It’s a VERY specific tool that needs

• a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
• huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
• energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting

So I think it is fundamental to distinguish

• “AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all

versus

• commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.

When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.

Thought this comment from reddit summed it up well

AI is more than a tool, it is a suite of projects that the richest companies in the world have poured trillions of dollars in to and are now flailing to recoup their investment. It has devastating effects on communities around the data centers that make up its infrastructure. When these companies continue to charge forward unregulated, it will have increasingly devastating consequences. A hammer doesn’t consume all the fresh water in an aquifer and make it undrinkable, nor does a screwdriver drive up the costs of energy to unaffordable levels, a spanner does not purchase politicians and corrupt any effort to reign in the harmful effects of a blind advance for the sake of profit generation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1qerho4/duckduckgo_official_survey_say_yes_or_no_to_ai/nzzs2xb/

My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.

Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.

While I agree it has uses and can be a good tool, it was trained on stolen material/data. These are unprecedented levels of theft, and its going unpunished.

I do not know what alternatives were available for the learning phase. Simply stating the cost it came at. And that’s not even taking into consideration what its doing to the job market, youth, disinformation, etc.

I prefer a world without it.

That’s one of the problems.

The other problem is that the billionaires want to use AI to make censorship and kill decisions (see Palantir) to lock up their olygarchy.