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AI is a con
AI is a grift
AI is a scam
"The people who have temporarily gotten rich or famous on AI have done so by pretending that this outlier problem simply doesn’t exist, or that a remedy for it is imminent. When the bubble deflation that I have been predicting comes, as now seems imminent, it will come because so many people have begun to recognize that GenAI can’t live up to expectations."
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/this-one-important-fact-about-current
@gerrymcgovern do you think AI is a scam, or just that investors and financial types just haven’t learned what to apply it to and what not to apply it to yet?
With many of the automation and analysis tasks in business that I have come across, AI and LLMs are massive drivers of productivity.
Happy to say the market is overhyped and a financial bubble and AGI is nothing but a myth at this stage. But I do think the core tech doesn’t have amazing use cases when applied correctly.
@blairbarley It is a scam at multiple levels. All this so-called productivity that tech has driven since the 1970s, has it helped stabilize the climate, improve air quality, improve water quality, improve soil quality, reduce plastic and chemical pollution, reduce overall energy needs, improve social cohesion? You know, what has it done for the very basics for life? Or have all these "productivity gains" actually destroyed all of the above?
AI is just one more scam in the Big Tech Big Lie.
@gerrymcgovern haha! Well you’re going one big step deeper, and I like it!
In terms of building businesses that can make more money, I think AI has a lot of genuine potential and is not a scam.
In terms of actually making life better and raising humanity up, I agree. Like most tech, it will increase the gap between the rich and poor, ruin the planet, and enslave us even more to our screens, devices, ecosystems and corporate masters.
I am going for a walk!
@gerrymcgovern
Thank you! You have very simply made the point Ihave struggled to make as I intuitively reach the same conclusion.
AI is NOT "intelligence." The neighbor's escaped pet rabbit we attempted to help catch in our yard has more intelligence than all the computer learning systems combined. An easy statement to make since they have none. "Self-driving cars" are an obscenity.
The expression " just that you CAN does not mean you SHOULD" applies.
@gerrymcgovern A question:
How is this different from how human beings approach solving outlier problems? Are we not subject to the same failure modes?
In other words - is this an issue inherent in the systems themselves or in our *expectations* and assumptions of the systems? What does a system that does not have these failure modes even look like, given the infinitely broad problem space we expect them to operate in.
@dogzilla We have a lived experience, although, true, some of us don't have much common sense. However, if we see a huge thing sprawled across the motorway, most of us will slow down. AI will keep going and crash into it because it's not in its training set. Not all AI will do that all the time, but AI has very little common sense.
@gerrymcgovern Actually, a surprising number of humans will do just that - as a motorcyclist I’m keenly aware of that.
You see my point - what we call “AI” strikes me as a much closer mimic of humanity than we want to admit. Our expectation is that it will be better, because otherwise, what’s the point of AI?
I think that’s where the problem lies: it’s been hyped to be something it can’t be.
@dogzilla You're probably right. After all, we are destroying the planet--the only home we have.
But AI is often weirder than the very many weird humans out there.
@gerrymcgovern @dogzilla Basically, the machine models need to “understand” their data. The only way for that to work is to establish a symbol composition scheme for nodal datasets and then a correlation regime for the symbols. This might be enough to manage the edge/corner case situations and allow the models to extrapolate and adapt.
♫ @gerrymcgovern "An entire industry has been built - and will collapse - because people aren’t getting it."
While I haven't made that specific realization before reading the piece, I had an instinctive distrust of AI in its current form.
@TFFPrisoner @gerrymcgovern
And referring to it as an "Industry" is how we know Capitalism Already Ate Itself
@gerrymcgovern Good article, thanks.
@gerrymcgovern
"AI" is a marketing term.
Originally, it was a marketing term dreamed up by computer scientists to help get funding for research.
Now it's a marketing term used to bamboozle low-intelligence executives at big corporations.
But because of this marketing term, researchers now use the term "general intelligence" to mean what everyone thinks "artificial intelligence" already means.
@gerrymcgovern AI is bullshit.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
The goat problem is because it is just generating plausible continuations of the prompt using text similar to what is in the training data, and all the text of that kind in the training data has some kind of complication.
