I genuinely don’t get it. Its a fucking trash chatbot that’s doing perceivably nothing beyond taking jobs away from people?
Like am I an insane outlier here when it comes to AI and robotics? I cant imagine having a fucking robot in my home, let alone one run by an AI. Nor can I understand why the fuck people want their cars to have it in them with the ability to monitor their biometrics.
Maybe I’m just the outlier here, but I genuinely have no interest in the slop machines or their potential clanker bodies and see no use in them.
Corporate AI as a service is cancer. But I don’t completely discount locally hosted AI for certain tasks. If you know it’s capabilities and trade-offs, it can be used as one of many tools in a toolbox.
For example, vibe coding entire projects is shit but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a locally hosted AI spitting out ~6 lines of boiler plate code that you can edit for your needs. It’s a huge time saver when you don’t code for a living but enjoy it as a hobby. I don’t have unlimited time for hobbies and my local chatbot does let me accomplish some tasks faster.
Edit: for those of you who disagree, I’m curious to know at what scope you’re thinking about AI at. Are you just thinking about the tech and/or larger social consequences and/or environmental impacts etc. If we’re just talking about the tech, the tech is amazing and has its uses but if you’re thinking about it more broadly then I get it.
One example where it may be truly revolutionary is astrophysics research. I saw a lecture by an astronomer talking about it. Astrophysics works well with the limitations of AI. A lot of their work is building simplified models to study large complex astrophysical systems. Imagine someone modeling the formation of planets in a circumstellar disk.
The key is that these are very contained problems. You’re just trying to simulate a little toy solar system. The code can all be completely self-contained and doesn’t need to deeply integrate with tons of other existing software and infrastructure.
Articles come out all the time that mention AI being able to detect different diseases months or years before symptoms present. It can be trained to sift through lifetimes worth of data and recognize patterns. There’s no way that’s not useful.
The wider social, economic, and environmental impacts are definitely issues that should be looked into but the tech itself is a marvel. The AI hate, I think, mostly comes down to chatbots and the companies pushing them.
You have to be very careful with such articles. They’re vulnerable to the same AI hype cycles as anything else. And those systems rarely work as well as the people selling them claim they do. Those articles you’re reading are written from the press releases of for-profit companies. The technology is also being used for mass medical fraud.