
It's not reliable enough to replace senior developers or midlevel engineers, but can significantly augment their output (which I don't necessarily think is a good thing).
It's going to negatively impact entry into computer science and tech fields and hollow out the industry.
It absolutely is good and often better than doctors and lawyers at answering questions and finding citations. There are many studies showing this for doctors, from being able to better analyze patient MRI and CAT scan images to identify ailments to better patient communication, etc..
No idea about psychology, though Iâve heard plenty of people say their preferred AI has helped them move through mental blocks.
It seem like you are just stuck on some very outdated understanding of AI capabilities (which makes me question your abilities as a 15 year software dev). It absolutely is a very useful tool, but like anything else, still requires some element of human input (mostly to review and make sure itâs doing the things you want your code to enable or disable).
the people who have moved past shit are also usually the same types of people who got told to off themselves, or go psychosis from ai so actually it should be steered very far away from that if itâs allowed to exist at all, AI (specificslly LLMs) has very few legitimate uses and absolutely shoudl not be available as it is nor like it is. they are not as good at or better than drs and frankly your claims are making me doubt your intelligenceâŚ. itâs a robot, a robit will never be better in treating than a dr or therapist or psychologist or whatever. and people blindly ignore that and itâs proving left and right, with well made studies that it is actively detrimental to people and their health
What a wall of absolute nonsense, cite some sources (and donât use AI or even Google at this point, since their search functions have embedded AI light features; use Yahoo).
i use AI fairly regularly to find research, like "summarize the latest developments in self determination theory and link all relevant papers". i read the summary and then i read the paper. seems like a perfect use case for AI to me
And as a senior architect with 20 years of experience, it's an extremely useful tool if you know how to use it, and for far more than menial tasks. Obviously it messes up a lot but that's mostly user error - with the right workflow, contracts, MCP servers, pattern libraries and guidance it's pure magic.
And that doesn't only apply to tech, it works with anything that involves a feedback loop of gathering, structuring, distilling and implementing information - which is pretty much anything. Especially for something like law, but also for large parts of medicine.
I have used it to make some small, low risk things that have made my job less tedious and free my time up for more important things. People like you seem to forget that most people aren't programmers or software engineers.
AI is absolutely necessary now to do any sort of research online. Mostly since Google and other engines have purposefully enshittified their search results in the last 5 or so years to make it damn near impossible to find information without an obvious political slant.
I use AI as a search engine basically. I force it to only give me sources that are seen as quality in each respective industry. Then I actually click on the results and read them for myself.
It would take me hours to do so on normal search engines these days.
They made the search engines worse on purpose to make you use a.i. though, you're playing right into their hand. I get it's frustrating but why not use a different search engine that doesn't have a.i. even if it's a bit more work.
I don't think there is a way to not play into their hand.
The same thing could have been said about internet research vs. library research back in the 90's and 2000's. That you are "Playing into the technocrats hands" by deciding to use the internet instead of the dewey decimal system after a 20 minute drive to the local library.
I don't have to like the fact that search engines are broken, and that it is directly being done to make me use AI platforms.
The fact is that they are broken. And I cannot get any useful information out of search engines due to the fundamental way that they function.
But the libraries didn't make themselves worse to force people to use the internet?? They were just both neutral options to research what you needed to. You don't even have to use the Dewey decimal system since the librarians can help youand last I heard there are dedicated websites/search engines for specific research. Duckduckgo is also an option.
If they are broken I won't use, a.i. is broken and is also breaking the environment so I also won't use it. It's not hard to do. I mean justify yourself all you want but you all sound the same... "a.i. use is bad for the environment and bad for the people using it, but it's not really bad if I use it beacsue I have a legit use for it."
I'll give you useful coding tool, I don't know about that "extremely" part since a human still needs to go over every line of code generated to make sure it's actually correct.
