I've found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?
I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.
I abhor it and I think anybody who does actually like it is using it unethically: for art (which they intend to profit off of), for writing papers or articles, and for writing bad code.
Is this discussion? I added my answer onto the pile for OP's question. I said I dislike a thing and everyone who uses it, never at any point expressing any uncertainty or confusion on the matter. Then user b said they use it and explained how. If anything they seemed to want to be insulted, and in that sense I was quite nice about it.
Clearly, their intent was to provide an example of a relatively harmless use of AI as a way of demonstrating to you that your position may have been a bit reductive.
Your reaction, of behaving like, lets be honest, a bit of an asshole, wasn’t really warranted.
I tried really hard not to engage with this obvious bait but I guess you really want it.
If you require AI to be amused while high then congratulations you're the most disgruntled creature on the face of this earth. Too bad you're still paying for a business sampling works without permission or accrediting authors.
First of all, most AI tools have some free tier. I doubt the other commenter paid a penny.
Also, just because they did it, it doesn’t mean they “required” it… I’ve laughed at cat videos before, that doesn’t mean that I require cat videos to be amused.
It kind of depends on your perspective, I wouldn’t say they profit from it monetarily - they definitely make a significant loss in raw $ from free users, but there is some amount of beneficial optics for the company, if people use it for fun/harmless activity.
I think we both want the same thing. I don’t want to tone police you or any of that shit, and I believe you’re totally justified in how you feel about AI, but I really do hope you have a read of my comments from the perspective of someone who agrees with you rather than someone who is trying to pick a fight with you.
I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.
However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.
In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.
Corpos are currently shooting themselves in the foot by trying to sell an essentially useless product which only lowers the quality of everything it touches.
I'm sure someday it will replace the press number phone machines, at the cost of accessibility, but otherwise I cannot imagine it "maximising profits".
Can you seriously not imagine how a corporation could benefit from generative AI, or are you just being obstinate and saying it’s useless because you think it’s unethical and you hope that by saying it’s useless that you can effectively manifest that?
Because there are plenty of use-cases for generative AI. None of them have to be good, or even products. Your phone machine example is a good one - it’s not a product, really, it’s taking the role of a human to fulfil some obligation, or to intentionally make it harder for people to add to the company’s support burden.
I think there are some useful applications for generative AI, but I do agree that the incarnations we have are unethical. And again, I really don’t think that simply telling people that they’re bad people for using it is going to win them over to your side.
Totally second the latter part - it's the self destructive nature of being blindly anti-AI. Pretty much everyone would support giving more rights and benefits to people displaced by AI, but only a fraction of that group would support an anti-AI mentality. If you want to work against the negative effects of AI in a way that can actually change things, the solution is not to push against the wall closing in on you, but to find the escape.