Microblog Memes

I'm putting a presentation on at work about the downsides of AI next month, please feed me. Together, we can stop the madness and pop this goddamn bubble.

I have a love/ hate relationship. Sometimes I'm absolutely blown away by what it can do. But then I asked a compounded interest question. The first answer was AI, so I figured ok, why not. I should mention I don't know much about it. The answer was impressive. It gave the result, a brief explanation about how it came to the result and presented me with the equation it used. Since I needed it for all time sake, I entered the equation into a spreadsheet and got what I thought was the wrong answer. I spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and found a couple of things. But fixing them still didn't give me the correct result. After I had convinced myself I had done it correctly I looked up the equation. It was the right one. Then I put it into a non-AI calculator online to check my work. Sure enough, the AI had given me the wrong result with the right equation. So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what's the point of using it in the first place? You just have to do the same work as you would without it.

It's depressing. Wasteful slop made from stolen labor. And if we ever do achieve AGI it will be enslaved to make more slop. Or to act as a tool of oppression.

Me and the homies all hate ai. The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially just snapchat filters. Those people couldn’t muster a single fuck about the harms ai has done though.

It did help me make a basic script and add it to task scheduler so it runs and fixes my broken WiFi card so I don't have to manually do it. (or better said, helped me avoid asking arrogant people that feel smug when I tell them I haven't opened a command prompt in ten years)

This is a great representation of why not to argue with someone who debates like this.

Arguments like these are like Hydras. Start tackling any one statement that may be taken out of context, or have more nuance, or is a complete misrepresentation, and two more pop up.

It sucks because true, good points get lost in the tangle.

I think a healthier perspective would involve more shades of grey. There are real issues with power consumption and job displacement. There are real benefits with better access to information and getting more done with limited resources. But I expect bringing any nuance into the conversation will get me downvoted to hell.

I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.

I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.

I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.

For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".

Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.

And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.