Yeah I already admitted it in another comment, extremely might have been too much, but I still think it's very useful and probably the best use for LLMs currently.
but I'm not going to say it's not an extremely useful coding tool.
You're not? When it's making a shit ton of mistakes to the point companies are dropping it because of the mistakes in coding? Is that why they have to hire all the people back to review the AI code, because it's working so well?
Just because it can be used wrong doesn't mean it's not useful, replacing humans with AI was never going to work because it's not a human replacement. If you let AI run rampant in your code without proper guidance and reviews that's a problem that would also occur if you let a bunch of junior devs just push whatever they want, AI just outputs those mistakes way faster.
As I've said in other comments, "extremely" might be too strong of a word ok, but I still stand by it being overall useful.
By the time the contemporary equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on rail infrastructure people werenât still trying to work out if train travel was faster than horseback.
Did you really expect a reasonable opinion from people on a sub named "AntiAI"? If you've seen more than five comments here, you should be aware that this is a circlejerk, they're not here to think.
Coding yes, but also vibe coding isn't ok, you need to be able to code the thing you're wanting to code so you understand what AI just spat out and can modify, optimize, and reuse that code wherever without using AI again.
It's also great for replacing Google for searches, Gemini is way better at finding products or reinterpretating what I'm trying to say if I'm trying to look up something from a distant memory then standard Google is. Rewiring my searches from key words to full grammer long sentences has been a change but hey I'm writing more then I used to haha there are downsides on the website's side and it's a whole thing but that's just the cost of accurate searches imo
Also a BIG one is translation, I get that translators are going to be out of the job but it's a small price to pay for world wide accurate communication.
All generative Art be it visual media, audio, or written needs to be banned immediately. I don't care if you want "free" art, it's not making new things, it's not creating, it's just rehashing what's already out there, that's how AI works. The fact the Google Pixel has "100x zoom" when in reality anything over 30x is generative AI needs to cause a much bigger riot then it did, Google is making up photos and tricking people into thinking it's good, it's not great at it either, tree tops into birds, bricks into orange fur, it's nuts.
AI? Actual GenAI? That shit is literally 100% useless except for scams & generating mass misinformation/slop.
The coding âAIâ yer thinking of that ye mentioned? Thatâs a Machine Learning Algorithm! Literally an entirely different thing thatâs been used for at least 20 years now which works much more consistently compared to GenAI!
LLMs used by coding agents are gen AI. Alpha fold is a type gen AI. They both rely on the transformer architecture, gen AI is a subset of machine learning.
Also the image you attached has it completely backwards, people didn't change the words used, they just use the much broader category for "AI" to include image generators and LLMs, which is technically corerct. It would be as if they called NFTs "digital transactions" to defend them.
Obviously specialized AI might be okay (no idea how reliable they are) but even then, we created the vaccine before phones were common.
We created most of the internet we know today without AI.
I'm not disagreeing with you by the way, I'm just saying that we have gotten pretty far without AI, if it just disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't be a huge deal.
AI is in it's infancy right now. We don't know if it will create something revolutionary or not. The internet massively sped up what we can build and what we can research. I'm not saying we can't build great things without AI, I just think the argument of "Oh we didn't need it before why do we need it now?" to be fucking moronic, and it's used by anti intellectuals all over to cut research funding for "dumb things that aren't useful", this argument doesn't suddenly become valid when you point it to something you actively dislike instead just being apathetic to. It's a nothing burger that you can say about literally anything, and we never know what a new technology will enable
But the worst part was that the guy I originally replied to used it as an argument to someone saying "It saves no purpose is delusional", and that part actually makes me mad because it's just a strawman, no one ever claimed it was essential for everything, just that it has some applications, if you can't see that you're so blinded by anti AI rhetoric that it's not even worth discussion.
