I’'m curious about the strong negative feelings towards AI and LLMs. While I don’t defend them, I see their usefulness, especially in coding. Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution? I want to understand why this topic evokes such emotion and why discussions often focus on negativity rather than control, safety, or advancements.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    My main gripes are more philosophical in nature, but should we automate away certain parts of the human experience? Should we automate art? Should we automate human connections?

    On top of these, there’s also the concern of spam. AI is quick enough to flood the internet with low-effort garbage.

    • Dr_Nik@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The industrial revolution called, they want their argument against the use of automated looms back.

        • Dr_Nik@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Lots of assumptions there. In case you actually care, I don’t think any one company should be allowed to own the base system that allows AI to function, especially if it’s trained off of public content or content owned by other groups, but that’s kind of immaterial here. It seems insane to villainize a technology because of who might make money off of it. These are two separate arguments (and frankly, they historically have the opposite benefactors from what you would expect).

          Prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was done by hand, making all cloth expensive or the result of sweatshops (and it was still comparatively expensive as opposed to today). Case in point, you can find many pieces of historical worker clothing that was specifically made using every piece of a rectangular piece of fabric because you did not want to waste any little bit (today it’s common for people to throw any scraps away because they don’t like the section of pattern).

          With the advent of automated looms several things happened:

          • the skilled workers who could operate the looms quickly were put out of a job because the machine could do things much faster, although it required a few specialized operators to set up and repair the equipment.
          • the owners of the fabric mills that couldn’t afford to upgrade either died out or specialized in fabrics that could not be made by the machines (which set up an arms race of sorts where the machine builders kept improving things)
          • the quality of fabric went down: when it was previously possible to have different structures of fabric with just a simple order to the worker, it took a while for machines to do something other than a simple weave (actually it took the work of Ada Lovelace, and see above mentioned arms race), and looms even today require a different range of threads than what can be hand woven, but…
          • the cost went down so much that the accessibility went through the roof. Suddenly the average pauper COULD afford to clothe their entire family with a weeks worth of clothes. New industries cropped up. Health and economic mobility soared.

          This is a huge oversimplification, but history is well known to repeat itself due to human nature. Follow the bullets above with today’s arguments against AI and you will see an often ignored end result: humanity can grow to have more time and resources to improve the health and wellness of our population IF we use the tools. You can choose to complain that the contract worker isn’t going to get paid his equivalent of $5/hr for spending 2 weeks arguing back and forth about a dog logo for a new pet store, but I am going to celebrate the person who realizes they can automate a system to find new business filings and approach every new business in their area with a package of 20 logos each that were AI generated using unique prompts from their experience in logo design all while reducing their workload and making more money.

          • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            GenAI is automating the more human fields, not some production line work. This isn’t gonna lead to an abundance of clothing that are maybe not artisan made, but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products. Hope you like Marvel slop, because you’re gonna get even more Marvel slop, except even worse!

            Creativity isn’t having an idea of a big booba anime girl, it’s how you draw said big booba anime girl. Unless you’re one of those “idea guys”, who are still pissed off that the group of artists and programmers didn’t steal the code of Call of Duty, to put VR support into it, so you could sell if for the publisher at a markup price, because VR used to be a big thing for a while.

            • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products

              It’s even worse than that, because the #1 use case is spam, regardless of what others think they personally gain out of it. It is exhausting filtering through the endless garbage spam results. And it isn’t just text sites. Searching generic terms into sites like YouTube (e.g. “cats”) will quickly lead you to a deluge of AI shit. Where did the real cats go?

              It’s incredible that DrNik is coming out with a bland, fake movie trailer as an example of how AI is good. It’s “super creative” to repeatedly prompt Veo3 to give you synthetic Hobbit-style images that have the vague appearance of looking like VistaVision. Actually, super creative is kinda already done, watch me go hyper creative:

              “Whoa, now you can make it look like an 80s rock music video. Whoa, now you can make it look like a 20s silent film. Whoa, now you can make look like a 90s sci-fi flick. Whoa, now you can make it look like a super hero film.”

              • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                It even made “manual” programming worse.

                Wanted to google how to modify the path variable on Linux? Here’s an AI hallucinated example, that will break your installation. Wanted to look up an algorithm? Here’s an AI hallucinated explanation, that is wrong enough at some parts, that you just end up just wasting your own time.

            • Dr_Nik@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Gotcha, so no actual discourse then.

              Incidentally, I do enjoy Marvel “slop” and quite honestly one of my favorite YouTube channels is Abandoned Films https://youtu.be/mPQgim0CuuI

              This is super creative and would never be able to be made without AI.

              I also enjoy reading books like Psalm for the Wild Built. It’s almost like there’s space for both things…