this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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[–] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 66 points 1 day ago (28 children)

I’m old enough to have gone through a number of these technology bubbles, so much so that I haven’t paid much attention to them for a fair while. This AI bs feels a bit different, though. It seems to me that lots more people have completely lost their minds this time.

Like all bubbles, this too will end up in the same rubbish heap.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 59 points 1 day ago (20 children)

That's because there's a non zero amount of actually functionality. Chatgpt does some useful stuff for normal people. It's accessible.

Contrast that to crypto, which was only accessible to tech folks and barely useful, or NFT which had no use at all.

Ok, I guess to be fair, the purpose of NFT was to separate chumps from their money, and it was quite good at that.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Can't believe I'm doing this... but here I go, actually defending cryptocurrency/blockchain :

... so yes there are some functionalities to AI. In fact I don't think anybody is saying 100% of it is BS and a scam, rather... just 99.99% of the marketing claims during the last decade ARE overhyped if not plain false. One could say the same for crypto/blockchain, namely that SQLite or a random DB or is enough for most people BUT there are SOME cases where it might actually be somehow useful, ideally not hijacked by "entrepreneurs" (namely VC tools) who only care about making money but not what the technology could actually bring.

Now anyway both AI & crypto use an inconceivable amount of resources (energy, water, GPU and dedicated hardware, real estimate, R&D top talent, human resources for dataset annotation including very VERY gruesome ones, etc) so yes even if in 0.01% they are actually useful one still must ask, is it worth it? Is it OK to burn literally tons of CO2eq ... to generate an image that one could have done quite easily another way? Summarize a text?

IMHO both AI & crypto are not entirely useless in theory yet in practice have been :

  • hijacked by VCs and grifters or all kinds,
  • abused by pretty terrible people, including scammers and spammers,
  • absolutely underestimated in terms of resource consumption and thus ecological and societal impact

So... sure, go generate some "stuff" if you want to but please be mindful of what it genuinely costs.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 15 hours ago

i think you've got it backwards. the very same people (and their money) who were deep into crypto went on to new buzzword, which turns out to be AI now. this includes altman and zucc for starters, but there's more

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