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When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains.
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If you liked this essay, consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription. My writing is never paywalled, but your support is what helps me keep doing this. citationneeded.news/signup
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> if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. yeah, a lot of people assumed the tech would keep improving exponentially and had infinite potential. We've seen the limits now, but a lot of tech people are hell bent on ignoring that
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well on the bright side they also suck down huge water and electrical resources during a climate crisis!
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and use up our dwindling minerals—which are on the whole extracted through violence too
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Increasingly feel like even "Could you use AI to help you do this" is a misleading question and the real test is "Would you *pay* to use AI to help you do this."
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This all feels like the Gartner(?) hype cycle, but on a much more viral hype curve. Maybe we'll learn something useful after the money disappears from the hype, but it seems like "don't get suckered by the hype" won't be on that list.
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Every time someone describes a somewhat useful feature of these text and image generators, they should have to follow it with "...and that's why I don't mind if people post fake nudes of your children on the internet."
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They always claim it does things better while, at the same time, try to urgently convey it's not mature and it will not be for YEARS to come. You can't have it both ways.
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This is pretty much exactly my impression. There *are* some ways in which it's useful, so it's wrong to be totally dismissive, but they're all bad (spam, harassment, disinformation, spam).
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The only good use I've thought of for image-generating LLMs is drawing backgrounds on low and mid-budget anime, sparing the budget for actual animators.
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Human artists are not exactly expensive, whereas image-generating LLMs are a cash furnace. There are lots of tools that are free to use right now, but only because they're operating at a loss.
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Don't forget fraud! Devaluing the work of actual creators! And spam!
This was a -spectacular- read, thanks.
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Hmmh what productive use are blockchains being put to though? I think if you can’t make a working Ticketmaster replacement which is just a db or ledger, you’ve lost the plot. Basically just like gold mining, spend tons of resources and poison the world to dig stuff up and then put it in a vault.
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No strikethrough text jokes this time though? Disappointing. ☹️😉
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What's the monstrous cost of blockchains? All I can think of is the opportunity cost.