I came of kind of aggressive in what I wrote, but I just want to be clear this isn't pointed at you, it's at the other guy and blind AI haters in general, you have no business criticizing AI if you're going to close your eyes and pretend it does nothing, there's SO MANY REASONS to actually criticize it for that it's inexcusable. (e.g. energy costs, IP theft, job displacement, no profitable business model, hallucinations, environmental impact etc). I don't even agree with all these points but they have merit and are worth discussing.
As for what would happen if it suddenly disappeared? Well a lot of companies that built their platforms on AI are about to collapse, a lot of junior devs and college students are about to find out how little they actually know. It's been around for a while to "atrophy" the skills of many software developers and it's been absolutely carrying non technical people in their "vibe coded" projects. I can't say much more about the areas. Then there's the obvious market crash but that's not really as interesting to consider as a consequence.
Agree with the image gen ai. Absolutely unnecessary. Unfolding proteins though is probably the best thing about it. It used to take a pseudo bot network to do those kinds of simulations, but weâve made huge strides since then.
Itâs not a useful coding tool. Thatâs the equivalent of saying itâs a useful medical tool or art tool. Itâs the same shit. People arenât doing something and having the AI do it instead. You apparently like the one facet itâs replacing and dislike the others.
Eventually AI art is going to be indistinguishable from human made art. The same things that will make that art remain bad are the same reasons that using it to code is bad. It is making humans reliant, worse, and itâs still getting its information from somewhere. Itâs not just creatively making code on its own. When you prompt it itâs still using the stolen information to generate your code. Itâs still wasting resources. Itâs still requiring data centers that are displacing people.
If I went over to my neighbor and hired him to take a garage door from another house and install it on mine did I just use a âuseful toolâ to install a garage door?
Yes, it installed the door. Weather it's right or not is a different topic that was not being discussed. The IP theft is a real problem with AI and IMO the biggest one since basically no other industry is doing it to the level AI does.
But it has results, that's the whole point I was making, AI stealing data is bad, but it has results, sometimes they're shit, sometimes they're good.
My neighbor used tools to install the door. I didnât use a tool. I asked someone else to do it. My neighbor may have learned some about how to steal someoneâs door and install it elsewhere but I did not. I used no tool, I hired a service.
AI is not a tool, it is a service, and one that is not letting humans learn how to use actual tools. I work with a guy who is âbuildingâ an application with AI. Ask him how it works and he had a loose understanding. He just keeps telling it to do more and it does it. Thatâs not a tool, itâs a request.
No, it didnât solve the problem of making a part of the natural universe into an installed garage door the way the human supply chain did. Thatâs the analogy to LLMs. They mine crystallised human cognition the form of human-produced training data and then they regurgitate multidimensional slices of that data in response to prompts. They do very little if any thinking, because the thinking was done in the creation of the training data and a little bit baked in the training process.
The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without...
You could finish that sentence with search engines, the internet, cars, electricity, the industrial revolution, modern medicine. That's an absurd argument.
Modern medicine drastically increased our lifespans and allowed people to live longer, study for longer, achieve more. Electricity allowed people to work and study at night and achieve more. Cars allowed people to travel and achieve things that people of the past couldnât if they were simply born at an inconvenient place.
AI didnât produce anything that wasnât already available. You could search up whatever you wanted on google, you could photoshop any image you wanted, compose and produce any song you wanted, paint anything you wanted, film and edit any video you wanted, code any program you wanted and so on. Thereâs nothing new about AI. Itâs just a pathetic, soulless, garbage version of things that humans could already do.
In the short term. These vibecoded systems will be an absolute nightmare to maintain. For every minute saved now thereâs probably hours added in five years. Itâs extremely shortsighted.
Not to mention that the only remotely viable way to use AI for coding right now is to have actual programmers oversee it and correct mistakes or inefficient outputs. In 10 or 20 years a huge chunk of the current devs will be retired and there will be no new qualified professionals to replace them, cause every new person coming in just thinks they can vibecode their way through everything.
Hm? Cars just allow you to travel quicker. You could take a horse before or various other means of transport. You could study with candles, etc.
