To be utterly sick of AI already

[snurtifier]

Logged on to my work email this morning to find that Google have added an AI assistant called Gemini, which pops up like a dependent puppy at every turn. It's monumentally annoying and, as far as I can see, completely useless. I contacted our IT dept and it turns out Google are charging us an extra £2 per month per user for this total waste of electricity, with no option to opt out. What's more, individual users don't have the option to switch it off, it's a global setting for the company account.

Meanwhile every online space has been invaded by AI bots, search results are polluted by pointless AI summaries, and our creative industries are being annihilated by generative AI slop. We were told AI would make our lives better, but so far the net effect is almost entirely negative as far as I can see.

AIBU to hate it and wish it would go away?

My favourite use of 'frivolous' AI is the AI generated review summaries on Amazon.

Obviously not infallible because it's relying on the accuracy of the reviews themselves...but ime the actual AI summary has always been an accurate representation of the reviews themselves. Very helpful for a quick overview.

How does AI damage the environment and use water? Genuine question

Yes, it's well known that AI loves particular words. I've noticed it particularly loves 'ensure/ensuring' and 'usage' as well. Basically any words that people hardly ever use normally, it particularly likes for some reason - which is why it always sounds so odd and unnatural.

And the other thing it's terrible at, obviously, is creativity. So it's basically spitting out the same garbage for everyone.

The images and videos scare me a bit, I remember how bad the quality of most AI images was only a couple of years back, it’s scary how fast it has progressed, especially with videos. It feels a bit dystopian.

Even just the basic, run of the mill free video generators blow my mind.

The fact that you can type in 'Two year old girl wearing yellow wellies and an orange hat, holding a white cat and waving a flag' - and then a couple of minutes later have a semi-realistic video of just that, just created from nowhere, out of thin air without any specific human involvement 🤯

Because the servers and computers needed to power AI have to be kept cool and uses water to do so. Same with cryptocurrency. Huge computers.

I had the misfortune of having to read through a lot AI text for some work I was doing. Now I see it everywhere. It’s all the same, and if I see the word ‘elevate’ now it makes me want to scream! ‘Elevate your experience’ aargh!

I hate AI. I used to have a really amazing job writing web content, but now they can pretty much just type in what they want and proofread it to make tweaks. No need for me.

I quite liked the paperclip.

At least he was friendly.

We are doomed I think. We have become very stupid, determined to wreck our planet.

Objectively and morally I hate it, but I have begun to wonder if it's correcting the marketplace that social media destroyed when it comes to written content online.

The rise of blogs and socials from the late 00s and the pivot to video of the last ten years or so, both did their bit for killing off long-form, written content. The 'anyone can start a blog' era flooded the market, and when all the ad money went to click-bait and videos, publishers stopped funding the good stuff.

Now AI is doing all the aggregating, blogging etc, and the genuinely good long reads survive mostly behind paywalls. So in a way, its only the actually talented people getting paid to do it again, albeit less of them, and for less money.

As someone who used to make a decent wedge (as a side gig) writing, I'm torn.

I get why people are comparing genAI to the paperclip but IMO it's more like Photoshop or CGI. You only notice it when it's badly done.

Back in the 90s Photoshop, CGI and video post-processing were really obvious. 30 years later every image you see or film you watch is at least a little touched up and sometimes the entire background has been rreplaced and unless it's a fantastical scene you don't even realise.

The people who think they can recognise AI images or text are mistaken. They can recognise crude AI generated content. They don't know how much has slipped past them.

Ah I got lucky then - I agree, it was hugely annoying having it there!

I remember that annoying little git bouncing around with its ridiculous happiness.
I can't remember how I got rid of it but I did eventually.
I'm really old school. Taught word processing in the 80s 😳

AI is predicted to use as much energy as Japan by 2026. It uses energy in two ways. First, it takes huge amounts of computer power to process the data. Training one hour of ChatGPT data uses as much energy as 80,000 households do in a year. Then, every query uses a much smaller amount of energy to produce an answer, but since there are billions of queries producing shit pictures of mutant kittens the amount of energy needed in the aggregate is vast. As I posted upthread, it also takes vast quantities of water to cool the data centres. It cannot use sea water which is too corrosive, so it takes water from the local area that disrupts the water supply for the local population, plants and animals. This is already causing social unrest in e.g. Chile. www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/

It also requires rare metals that are mined in dangerous conditions, often by children, in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo where 6 million people have died in a war driven in part by the fight to control the rare resources. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/foreign-correspondence/64646/in-the-east-of-the-drc-a-war-is-financed-by-blood-minerals

It also pays so-called "ghost" workers in places like Kenya under $2 an hour to train the data by spending their days tagging all the content online, including bestiality and CSA content. time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

So no, I am not a fan.

It's got a massive carbon footprint too
Ah just seen the post above!

I was just reading about the French woman who has been scammed out of £1million after the scammer used AI video to pretend he was Brad Pitt and convinced the woman she was in a relationship with Brad.

How did you do this??

I interviewed people for a position recently and the short listed candidates had to prepare a presentation as part of the interview. One person openly said they’d asked AI to do the presentation……she got the job 😁. Why not, work smarter not harder! 👍.

This would be an instant fail from me. I'd want to know that they could put together a decent presentation without AI. I'd be concerned that they were going to put sensitive data into chatgpt or similar.

It staggers me that people can blithely sail.past a post about the world-endangering risks of ai and post meh it saved me two minutes doing some stupid task. I can see it offers accessibility for people with disabilities but seriously, mass deskilling is not a good thing, people

I use AI for the tedious aspects of my work that are really not part of my job description, but somehow still required of me. Company newsletter articles for my department, for one. No one really reads them, it's not part of my job, but I'm expected to use my time to produce one biannually. Sod that, Chat GPT is writing that for me.

The future of AI is indeed scary. Aside from the dangers around false news and deepfakes, which may end up costing careers and lives, AI will only get better in time and the number of jobs it can and will take over (and is already) is scary. AI generated art is already on the up and as long as it's using inanimate objects, is actually often superior to what many humans can produce. AI generated instrumental music in the niche genre I like listening to is already on my playlist as some new favourites; once issues with speech patterns have been solved it will take over music and entertainment as we know it. One of my children was looking forward to space-related job training but may now never get to do that job as sending robots into space is cheaper and safer. Waiting staff robots in restaurants already exist, so do self-checkout machines, sorting and stacking machines and all sorts of low-paid manual work. AI shops exist. Fully preassembled houses exist. Hell, driverless transport exists. Smart brain implants and related augmentations exist.

I can see a future where a world a la Deux Ex becomes reality, in which there is a stark, and contested, divide between human purists (buying only human-made products, living in human-built) and those embracing machines and AI fully. And if video gaming is anything to go by, it won't be pretty.

It was a gamble I guess. Was slightly more nuanced than that as they did discuss the benefits of AI and how it could be used for some stuff but not other stuff. I felt they’d used it as an adjunct rather than completely writing it though accept I might be wrong.

It was not a good thing societally when thousands of miners lost their jobs. It won't be any better when it is freelance copywriters and creatives. As least closing the mines reduced coal pollution, though.

It’s going to get more sophisticated and more popular - it has to, because there’s so much money involved. For most of us, we’re in the ‘fun’ era - e.g. chuckling to ourselves about the mistakes ChatGPT made when you asked it for a simple recipe and the novelty of Copilot writing a resignation letter you’re too tired to do yourself. Sooner or later we’re in for a rude awakening and no job will be safe. I don’t have children but if I did I would be hugely scared for their futures, which includes the disastrous effects of climate change.