this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Are there any genuine benefits to AI? (self.technology)
submitted 10 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] 7 points 10 months ago

There are lots of things that are very hard to program, but people can do very easily. For example, play Go or recognize that an animal is a bird.

Machine learning/ai makes it competitively simple to make computers do some of these things, but at the cost of efficiency and speed at runtime. This is true if computers vs people as well, a human brain is much slower, less efficient, and less accurate than a calculator.

Machine learning/AI is exciting because it enables computers to quickly be trained to do tasks that were impossible or would have required years of dedicated effort. The tech world is excited about it because whole new enterprises and areas of tech may spring up, big markets that were previously out of reach.

Downsides:

  • AI uses a lot more electricity. Especially for things that computers can already do, using AI is very inefficient.

  • Limited control. You train an ai model to do a task, but you don't have direct control over how it thinks. If chatgpt gives a wrong answer, they can't just trace the program and figure out why. It takes serious effort to figure out how chatgpt answers simple questions, so figuring out how it gets complex answers or why an answer is wrong is nearly impossible at this point. This also applies to unwanted behaviors,if you had a really good history chatbot who happened to turn out racist, you can't just turn that off. You end up having to retrain the model, or secretly add "make sure your answer isn't racist" to every submitted prompt.