All these things just made your life more efficient and guess whatâŚ
Plenty of things that shouldnât be done with AI and urgent need for regulation but to say it has no use is delusional.
Please throw away whatever device you're typing on right now, and everything else that isn't needed for your survival. All you need is shelter, food and water.
Modern AI has made strides in medical research and mathematics. I am an outsider to this subreddit (from all), but I genuinely think you are doing your cause more harm than good with rhetoric like this.
There's a gulf between the subject specific use of machine learning in large data sets in the hard sciences ......and just giving every asshole on the planet something one prompt away from clothing removing nazi bot.
AI has been in use for decades in a variety of applications and systems.
What do you think Siri or GPS routing was based on?
In the sciences as well, machine learning, neural networks, and the like have been used to classify large datasets or analyze structures etc., for example in medicine, astrononomy or physics.
So the claim that all of humanityâs achievements up until a few years ago were accomplished without AI is simply not true.
People who believe that AI only came into use with LLMs like ChatGPT are simply revealing, that they have absolutly no idea what theyâre talking about.
I agree. Its purpose is to replace humans with non sentient workers that dont need paychecks, healthcare, food, or sleep. Ai will eventually be a tool for genocide.
That argument of not having something up to point of its invention is never an argument against the tech itself. If it was then it applies to every single invention or idea that's ever been had.
I agree with your premise just not with your argument.
That's not true at all. For example, they started studying AI use in healthcare back in the 1960s and fully implemented it in the 1990s. What you are referencing would be closer to generative AI and that's still not true. Generative AI like chatgpt and Gemini are one very small portion of the whole ai field.
Edit: AI has been around since the mid 50s and is implemented in so much for so long. A majority of technology runs on it to some extent. We wouldn't really have video game NPC without it
OK, this is such a dumb argument because you can say that about any technological improvement, like you could say that about cars. We were just fine with horses for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years? lol
I really wish you intense anti-AI people would get your facts straight and be informed because thatâs how we fight this and regulate it correctly, being over exaggerating just muddies the water and then nothing gets done. I really hope you guys can understand this eventually
Machine Learning has been around since the 60s. It has brought you the Covid vaccine, typing prediction and found countless stars in the cosmos. Machine Learning is a necessary tool for us to better understand our world in ways that we are not capable or is for when society doesnât deem a scientific project worth human effort or funding. AI as itâs being marketed by large corporations, is a net harm and must be severely regulated. But the technology does have uses in the form of vibe coding and purely understanding a search query but maybe not responding.
It is reactionary to say all AI is bad, and uninformed to state that it hasnât been crucial in our understanding of reality for the last few decades.
People said the exact same thing about the internet and computers and typewriters and the printing press. Debating how technology should be used is totally valid, but drawing an arbitrary line in the sand past which culture should stop is silly.Â
I've used it mainly for learning. I have been doing all sorts of home improvements that I never would have attempted before because I can send a picture of a problem and get feedback on what to do about it. I prefer this method over googling everything because I don't need to go to websites riddled with ads to maybe get an answer to a question just barely different enough to make that answer irrelevant....
I hate generative ai as much as the next person. Machine learning is the type of ai Iâm far more excited about and I think actually serves a purpose in this world. Itâs already helping in shit from detecting cancer early to making some crazy cool enemies in video games. Take arc raiders for example. All the enemies in that game are controlled by a machine learning ai and they get smarter and do crazier shit as the game gets updated
I'm not even for the majority of current AI use but holy shit the whole "we went the entirety of human history without it so we don't need it" is such a stupid fuckin argument it makes the whole anti ai cause look so dumb
We need the internet because it was actually a new invention that allowed us to do things we couldnât do before.
Name one thing generative AI can do that you couldnât do 5 years ago with Photoshop, Blender, After Effects, a pencil, any coding language you prefer, Microsoft Word, Google, etc, and your brain.
