Technology

60112 readers

3860 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nice post. A while back I read something on reddit about a theory for technological advances always being used for the worst possible nightmare scenario. But I can't find it now. Fundamentally I'm a technological optimist but I can't even yet fully imagine the subtle systemic issues this will cause. Except the rather obvious one:

Algorithms on social media decide what people see and that shapes their perception of the world. It is relatively easy to manipulate in subtle ways. If AI can learn to categorize the psychology of users and then "blindly anticipate" what and how they will respond to stimuli (memes / news / framing) then that will in theory allow for a total control by means of psychological manipulation. I'm not sure how close we are to this, the counter argument would be that AI or LLMs currently don't understand at all what is going on, but public relations / advertising / propaganda works on emotional levels and doesn't "have to make sense". The emotional logic is much easier to categorize and generate. So even if there is no blatant evil master plan just optimizing for max profit, max engagement, could make the AI pursue (dumbly) a broad strategy that is more evil than that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Another great one is science! Machine learning is used for physics, bio, and chem models, in things such as genetic sequencing and generation of new drugs as well as very useful in figuring out protein folding. It's very useful in all of the iterative "grunt work" so to speak. While it may not be the best at finding effective new drugs, it can certainly arrange molecules according to the general rules of organic chemistry much faster than any human, and because of that has already led to several drug breakthroughs. AI is hugely useful! LLMs are mostly hype