All the AI obsession is really getting beyond any reason. (Also important to note the term AI itself is misleading, what we are talking about is so called generative AI, or LLMs, from Large Language Model. And the term AI is often confused with machine learning technologies which are generally trained and used on a much smaller scale to perform much more specialized tasks.)
I personally don’t use AI and, honestly, there are way more than enough reasons to not do it, including human rights, climate change, environment, AI training bias, destruction of the Internet and physical media. However there is another reason that is important to know about. That is AI is really, really bad at imitating thinking.
The way LLMs work is they are trained on extremely huge amounts of data, like all the texts they have access to, and then for a given input prompt an LLM gives back some answers which is statistically likely based on the training data. (That said you can imagine how training bias play out. Training data includes all the toxic social media posts, forums and whatever developers were able to access. Of course AI companies are trying to hide it by adding more layers of training, instructions and adjustments, but at its core AI is racist, sexist and has all the other bias it got from training data.)
AI might sound like it is competent in whatever the topic of conversation is, it might write according to all the language rules, it might write a full page without a single typo. And that’s for a reason. It was trained on billions and billions of texts, so knowing the punctuation rules and all kinds of fancy words is expected here - those are very common among those billions of texts. For the same reason AI might imitate all the basic daily conversations, like talking about weather, going shopping.
And for the same reason it might know answers to all the basic questions like how far from one city to the next or how long you can store fruit before spoiling. Less common topic means less training data. And here things become clear.
If one asks AI about some less known topic or some question that requires out of the box thinking, it fails completely. It might sound very confident and legitimate still, while telling lies, missing the point hard, introducing words that sound relevant but belong to completely unrelated topics or made up at all.
As mentioned above AI can be good at texts and language, however it doesn’t know logic, reasoning, thinking, living beings experiences. It can’t understand, think, feel or make its own decisions. AI can’t tell an argument from a counter argument from a fun fact. As well as it doesn’t know where summary stops and explanation begins.
If you care about any of the harms (and there are lots and lots of them) AI companies do, and I hope you do care, don’t use LLMs, don’t give them your data, don’t promote or normalize the use of LLMs.
But even if you don’t care, LLMs still make you weak, they give you lies, they feed you with AI-slop and stupid answers. They waste your time on these dumb conversations, while you could use that time on learning stuff. Oh, and they will steal all your data they can get to.
All that said it is sad to see how many people fall for this scam. How many organizations get distracted from getting their work done and reaching out to their allies, and instead start talking about so-called ethical AI or responsible AI or human-centered AI. I got so many emails from activist organizations about how we should participate in making AI more ethical, even how we can attract investors from AI industry.
People can’t stop talking about AI; when I ask a genuine question because the person I am talking about knows better, they ask AI instead of telling me what they already know; people make jokes about AI which are not even funny and not relevant to the conversation; people mention AI more and more often just because they think it’s a cool new thing.
Please don’t be like that. Don’t support the hype. Tell others that it’s dumb.
I think we should seek allies instead of trying to find compromise between our values and AI companies.
It is NOT inevitable. Actually AI companies WILL destroy themselves. One way or another, sooner or later. The larger their models are, the more training data they consume, the more layers of complexity they add to chat bots - the sooner the crash will come.
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