The problem with AI, in my opinion, is not that it is a waste of money and resources. It's not that it's ethics are questionable at best, nor is it that it is quickly giving rise to more scams, clogging up the internet with all the scraping or that it's being shoved in every single product. The fact that it will boldly tell you a lie because it doesn't know any better (nor can it know) is not at issue and neither is the fact that it is staining the entire term of AI.
The problem is all of the above and maybe more.
Oh I should perhaps specify what I mean by AI as it is a very broad term. The tech bros peddling this most likely will neglect to do so. What I'm talking about here is specifically generative AI such as LLM's.
This is quite a wide topic and one I have argued about with many people. Personally I do not find it ethical that these models are scraping content that is both publically available and copyrighted. I remember back in my day when you so much as thought about downloading a Metallica album Lars Ulrich would personally come over and break your kneecaps with a tire iron (This may be a slight embellishment) but now because these big corporations need to do this to potentially maybe make a profit at some point in the future they need to download the entire internet and torrent all of Disneys properties we are supposed to just be okay with it.
If you download a Metallica album, you can listen to the songs and maybe you'll give your friends a copy. When one of the big AI companies do it, it's so that their AI can generate music in the same style. It's quite a different use case, is it not?
But that's talking about the big guys. I'm honestly more concerned about hurting smaller artists with companies now using more and more generative art the real artists are finding less and less work while the AI companies that trained their models off these artists works are profiting from it, though still not turning a profit.
Now there are many arguments against my points here and I honestly don't give them much credit. One argument is that this liberates the creation of art from the evil, elitist artists who refuse to draw for free but my fellow, most artists will gladly tell you how they developed their skills and you can too if you just put in the effort and time. Artists also need to eat, they can't simply provide free work for everyone who asks.
Another argument that I don't buy is that the models learn the same way that humans learn and so art generated by an AI is no different from a human drawing something after they've seen other art and been inspired but this reveals a lack of understanding on how the training process works and how LLM's work under the hood. People hear about artificial neurons or some such thing and thinks that the AI is very similar to a human brain but it's not. The technical aspects are beyond the scope of this simple blog post though so I won't dwell on it.
There is also the argument when it comes to code or text that a lot of that is freely available which is true if we ignore copyrighted texts. I'm willing to do that for the sake of the argument right now though. We run in to the problem that these models are constantly being trained and are constantly scraping the web and that is, in my opinion, needlessly adding load to websites for some honestly quite bad code and text that you still need to edit quite a bit to salvage.
You now see all kinds of ads and headlines about AI, how it "provides comfort" to people grieving someone who passed away because they have trained the AI on their voice. I'm not a psychologist or anything of the sort so maybe I'm wrong here but I do not know that that is a healthy way to grieve. The AI companies propose we write our stories, our books, our love letters, everything with these AI models but if those things are not worth writing yourself or even paying a ghost writer to do then are they worth being written at all?
On a final note under this headline I will add that I find it extremely distasteful how these AI's are showed down our throats. I primarily use Linux on my desktop because Microsoft is getting worse and worse and that was before this AI bubble but I'm still forced to use Windows elsewhere and they are pushing copilot, my android phone insists I enable gemini, the search engines have... I don't even know and I don't want to know and now I have to open up about:config on all my mozilla firefox browsers to disable their AI integrations. I'm so tired, none of these things provide me with any value.
I'm not an economics guy, but damn these things are sucking up a lot of venture capital and last I heard have no clear path to profitability. I hope this is a bubble and that it bursts sooner rather than later because the longer it takes the worse the fallout becomes. The fact that so much money has been invested yet the use cases are kind of a question mark right now should be worrying to anyone in my uneducated opinion but venture capital keeps pouring in and out comes more and more horror shows. "We are almost there, just a few more billions!" the tech bros cry! But imagine all the good that money could have done...
The people who actually made these models have some kind of intelligence, I can't deny that and on an academic level I do find LLM's interesting in a "If we put in this much data this model gets this level of coherncy" but I don't think this technology will lead to much to be honest. Yet we are building more datacenters that take more energy, require more components and clean water and for what? Scammers can automate scamming more effectively and your mom sends you AI generated videos on facebook, meanwhile you call a customer service line that's powered by an LLM and you can't even trust what it says because it doesn't know, it just says what it calculates is the most likely response.
Imagine if all of this was put to a useful cause instead. The developers, the money, the water, the energy, the components the everything. Or even if all of it hadn't been used at all, I think we'd still be better off.
At this point I feel deflated. AI is getting everywhere and I wish I could just dump my android phone for something that doesn't have any AI shit but for reasons I won't get in to here I can't. I can't ditch firefox because the only other options are Chromium based anyway, though I should give the firefox forks a try at some point I suppose. All this AI shit is driven by pure corporate greed and desperation. But I will continue to fight against it as and where I can.
It pains me to say that I see no good in this technology. I'm sorry to leave this post on such a nothing note but I'm spent. I might write more on the subject as more thoughts emerge but I make no promises.