A thing that bums me out about AI discourse is that there are incredible scientific applications for it and it’s used all over the place *for the good of humanity* for example climate change modeling (and many other areas!) and as usual the tech bros have just fucking ruined it and turned it evil. 🧪
even in creative fields there are ethical uses for it, where it supports human creativity and ingenuity by taking tedious repetitive processes off their plates so they can do the things only humans can do. lots of possible applications in animation, for example. but not INSTEAD OF paying artists!
It should be criminal what Adobe did. They never bothered to pre-notify any of their Adobe Stock artists their works would be used to train Forefly AI, which they will make billions with and paid most of the stock artists less than $10, a 1-time fee.
Great article:
venturebeat.com/ai/adobe-sto...
I spoke to several Adobe Stock artists personally. One said there was no wording anywhere in their existing contracts that said “AI Training” — The artists were blindsided.
Adobe used vague, nebulous wording, and many signed these contracts years ago, long before AI was a thing.
It’s essentially like theft, from within a pre-signed standard stock art contract many signed long ago.
The Artists will need to go to Washington — New AI laws must be passed which require companies to clearly state “AI Training” in writing ✍️ in future contracts.
No more hiding it in TOS either.
It's depressing that so many new innovations immediately get applied to humanity's greatest problem, of CEOs trying to get away with paying workers less.
And ironic that while life is generally longer due to innovations, it's not always better or easier. The innovations lead to multiple new problems to be solved leading to the fallacy of linear "progress."
This is why I get sad about robots.
I love robots. But the way they're going to be used means I will 100% support destroying whatever cop-bots get released into public on sight
As an adamantly anti-AI-for-creative-endeavors individual I wholeheartedly agree - the whole thing is a massive bummer, because it HAS a lot of stellar use-cases and instead anyone with their hands on it is just looking for ways to make folks more miserable for the sake of profits-go-up.
idk i work with autotranscription and it makes egregious errors still, totally meaning-changing in addition to nonsense
would be amazing if it were improved but rn it’s dangerous imo
I work with it and it's super useful as a journalist, for quick and dirty transcriptions. Yes you have to clean up the tape but compared to how long it would take to transcribe myself or sending it out it's a god send.
I used to do whole transcriptions by hand and if it were only me who had access me and my wrists would be very grateful. Like all dangerous tools you need enough skill to use it well. I wouldn’t trust me with a bandsaw, either.
Also BirdNet which listens to thousands of hours of recordings from autonomous recording units and picks out different birds species saving tons of hours of person time and travel time
Statistics was first used for eugenics, so AI has always been evil. It’s up to us to find positive applications, reject harmful ones, and choose paths of research and development to encourage the good as much as possible.
Tech is angry that the tech press is no longer fawning. to control the narrative you control the words. pitched as a cost saving measure to “save journalism” with AI rewriting press releases without criticism trained and funded by the same people that have told us they shouldn’t be held accountable
I'm of the opinion that there are ethical ways to use AI. MANY ethical ways, despite the tech bros.
Uncritical anti-AI absolutists need to acknowledge that not all "AI" is the same. And even with the evil tech bro stuff, sometimes using their tools is the lesser evil.
I’m optimistic because the data is out there, we just can’t use it in a cost efficient way (yet) Study of diseases sane thing. Data is all siloed. filecoin.global/web3-will-le...
A cool application was using AI to narrow down proton models to help strengthen a new theory of the proton that includes 2 additional quarks
We would have had to sift through thousands of models, including making them, to do this process without AI
It can be useful just not where the money goes
Every time I write about AI tech that's already in use I am sooooooo careful to differentiate it from "generative" AI "like ChatGPT" so readers aren't scared of it.
I heard a report about using AI to sort recycling (currently done by humans) which hugely reduces cost and increases the likelihood of recycling, and all I could think was MORE OF THIS, PLEASE. AI doesn’t have to be “cool,” it has to be useful.
Yeah. I just hate the Silicon Valley marketing dudes decided to brand it AI to chase VC dollars. This was all so useful (& low-key amazing) when we just called it ML, or, back in the day, Deep Learning.
*extremely tech bros thinking* But what if we, a bunch of lame soulless dweebs, used it to instead ruin creative pursuits and put a lot of people out of work instead? 🤔
I think this is a great application for AI. To be able to feed it data that has been legally/properly collected and use it to quickly digest and create connections can be hugely powerful.
100% I don’t think technologies are inherently good or evil. That requires human input, and the types that can afford the resources to properly take advantage of the technology are often either blatantly ignorant or genuinely terrible.
So true. I use AI in cancer research. Do we get near-unlimited resources put at our disposal by Big Tech? No, we do not. Doesn't create enough shareholder value, I guess. 😡
