The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
I don’t know about specific instances but AI has both good and bad sides, so it’d be stupid IMO to just go with a black’n white stance.
Most loudmouths don’t know what they are talking about too (on both sides).
That doesn’t really help me or add anything to the conversation. I already have views on ai, I was really just asking about the dynamics and cultures of different instances because I find learning about those cultural differences interesting.
I’m personally not a fan. Its a commercial product built on the theft of intellectual labor by creatives and the primary selling point of generative ai is that it can replace the people who do that creative labor. I’ve tried using it at various points and it straight up made stuff up and ended up not helping me find what I was looking for at all. I tried to use it to generate practice text I could translate into Japanese for language learning and it constantly used words other than the ones provided- words I didn’t know in japanese.
It has hypothetically useful usecases, that I pretty much never see anyone actually implement, and it feels very clear that the only reason anyone is investing in it is because it can reduce the need to pay actual humans, generating more money for people who already have tons, while wasting huge amount of electricity and resources.
Telling me, apropos of nothing, that having a stance other than neutral is “stupid” doesn’t add anything, give me anything to consider, substantiate any stance, provide any details, etc. I don’t really need to know that you think I’m stupid for not liking ai.
One useful usecase that’s being exploited a lot is roleplay.
Using AI to generate a bot to do a roleplay with and maybe images to add flavour. It’s something that people like to do, and that’s totally harmless.
Like, yes, the llm was trained the books of grrm without his explicit consent and now someone is roleplay a fantasy scenario with John Snow, but who cares?
It’s not like GRRM is available to be hired as a play partner, and no one is getting profit out of it, specially if people just selfhost the models. People is just having fun. And the AI is not substituting anyone. As people didn’t hire “actors” to play their roleplay sessions anyway.
And it’s not like people who use it it like this even post the results in social media and call themselves “AI artist” or anything like that. They just play for themselves or their group of friends, and, at most you can share online the “bot card” so others can use it.
Well, it seems you only judge AI on large language models, not when it’s used in other ways like in research. I integrated AI (Tensorflow) in a massive project in 2016, it outperformed other AI at the time and makes real differences in particle detection. For example.
So just know that AI isn’t just chatgpt or midjourney, that’s the products people try to shove into everything and upsell.
let me get this straight. you like AI because a model outperformed another? how is that a real argument for any kind of question? the topic was not about whether they evolve.
that “black and white stance” is not really bad here, because it’s not actually black and white. their stance is against generative AI, not the kind you use for research. and guess what, forums are flooded by gen AI slop, the only kind of AI today that highly affects our forums.
I just expressed that AI is good in some places, like research.
while dissing someone for not wanting AI in forums, for “not knowing what are they talking about”. right, they didn’t specify what kind of AI they don’t want, but I think it comes from the context that they don’t want generative AIs, because that’s what affects them negatively regularly
There’s really nothing good about ai if you really look into it. MAYBE medical advances, and thats it.
They have been doing machine learning for novel proteins for over 15 years now. “AI” is just a buzzword grant writers have to add these days to have any chance at funding is all
There are a massive number of scientific research and other pattern matching positive uses that all involve using the AI to help narrow down what to focus on. All of those use AI as a way to filter and group information, not as the end result like the current trend is for the AI being shoved into everything.
Heck, there are some positive uses that could be made with the right guardrails like as a supplemental tool when learning a language (with an educator for oversight!) or as a natural language output for something that is created through an algorithm that returns accurate results.
Mainly, the exact opposite of what is being forced on everyone right now which is inaccurate slop that is full of errors but presented as reliable and helpful.
I have to correct you here, machine learning (AI) is extremely important in research. There is just no doubt about it.
Is AI image generators beneficial for society? Probably, I have artist friends who use AI images to help them paint for example, but is it out weighing the cost? Dunno.
Is AI slop beneficial? Orobably not :-)