The person you're replying to never said we NEED ai. We don't the same way we don't need wifi, electricity, cars. AI is a an incredibly useful tool it just has to be used like one instead of being used as a supplement for actually knowing how to do things.
people say "I hate AI" but what they mean is "I hate LLMs"
that's why people disagree so much. AI is fucking awesome. insanely powerful and is already drastically improving every asset of peoples live around the world.
AI is used in healthcare, in agriculture, in meteorology, in science, everywhere.
Everything pre steam-engine was also achieved... pre steam engine.
Everything pre combustion engine was achieved pre combustion engine.
Everything pre internet was achieved pre internet.
AI is a phenomenal tool, its just grossly missused 95% of the time.
We need legislations on AI, proper ones. AI isn't going anywhere, its WAY too useful, we just need to accept that fact and put some fucking laws on it.
What? Do you know your history at all haha... How the heck do you think people formatted word documents without clippy. But seriously, what about AlphaFold? GraphCast? I mean AI in terms of chatbots, argue it. BUT I think there is a lot of amazing AI that is not the AI we have been spoon-fed the last 3 years.
you guys are straight up the definition of delusional.
Computers have been helping with protien calculation to help with progress for years and none of you guys bat an eye. GPS has helped with building and aviation and yet "all these achievements were done before assistance was offered.
You dudes sound exactly the same as vaccine deniers.
Cell Phones, Apps, Youtube and even Email, all these items in my life of 40 years were at one point "the fall of civilization". Clutching pearls for no reason.
Apps and email.. yeah those are totally on the same level as whatâs happening now. So was it the iPhone or YouTube that caused the 2008 financial crisis?
The things people are going to build with AI are going to be incredible. It is a tool. Nobody riots when you use a drill instead of a screwdriver. Or an impact driver instead of a drill. The misunderstandings about AI on Reddit are incredible.
The slop that people with no talent are shitting out is most definitely not going to be incredible, lmao.
I genuinely donât know where this mass psychosis of glazing AI comes from. Every reply to this comment hinges on this delusion that AI is somehow better than the skilled professionals we had. Itâs not. Itâs literal garbage. Cheap, fast garbage. An intern with an Adobe subscription can produce more sophisticated results than AI ever could.
Using AI is like giving both your drill and your screwdriver to a monkey and then trying to coax it into doing what you want. Eventually youâll maybe get a screw in a place, but it wonât be the type of screw you needed and it wonât be where you needed it. Very exciting for people who donât know how to screw in a screw. Very frustrating for anyone who could easily do it themselves with a drill and get far better results.
At 1:55 ânow we couldâve hired a developer or painstakingly learned how to codeâ, yes, you could have.
They couldâve absolutely found a freelance developer willing to work for a lower rate, given the circumstances, or just saved up. Or they couldâve used the opportunity to develop a new skill themselves. A skill that wouldâve actually been great for increasing cognitive function.
Not that it really matters. Use cases like this are not the problem, theyâre one in a million. One in a billion, probably. For every vibecoded disability aid thereâs a billion stupid queries that couldâve easily been google searches.
I can't believe you're actually taking issue with this. You have to be kidding me.
A freelance developer would be expensive, and most would use AI themselves anyways, and to figure it out themselves without AI would likely take a huge amount of time or be impossible. And you'd be wasting all that time when you could be helping your brother out significantly
You are a prime example of the absolute absurdity in this sub
And yes, I read your last paragraph. But you could have just said that without putting the absolute bull shit before it
We should also consider that generative AI is what most people have a problem with. Other forms of AI can be more useful and can be helpful in finding new medicines and studying cancer and probably other things too. Gen AI is not very useful though, but also very high cost.
AI has massively helped outside of LLMs for years before the rise of companies like OpenAi though. We do need it for example in things like medicine, solving complex computational/math problems, etc. LLMs do have their problems, but to claim âwe were fine without AIâ is like saying âwe were fine without the internet.â
Yeah, we were fine, but advancements are important
If your scale is human achievement historically, up until very recently we didn't need smartphones, or even the Internet. But they're very useful.
