I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something here? Are there any genuine benefits?
This sort of feels like someone using a PC for the first time in 1989 and asking what it does that they can’t do on a piece of paper with a calculator. They may not have been far off at the time, but they would be missing the point. This is a paradigm shift that allows for a single application to fulfill the role of, eventually, infinite applications. And yes it starts with mundane tasks. You know, the kind people don’t want to do themselves.
The problem is that most of the things it feels we can currently see applications for are… Kinda bad. Actually repulsive frankly. Like I don’t want those things. I don’t wanna talk to an ai to order my big mac or instead of just getting a highlighted excerpt from a webpage when I search things. I don’t want a world where artists have to compete with image generators to make a living, or where weird creepy porn that chases and satisfies ever more unrealistic expectations is the norm. I don’t want to talk to chat bots that use statistical analysis to convincingly sell me lies they don’t understand.
I just wanna talk to actual people. I wanna see art made by people, I wanna look at pictures of the bodies of actual human beings, I wanna see the animations that humans poured their soul into, I wanna see the actual text a person wrote on the subject I’m researching. I wanna do simple things, in simple ways, and the world that it feels like AI companies are offering us honestly sucks, and as soon as that door is fully opened things will just be permanently worse. Convenience is great but I don’t want a robot to feed me a weird gross regurgitation of reality or approximation of human interaction to me like a bird that chews and digests its food for its babies. I don’t wanna consume the spit-up of an overgrown algorithm. Its a gross idea of how we could engage with the world. It obfuscates the humanity of whatever it touches, and the humanity is the worthwhile part. There comes a point where the abstraction is abstracting away everything of value and leaving you with the most sanitized version.
If ai was just gonna be used to improve medicine and translate books or webpages, or as interactive accsessibiltiy tool, or do actually helpful shit maybe I wouldn’t be so opposed to it, but it feels like everything consumer or employee facing that ai is offering is awful and something I absolutely do not want. But companies don’t care, and that shitty world is gonna be the reality cause it’s profitable