Ask Lemmy

It will kill us all or solve everything, step right up and place your bets! No ma'am, there is no third option to bet on, none at all I say.

No, they're pretty much just dumb. In tech, this works along hype cycles where there's gotta be some new thing all the fucking time, and it cures what ails ya and is perfect for every case. This mostly involves taking any actual merits of [new tech] and blowing them way out of proportion and context, making it the best thing since sliced bread. This invariably makes people invest because hype is more important than making sense. When the cycle for that particular tech winds down into the Trough of Disillusionment, a new one shows up.

We had IoT, Web3, and now AI. Part of it seems linked to very good salespeople pushing it onto other salespeople.

For the first two, we've seen business spinup quickly and have very aggressive arguments, backed by cash, pushed onto existing business as "the solution to everything". Only to burn down later as a gimmick nobody really cares beyond a handful of niche applications.

So far with AI there's a handful of "big name" business that pushes it as the ultimate solution for everything and are injecting ton of cash in that discourse. We just have to wait a bit if the last part of that happens. After that we'll go back to normal until the next "big thing" gets propped up.

AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it's worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.

Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it's a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.

In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.

Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.

The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don't get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it's not actually intelligent it's just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.

Money, really. Someone thinks AI is going to make money, so everyone is trying to make money by slapping "AI" on everything to see if something sticks.

Honestly, the LLM / Generative AI tech is pretty cool and amazing that it even works, but it is still in its infancy. As one person put it, we're watching a baby (AI) take its first steps walking, but the people with money are going "Get that baby a job!"

It's nowhere near ready for daily driving / what it is advertised to do, but I believe the ones that are serious about making it work are hoping technological and programming innovation will come along that will make it more energy efficient and more accurate as it is used more.

They believe that we're on the precipice of creating agi. Agi, if invented, would be like inventing the nuclear bomb. Whoever does it first gets a massive leg up on the competition. Except in this case instead of destroying a rival with a bomb you just ask your Agi, "what's the best way to become the most profitable company in history" and it will tell you and it will be right.

It's just a modern version of "Fuzzy Logic"

They want to create some hype and look cool by using AI chatbots. And most normies don't care about privacy and the dangers of AI in the future, they only care about "wow I can use AI for bla.. bla.."

But they have no idea, that one day AI could take over their jobs.. and rich people like Sam Altman are getting richer, and he only pays you with ~~UBI money~~ some pieces of computing

https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1789107043825262706

Also, AI companies aim for government contracts and medium / big corpos.

businesses are hoping they can use ai to higher cheaper labor. they want to be able to higher someone who does not know how to use the relevant program but can coax a machine to produce it or can get enough information from a machine to do the job. also they hope to eliminate human trainers and such.

Venture capitalists and shareholders want to make money. Company executives want to give them eternally increasing profit. Simple as that.