AI Is a Total Grift

Comments

• MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  AI has some legit uses but the hype around it is mostly VC’s throwing money at buzzwords while the actual tech is nowhere near the “AGI revolution” they keep promising us lol.

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  • sundray@lemmus.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.

    A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it’s what’s selling for some reason?

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    • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The latter isn’t even selling, just used because it is free to use or they jammed it into an existing ecosystem like Copilot.

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    • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The former isn’t “kind of interesting” and there are lots and lots of daily use cases solved by AI that are much much more than “kind of interesting”.

      What a simple way to try to downplay it by calling it only kind of interesting.

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  • Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    But can we at least be thankful that it shifted focus from augmented reality? Prior to AI, the buzz was around things like the metaverse and digital avatars in your teams meetings.

    Even crap AI is more useful than avatars in teams.

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  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The crap they’re promoting it for also showcases the direction they’re developing it for which is an utterly depressing, unsustainable and impractical one. It’s frustrating to see how much money is invested (and ultimately burned) to actively destroy the economy and create problems rather than fixing some.

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  • oppy1984@lemdro.id ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This. Everybody wanted it to be AGI right out of the gate. It’s just a tool, like Photoshop. It will get better over time but it’s not the end all be all.

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  • hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How does this differ from most other things VCs throw money at?

    cough cough crypto cough

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• sundray@lemmus.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  “Use our AI!”

  “Hmm… I don’t know.”

  “If you use AI you can fire all your employees 🤞 .”

  “GIMMEE! GIMMEE! I’LL PAY ANY PRICE! I HATE EMPLOYEES SOO MUCH!”

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  • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    two.months later

    “Why is everything broken?”

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• Ghyste@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No fucking shit.

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• Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  well duh, much like CRYPTO was a grift/ponzi scheme, after it crashed people started looking for th next big thing, it was AI.

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• DrSleepless@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Duh

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• fuckyoukeith@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Every tech buzzword is a grift to try to rationalize endless exponential growth in a world where that’s just impossible

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• Cyberflunk@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • chobeat@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’ve met the author IRL. He’s quite famous in his niche

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• MelonYellow@lemmy.ca ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Unrelated, but what’s the difference between grift vs. scam? Internet search seems to give me the same definitions.

  Is it just that grifts are personal, while scams are impersonal (like phone/internet scams)?

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  • neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not sure of an official difference, but my take is a grift is something that everyone’s kind of doing on the DL, but nobody is admitting that it’s a scam.

    Think like a cult. Everyone’s a part of the cult, but nobody actually wants to believe they’re getting scammed or scamming others, so it’s more of a grift. People assume what they’re doing can’t last/sustain, but they do it anyway because the benefits are good.

    A scam is straight up the party knowing it’s illegitimate and going out of their way to execute the scam so they can benefit at the expense of others.

    Basically, I’ve always taken it as one is self aware (scam) and one is only self-aware at the top levels (grift).

    But this is all just in my head.

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  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s a good question actually. Could it be it’s a “lie vs. untruth” situation where grift is just a nicer word for what’s obviously a huge scam? In that case we should probably use “scammer” a lot more than “grifter”.

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  • Broadfern@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    When I think of a scam, I think a one-off, obviously amateur attempt. An email with awful grammar saying the government will fine me a bajillion dollars if I don’t download a file is a scam. A scam will also leave you alone.

    A grift is done by career slimeballs. Used car salesmen, big C-suites and corrupt politicians are grifters. It’s more offensive and more aggressive. You can’t escape a grift.

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    • MelonYellow@lemmy.ca ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Hmm, yeah that’s helpful! So maybe if I think of grifting as more of a lifestyle, as in done by con artists.

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• artyom@piefed.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I read this as "gift" the first time haha

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  • cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Same 😅

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• bobbyguy@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  chatbots like gpt and gemini learn from conversations with veiwers, so what we need is a virus that will pretend to be a user and flood its chats with pro racism arguments and sexist remarks, which will rub off on the chatbots making them unacceptable for public use

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  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    So, just like actual users?

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  • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Been there. Done that

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    • atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      Yeah. GROK and Twitter have entered the chat. Seriously though, we’ve regressed pretty far in what the general. Public deems acceptable.

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  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How do models learn from conversations with users?

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• bacon_pdp@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Well not exactly but completely misunderstood.

  Everyone who actually knows about AI is familiar with the alignment and takeoff problems.

  (Play this if you need a quick summary

  www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

  )

  So whenever someone says, we are making AI, the response should be “oh fuck no” (using bullets and fire if required)

  New tagging and auto-completion is fine (there is probably a whole space of new tools that can come out of the AI research field; that doesn’t risk human extinction)

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We are so far away from a paperclip maximizer scenario that I can’t take anyone concerned about that seriously.

    We have nothing even approaching true reasoning, despite all the misuse going on that would indicate otherwise.

    Alignment? Takeoff? None of our current technologies under the AI moniker come anywhere remotely close to any reason for concern, and most signs point to us rapidly approaching a wall with our current approaches. Each new version from the top companies in the space right now has less and less advancement in capability compared to the last.

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    • bacon_pdp@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I agree currently technology is extremely unlikely to achieve general intelligence but my expression was that we never should try to achieve AGI; it is not worth the risk until after we solve the alignment problem.

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