Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

I'm fine with AI being used to take a game and upscale it from 540p to 4k or whatever, as long as it keeps the assets the same. I'm also fine with AI being used to make FPGA clone consoles like the Superstation One, because writing an FPGA core for even a PS1 is brutally hard without AI to speed it up. But both of these things are "soft AI" and not really AI as in the ridiculous crap that is now being pushed onto everyone.

I couldn't call someone a hypocrite for buying a Nintendo game that uses DLSS to take a game from 540p or whatever to 4k. Not the same thing as redrawing entire assets.

AI is only benefiting billionaires, making them richer. They don't care that most people will soon be too poor to buy their products. THAT is ignorance.

Then it should be limited to medical/scientific research. It shouldn't be a commercial product. We shouldn't be devoting this amount of money, energy, land, and resources into something used primarily for chatbots, industrial-scale plagiarism, and a generalized excuse for the capitalist class to automate as many jobs as possible, all while environmental degradation is worsened in the process. And if we need to do all those other things causing actual harm just so we can potentially get some medical advances out of it, then no, it's not a net benefit to society, and given the drawbacks society would be more than justified in banning it just as we've banned a great many other things we've invented but whose costs far outweighed any actual or potential benefits, like asbestos, leaded gasoline, and CFCs. If "A.I." could cure my muscular dystrophy, but the cost is water shortages, skyrocketing electricity costs, the death of art as we know it, and the final nail in the coffin of trust in each other, then I'd rather spend my remaining years suffering from the MD.

But what real benefit is there to society to be had from text-to-image/video models or LLMs? All we've seen actually manifest has been invariably negative. A deluge of slop that threatens to strike at the heart of something so central to humanity that we've been doing many millennia before the first civilizations arose, all so companies in many different sectors, most notably but not limited to entertainment, can find some sort of justification for firing as many people as possible (personally, I think the fact that things created by "A.I." cannot be copyrighted is a good thing, and I hope that extends to anything using "A.I." in any part of the process). A deluge of fake news further undermining trust in a society that already has a trust deficit, something actively being encouraged by the current fascistic American administration. A deluge of unreliable chatbots, which have literally driven some people mad, yet provide nothing that couldn't be answered by a quick jaunt to Wikipedia. And all of it is produced by soulless machines trained on the collective creative history of mankind, taken without permission, of course, which last I checked was theft. Machines that are some of the worst resource hogs of anything ever invented. Yet all some people can see out of Plagiarism Bot 3000 is "More money! Lower costs!" or "It saved me a bit of time!" Generative "A.I." is not only a solution in search of a problem like so much of the pointless tech being foisted on consumers these days that exists purely to bilk more money out of gullible, easily-impressed consumers, like coffee pods or smart toasters (or 90%+ of any "smart"/IoT gadgets). It's also a problem in and of itself.

I'd contend that the evidence is overwhelming that AI is terrible for the world and society, so saying it's a good thing is akin to saying the Earth is flat.

Just a few years ago the world got along perfectly fine without AI, and in a short space of time it's done immense damage, from the enshittification of the internet to mass layoffs to deepfake CP/Revenge porn, to the erosion of critical thinking skills, and so on. 

We simply don't need it and it causes more problems than it solves.

It being overall a good or bad thing is a different discussion though. My issue here was the implication in that post that the investment in AI is bringing no benefits when that is very clearly not the case. It'd be the same if someone said AI is causing no negatives, that would also be an absurd thing to say.

To get into that discussion though I do think there's a reasonable debate to be had over if the benefits or negatives are bigger right now so don't think it's as clear cut as you're saying. Me and SC have gone into various use cases in past posts in the thread and in general the benefits are already big and on my end the tech has overall improved my life so far. So many people are using it now to do things like help plan vacations and make their workflows more efficient so a lot of people are already getting a lot of value out of it.

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.

I'd contend that the evidence is overwhelming that AI is terrible for the world and society, so saying it's a good thing is akin to saying the Earth is flat.

Just a few years ago the world got along perfectly fine without AI, and in a short space of time it's done immense damage, from the enshittification of the internet to mass layoffs to deepfake CP/Revenge porn, to the erosion of critical thinking skills, and so on. 

We simply don't need it and it causes more problems than it solves.

Sorry, I don't think you see that the problem is not AI, but the current state of the world and political system. Our societal systems are not ready for the majority of people to quit their jobs and do what that want to be masterful at. The problem lies in how people build the tool and use it, not the tool itself. Imagine the world where humans couldn't create a machine that generates electricity. Would we have video games or consoles?

A push back against advancement in technology will limit growth and cause greater problems. Right now more humans are dying because of something else rather than AI and those matters should be addressed first IMO.

To bring things back to the original topic...

Made with DLSS 5:

Achieved without AI slop: