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Are there any genuine benefits to AI? (self.technology)

submitted 9 months ago by fiddlestix to c/technology

101 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think as a tool to synthesize and collect and organize information to help people make decisions, it has potential. Much like how machine learning is used to look at a bunch of MRI scans and highlight abnormalities and then medical professional looks at those anomalies to decide if they might be a tumor. But a machine is really good at finding things that are anomalous enough to be worth looking at.

Things that you might have delegated to a secretary or assistant or business analyst might be worthwhile done by an LLM. “sort all these papers by which ones understood the topic the best so I can read those first“ “Do any of these articles contain new information I haven’t seen before?“ “based on the Billboard top 20, create 5 catchy beats for a backing track” “Draft a letter to this customer apologizing for our error and offering them a coupon for their next order” “analyze this email I wrote and help me make the tone more professional”

I am terrified by what is going to be possible with phishing scams, spam email, fake articles, deep fake videos, reproduction of copyrighted works, an overwhelming volume of trademarks and patents that are meaningless, obtuse contracts that are purposely difficult for a human to read but contain surreptitious loopholes, software that is full of flaws and back doors, and corporations putting more barriers between customers and customer service people.

“find me the 50 most popular articles on this topic, synthesize them all into a 20 bullet point summary and highlight for me the differences of opinion presented so I can understand both sides of the issue” - super useful

“Generate 100,000 unique variations on a very professional email correspondence from a Nigerian Prince offering to pay $50,000 transaction fee for assistance with an international wire transfer “ - no

Unfortunately I don’t think there are any incentives for the companies building these things to limit use or install the guard rails necessary. And our laws, which always run a little behind technology, are thoroughly outpaced by the rate of innovation here. The very old people in charge of governments have no chance of staying ahead of these companies. It will get much worse before it ever gets better.

Honestly, we should just stick to porn. The Internet should just be for porn because everything else we do with it seems to turn evil. 🫤

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I've got some really bad news about the porn industry if you don't think it's evil.