AI is like a hammer
AI is like a hammer
Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.
A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.
If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Some hammers use enough energy to power a small country in order to show you a cake recipe without an entire backstory and 50 ads.
Without ads for now
Then it WAS worth it.
A cake recipe that instructs you to put non-toxic glue in it, and some small pebbles on top of it.
This hammer does the same without using the energy of a small country https://theskullery.net
Welcome to capitalism.
AI is the new thing, so cramming it into a product increase funding and/or stock price.
Even if it hurts the product.
Even if it hurts the product
Because the product is not the product. The stock valuation is the product.
It's more like Jefferson's dumbwaiter, in that it was created by someone who verbally supported an egalitarian utopian vision of society, but the device itself is a scale model of an exploitative social system. At one station of the device, unpaid/low-paid labor operates out of view of the user, and then at the other station, the user enjoys an almost-magical appearance of an answer to their request.
No tool is "just a tool", after all. In that way, AI is like a hammer.
(That section of the video leans heavily on Do Artifacts Have Politics?, which is a pretty short and accessible essay. If you're not convinced that artifacts do have politics, and you don't want to watch the video, just read a few paragraphs of the essay.)
It's not good at replacing your job, but good at convincing your boss that it can
Nope. It's more like that weird thing you brought at 3 am off of the Home Shopping Network because you were in a really bad place and thought it would make you feel better.
Now it's taking up space and you don't want to throw it out because that would mean you're a failure...
Basically what I said to people who asked me about my opinion on AI.
Exactly it was: "AI is a tool like a hammer. If you hit your finger, don't complain about the tool, but because you simply used it wrong."
Except AI is a pipe wrench pretending to be a hammer.
True.
And I get where you're going, but pipe wrenches are still way too useful in too many situations. AI is a like a disc brake compressor hand tool, being sold as the solution to everything else.
When I mention how much I like it for compressing a disc brake, I feel like people look at me like I'm crazy for falling off the hype train.
Edit: And by people, I mean AI hype shill bots, probably.
Sometimes it is more like "AI is like a hammer in a world full of screws."
it's very difficult to use jello as a hammer
Probably just as difficult as justifying the “AI” component of this light: https://amzn.eu/d/08yAcZpp
calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?
I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.
Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.
It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.
Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.
Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.
you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.
Software developer, here.
It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.
I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.
Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)
Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.
I am really piss off when Reddit use AI to shadowbanned my account. They never tell the reason. They just hide my interaction to outerworld, assuming that i am dumb and never found out.
As a result, all subsequent accounts i try to create are shadowbanned after 5 minutes because my phone in blacklist.
Appeals everyday but never get responded. I am sure all of this is handling by AI.
I wouldn't even call this AI, they just have an algorithm. That's poorly tuned.
I encountered the same issue, and that's exactly why I'm here on Lemmy. Reddit and it's Shadow banning habits have to go away.
I don't like having persistent social accounts, so I make a new one for each topic, Reddit, GitHub. Purpose specific accounts to do one thing. And for the last few years, every time I create an account like that, it's immediately shadow banned. It's frustrating, because my contributions are now thrown away, and it's dishonest, because these services don't have the politeness to even tell you you're not allowed to participate.
Because of that, a federated system like Lemmy must survive. That's why we're here