AIs are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
AIs are marvellous. They cause marvels.
AIs are fantastic. They create fantasies.
AIs are glamorous. They project glamour.
AIs are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
AIs are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said AIs are nice.
AIs are bad.
AI at this stage is just a tool. This might change one day, but today is not that day. Blame the user, not the tool.
AI and ML was being used to assist in scientific research long before ChatGPT or StableDiffusion hit the mainstream news cycle. AIs can be used to predict all sorts of outcomes, including ones relevant to climate, weather, even medical treatment. The University I work for even have a funded PhD program looking at using AI algorithms to detect cancer better, I found out because one of my friends is applying for it.
The research I am doing with AI is not quite as important as that, but it could shape the future of both cyber security and education, as I am looking at using for teaching cyber security students about ethical hacking and security. Do people also use LLMs to hack businesses or government organisations and cause mayhem? Quite probably, and they definitely will in the future. That doesn’t mean that the tool itself is bad, just that some people will inevitably abuse it.
Not all of this stuff is run by private businesses either. A lot of work is done by open source devs working on improving publicly available AI and ML models in their spare time. Likewise some of this stuff is publicly funded through universities like mine. There are people way better than me out there using AIs for all sorts of good things including stopping hackers, curing patients, teaching the next generation, or monitoring climate change. Some of them have been doing it for years.
I was just making a clever reference
The problem is that some people like me won’t get that reference and instead think AIs are universally bad. A lot of people already think this way, and it’s hard to know who believes what.
The problem is that people selling LLMs keep calling them AI, and people keep buying their bullshit.
AI isn’t necessarily bad. LLMs are.
LLMs have legitimate uses today even if they are currently somewhat limited. In the future they will have more legitimate and illegitimate uses. The capabilities of current LLMs are often oversold though, which leads to a lot of this resentment.
Edit: also LLMs very much are AI (specifically ANI) and ML. It’s literally a form of deep learning. It’s not AGI, but nobody with half a brain ever claimed it was.
LLMs have legitimate uses today
No they don’t. The only thing they can be somewhat reliable for is autocomplete, and the slight improvement in quality doesn’t compensate the massive increase in costs.
In the future they will have more legitimate and illegitimate uses
No. Thanks to LLM peddlers being excessively greedy and saturating the internet with LLM generated garbage newly trained models will be poisoned and only get worse with every iteration.
The capabilities of current LLMs are often oversold
LLMs have only one capability: to produce the most statistically likely token after a given chain of tokens, according to their model.
Future LLMs will still only have this capability, but since their models will have been trained on LLM generated garbage their results will quickly diverge from anything even remotely intelligible.
