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curl-6 1 day ago
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Norion said:
curl-6 said:

I can't speak for shadow1980, but perhaps he/she feels any benefits are negligible in comparison to the downsides.

People planned vacations or impoved their workflows for centuries without AI. People wrote code for decades without AI. People wrote, composed, and painted/drew for millennia without AI. Nobody needs generative AI, we all got on just fine without it only a few short years ago. Outsourcing one's thinking and work to it simply makes people lazy, reduces the quality and value of the end result, and erodes critical thinking skills.

People also did those things before the internet but that doesn't mean the invention of that didn't bring about massive benefits. Same goes for how the internet wasn't needed and society would've continued functioning just fine without it so those aren't arguments against something by themselves. For the last part it depends on how someone uses it. People can absolutely be lazy and overly rely on it but as this post shows people can get a lot of value out of it when it's used right.

Also I think a big part of this is that the aspects people dislike are often very in your face while the positives are more in the background so are generally less known about. Like stuff like the Genie 3 and Firefox examples I brought up before are largely things that only people that are into the subject of AI will know about while something like skyrocketing RAM prices is gonna be known about by way, way more people. As a result many people seem to have a false impression that the RAM price increase is happening just to do stuff like create more advanced AI images and videos instead of doing things that are far more worthwhile.

Whether those applications outweigh the downsides is a matter of debate though; I mean to take the internet for example, I actually made a thread about whether that was a net positive or negative for humanity and a lot of people felt it had largely been detrimental, especially in terms of allowing misinformation and the resulting authoritarian ideologies to thrive; one could argue the state of the US at the moment was largely enabled by the internet's ability to radicalise people en masse.

Similarly, innovations such as DDT, lead and asbestos all had useful and positive applications, yet in retrospect we would have been better off without them.

Are there useful applications for AI? Yes, there are. The question is though whether those advances are worth the consequences.