Generative AI Is a Parasitic Cancer (Freya Holmer) [video]
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I get plenty of people don't like AI, but a lot of the arguments seem to be confusing.
Like, AI has been a thing for a very long time. I'v done plenty of hobby research and development using AI. Be it CNN, GAN's or development of classifiers. This is all AI, and LLM's or image generation is no different. This "AI got good" is just what happens when you can manage to create really good datasets for training and are able to throw lots of compute at the problem.
If we made 4k scans of handwriting, we could easily generate synthetic handwriting that looks realistic, but based on how we classify the data you might even be able to determine different handwriting authors. This is. Of a breakthrough, its an application of using large data that's been classified correctly, and then using the massive compute that's available now.
I don’t know how many more times this argument needs to be made, but degree matters. It’s like someone complained about semi-automatic weapons and the answer was “people were killed with knives before”. Yeah, but certain tools make certain actions easier, simpler, and more prevalent at scale. So they happen more. This isn’t a hard concept.
> but a lot of the arguments seem to be confusing.
> Like, AI has been a thing for a very long time.
No one is confused. Yes, AI is a bad term for LLMs and image generation, but that term was overloaded by OpenAI and unfortunately we’re now stuck with it for the near term. We have to use words that people understand. They could’ve called it Pipicaca and we would still have to use the term, regardless of how bad or inaccurate it is, if it had stuck. People who don’t understand that and try to force their own specific terms on every conversation are the confused ones. If you want to be understood, you have to speak in a way people understand you.
Some people really thought the economy is there to please itself, to give shareholders great returns instead of bribing baseline humanity into peace and complexity with a constant surplus.