Technology

It's massively important in the sciences, both for computing purposes and theoretical design and investigation purposes.

AI is completely revolutionizing genetics research and subjects like biochemistry and pharmacology, because it's able to extrapolate from already identified genes and compounds and find new ones or identify the purposes of genes just from their sequence structure.

It's made processes that would take weeks or months just to identify a single new component to something that takes days or hours.

Depends on what kind of AI. In gaming, AI is part of the process to entertain and challenge the player, and has even been used to help model life systems.

I have yet to see how useful LLMs can be outside of being blatant plagarists but for a time, projects like AI Dungeon really did push the emphasis on "interactive dynamic narratives" and it was really fun for a while.

ML has been an important part in fraud detection for at least a decade now.

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. 🫤

Once the technology has embedded, our societal adjustments have completed (and they will be PAINFUL) and assuming the profit of AI is sufficiently taxed for the wealth to redistribute, AI will be seen as the Industrial Revolution x10.

Most likely however, the rich will get richer.

No one knows the long term benefits/costs yet, but its potentially more empowering to small creators than large ones. Everyone has access to the same tools, and for instance, if it can offload a bunch of work from an indy game dev, that could let them focus more on the part of the game design process they are most skilled at/interested in.

Have you tried out writing prompts for an image generating AI? If you have some idea and play around with it it's quite a new thing. And extension of human imagination. YMMV

AI is helping us to correctly predict protein folding which will enable new medication. Afaik it's a major breakthough that could allow alleviating a lot of suffering.