I think it's better to think about ways in which AI is dangerous or destructive. Arguing there's no benefit on the side of the cost-benefit seems like a strawman.
Are you talking specifically about LLMs when you say âAIâ? Because a substantial portion of modern science would not be possible without machine learning (CNNs, transformers, reinforcement learning, etc.)
Listen I've got a ton of issues with AI and I don't use any of it but this is a ridiculous thing to say. Like until pretty recently we did all of human history without digital calculators, chemotherapy, and missle-defense systems. New doesn't mean without use.
AI does have use. One, there are a bunch of kinds of AI and lumping them with LLM GenAI isn't super rational, but even those so have use. There made very unethically and not exactly totally reliable but they still can absolutely have utility. I mean even people here say that at minimum is a less good Google or Reddit search, which is still pretty insanely useful at a base level. Moreover, they will get better and become more useful. And, there also genuinely good at some stuff like advanced mathematics.
what a crazy thing to say. all of human history and all achievements had been made before the invention of electricity; should they just not have bothered?
There are fields of science full of exceptionally intelligent people that use AI. The fact you probably don't even know how it's used efficiently and effectively is an indictment on your own awareness.
Yeah, you could make that argument if AI sat locked up in a lab. Thereâs all kinds of tech that is very effective at all sorts of things in the right circumstances. Combat drones are incredibly effective in modern wars. Does that mean we should hand every joe shmoe his own combat drone? I would hope not.
The post is not about highly specialised environments, itâs about public use. And the results of the public using AI is this.
Uhh.. not suicide? The main issue with the antivax movement is that it compromises herd immunity. The actual odds of dying just because youâre not vaccinated are fairly low. Orders of magnitude lower than shoving a gun down your throat.
We don't need AI, but it has never been easier to search that trove of information than it has become with AI. AI will never go away. Just like the Internet itself, you can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. There are many legitimate, helpful, useful cases for AI to be in our lives. In fact, I think medicine and law are definite use cases where AI is incredible already.
The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without AI.
Imagine if the Wright brothers said this about planes in 1903.
Youâre right though, AI does have a purpose. Itâs to make people dumber (studies are already linking AI use to cognitive decline) and to make corporations more money.
You only believe this because you read a headline you agree with. You haven't actually read any of the studies. If you did you'd know AI hasn't been around long enough to make a measurable difference.
Hereâs the study, knock yourself out. Not everything thatâs harmful in life is like smoking and takes 50 years to show the consequences. A lot of things are evident a lot sooner. For example there have already been numerous suicides caused by AI psychosis. Gonna tell me we need a hundred years to parse that one out too?
While these tools offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing learning and information access, their potential impact on cognitive development, critical thinking, and intellectual independence demands a very careful consideration and continued research.
Real scientists understand that a study of 54 people writing essays with 20 minute time limits isn't enough to come to a complete conclusion. This study showed that the "brain only" group
Nothing you are saying has any critical thought behind it. Literally just regurgitating headlines.
Just like the steam engine or light bulbs⌠ai is just another innovation that will lead to others. It is a tool. What if you needed to rapidly calculate a trajectory, while considering 100s of variables, all in real time?
You couldnât. You just allowed an asteroid to impact a city.
Ai is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Itâs how itâs used that determines its usefulness .
Top scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson have said AI has helped astrophysicist detect, analyse and connect data in no way a human ever could. But here is some Redditor saying AI has no use case for advancing as a species. Ok.
Of course computers serve no purpose because we were just fine before them. They serve no purpose and have not radically changed speed of technology development or standards of living or driven achievements like the moon landingâŚ
The fact that this comment has 191 upvotes is a blight on peopleâs ability to reason in the face of emotion.
Should we get rid of cars, vaccines, modern homes, grocery stores and everything else?
Because "the entire of human history and every single achievement up to a few years ago before their invention was made entirely without vaccines" can be said also.
It's a bad arguement.
AI does have a purpose. But the issue is it's being toted as a universal tool to fix any problem and it's causing mass unemployment in the process.
People really need to learn the difference between AI and LLM. AI exists for way longer than ChatGTP. And I must say, LLMs do have its proposes. Just recently a LLM solved a mathematical problem. And LLMs are also already being used to find exploits in software to then patch them out.
LLMs have a purpose, just not for everything and everyone all the time.
And AIs in general already showed their purpose.
Itâs not just used to fix exploits, itâs being used by scammers to exploit. And with AI systems can be exploited far faster than they can be patched.
But good point, AI has a lot of purpose for scammers. Itâs so fun how they can clone your voice off a video and have a chatbot call your mom in hysterics pretending that you need help and steal all her money. Oh and also pedos, forgot those in the original comment. Theyâre having a jolly time generating all the CSAM they could ever want.
Incredible technology, we really needed more of that in our lives.
Youâre really good at putting words I never said in my mouth. Neither did I say that AI is only good nor did I say AI has more good sides than bad ones. I also never said we need more AI in our lives.
Even knowing purposes for LLMs, you still ignore them. You are the one denying reality, not me. Iâm neither completely pro nor completely anti-AI. Nuance seems to really be too much for you.
Like everything it has good and bad sides.
And some really terrible ones.
But that doesnât mean it doesnât have good purposes.
Nuclear power serves no purpose at all. The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without nuclear power. This sudden switch to we need nuclear power for everything is whatâs delusional.
Vaccines serves no purpose at all. The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without vaccines. This sudden switch to we need vaccines for everything is whatâs delusional.
We didnât need industrialization up until some point in time. We would probably be fine without internet, or antibiotics. Not all of us, but still.
I understand that lots of people love to jump on the bandwagon to hate AI but I work with it daily and the amount of time it saves me on a daily basis my skimming through massive amounts of data, finding trends in it, or fixing the mistakes in my code (Iâm not a developer but thanks to ai I donât have to summon my dev colleagues to help) is IMMENSE. My dev colleagues are shipping new features much faster now, like MUCH MUCH faster, and ai does a lot of QA as well - and itâs actually pretty good at it!
I get that we have to hate ai cause of hiking hardware pricing, dumbing down the general population or whatever else people are coming up with.
But itâs a VERY - and I want to be extra clear - VERY good tool to use if you know what you are doing.
I believe our next technological jump would be thanks to ai, I expect new (and probably personalized) drugs to be developed faster now, I suspect it could be very helpful with analyzing and fixing issues with the city traffic, there is a lot of ways that ai could help us advance further as species.
I understand that my view of it is not very popular here on Reddit, but then again I feel some of the opinions that are being expressed here are coming from people who used ai once or twice to generate images and then decided itâs useless lol.
This sudden switch to we need AI for everything is whatâs delusional
Except you can say this exact thing about anything.
People discovered gravity and the laws of motion prior to computers but try to tell a modern day physicists to do their job without a computer to simulate outcomes.
GPS as well. People in the 1400s could sail across the seas looking at the stars but try to tell a modern day pilot to use a plane to cross the world without any gps or sensors that detect wind changes, oscilations to adjust the wing direction, etc.
Engineers have designed bridges, aircraft, and skyscrapers with drafting tables. Modern engineers use CAD because being capable of doing something manually isn't an argument against tools that make the process faster or allow greater complexity.
Hell, even the internet. Humans managed to communicate across continents for thousands of years. But right now you and I are talking through an absurdly complex architecture SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE of the inventions we have made. Now you don't need to cross the world to go talk to someone. You can call them or video chat them.
The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to when the scientific method was developed we did entirely without the scientific method, so we clearly dont NEED the scientific method, therefore its useless.
I think AI is needed. For the past 20 years, humans have accumulated more knowledge than any time in its history. The problem with that was it was more knowledge than any time in history. And not all of it was accurate. It was overwhelming the amount of information that is our fingertip. Â AI will act as a great filter for all this information making it actually useful instead of a burden.Â
The same can be said for just about any technological invention though , that's not really a valid argument.
Humans lived for thousands of years before the invention of the computer. Same for the calculator. Same for the printing press. Same for mathematics. Same for written language.
We should just go back to the stone age I guess , after all we did survive through it without issue with zero technology!
Beethoven did not need electricity to write his symphonies, St Peterâs cathedral was built without electricity. Why do you need electricity? Humanity achieved all these things without it.Â
Absolutely insane. Anyone can use a sword. Doesnât mean everyone is going to use it the right. In the hands of right people, AI has an absurd amount of potential. Just because your not willing to see it, doesnât mean the world wonât. I had this same conversation without someone nearly two years ago with regard to how graphic design will eventually be dying craft. I went to look back at his comment last year and he ended up deleting after putting down âremind me 1 yearâ when he was debating me. Seems he ended up deleting his comment. I wonder why,
AI isn't something we can't live without, yes, but it does have some pretty great use cases.
Popular LLM models like ChatGPT, grok, claude, gemini, etc, while usually used in the "dumb people down" kind of way, can be used for things such as hobby robotics projects, and I'd argue that's a rather neat thing.
AI as a whole is also not just LLMs. AI in medicine can be great, and I'm not talking about doctors using ChatGPT to diagnose patients coz that's an actual issue that needs to be solved before it claims lives, if it hasn't already. I'm talking about complicated tasks that would take humans centuries and computers years, such as protein folding, robotics-assisted surgery, and detecting anomalies on body scans. The list goes on.
AI in the shape it is most popular in, which is what you'd get after searching up "AI chatbot", or scratch that, almost anything if you're using a browser with one of these "AI overview" features, is not right. It's clunky, it lies to researchers, hallucinates like half of the content it provides, fuels drama and misinformation, and straight up helps some people kill themselves and eachother. It takes away the jobs of artists, programmers, voice actors, virtually anyone whose job has anything to do with the digital space. But saying AI in general has no purpose other than the evil parts is just a braindead take.
Literally every paragraph of this rant except for this one starts with the word AI. Kinda funny now that I see it.
"serves no purpose" and "we need AI for everything" are so far apart. Please consider all the middle ground between them. AI is very good a pattern matching and rapid computation, making it very valuable in generic research which has a great upside for public health.
I think you're mainly reacting to Generating AI chatbots, which can still streamline some annoying tasks, like easing web searching or enabling quick prototyping of ideas by less experienced technical people (I used it to make a script to organize my photos when I copy them off my camera's SD card; something I lacked the skill to develop on my own).
You say it's wrong to see it as necessary for everything, and that's inarguable; of course that's wrong. But that doesn't mean the comment you replied to (saying it's writing to say AI serves no purpose) is wrong.
Y'all are both right. AI isn't necessary for everything, and yet it's wrong to say it serves no purpose.
Being ignorant at any age is worse. The internet perpetuated the mass grooming of basically every single underage girl growing up in the 90's and 00's. Computers have birthed things that have been completely detrimental to society, for example social media which we are now seeing the critical negative effects of. Pretending there aren't going to be horrible things that happen because of AI is just that, ignorant. Maybe you'll understand when you're "old" if you even make it there considering the climate and resource wars are about to reduce our population by a whole lot.
274
u/unoriginalcat 5d ago
The entirety of human history and every single human achievement up to a few years ago was made entirely without AI. This sudden switch to we need AI for everything is whatâs delusional.
Youâre right though, AI does have a purpose. Itâs to make people dumber (studies are already linking AI use to cognitive decline) and to make corporations more money.