Lots of people on Lemmy really dislike AI’s current implementations and use cases.
I’m trying to understand what people would want to be happening right now.
Destroy gen AI? Implement laws? Hoping all companies use it for altruistic purposes to help all of mankind?
Thanks for the discourse. Please keep it civil, but happy to be your punching bag.
Lots of copyright comments.
I want those building it at scale to stop killing my planet.
People have negative sentiments towards AI under a captalist system, where the most successful is equal to most profitable and that does not translate into the most useful for humanity
We have technology to feed everyone and yet we don’t We have technology to house everyone and yet we don’t We have technology to teach everyone and yet we don’t
Captalist democracy is not real democracy
I want disclosure. I want a tag or watermark to let people know that AI was used. I want to see these companies pay dues for the content used in the similar vein that we have to pay for higher learning. And we need to stop calling it AI as well.
My fantasy is for “everyone” to realize there’s absolutely nothing “intelligent” about current AI. There is no rationalization. It is incapable of understanding & learning.
ChatGPT et al are search engines. That’s it. It’s just a better Google. Useful in certain situations, but pretending it’s “intelligent” is outright harmful. It’s harmful to people who don’t understand that & take its answers at face value. It’s harmful to business owners who buy into the smoke & mirrors. It’s harmful to the future of real AI.
It’s a fad. Like NFTs and Bitcoin. It’ll have its die-hard fans, but we’re already seeing the cracks - it’s absorbed everything humanity’s published online & it still can’t write a list of real book recommendations. Kids using it to “vibe code” are learning how useless it is for real projects.
I’d like to have laws that require AI companies to publicly list their sources/training materials.
I’d like to see laws defining what counts as AI, and then banning advertising non-compliant software and hardware as “AI”.
I’d like to see laws banning the use of generative AI for creating misleading political, social, or legal materials.
My big problems with AI right now, are that we don’t know what info has been scooped up by them. Companies are pushing misleading products as AI, while constantly overstating the capabilities and under-delivering, which will damage the AI industry as a whole. I’d also want to see protections to keep stupid and vulnerable people from believing AI generated content is real. Remember, a few years ago, we had to convince people not to eat tidepods. AI can be a very powerful tool for manipulating the ranks of stupid people.
Serious investigation into copyright breaches done by AI creators. They ripped off images and texts, even whole books, without the copyright owners permissions.
If any normal person broke the laws like this, they would hand out prison sentences till kingdom come and fines the size of the US debt.
I just ask for the law to be applied to all equally. What a surprising concept…
We are filthy criminals if we pirate one textbook for studies. But when Facebook (Meta) pirates millions of books (anywhere between 30 million and 200 million ebooks, depending on their file size), they are a brilliant and successful business.
Reduce global resource consumption with the goal of eliminating fossil fuel use. Burning nat gas to make fake pictures that everyone hates is just the worst.
If we’re going pie in the sky I would want to see any models built on work they didn’t obtain permission for to be shut down.
Failing that, any models built on stolen work should be released to the public for free.
Genuine curiosity. Not an attack. Did you download music illegally back in the day? Or torrent things? Do you feel the same about those copyrighted materials?
Nah not really. I think piracy is a complex issue though, with far less wide reaching collateral damage. I wouldn’t compare the two, personally.
Definitely need copyright laws. What if everything has to be watermarked in some way and it’s illegal to use AI generated content for commercial use unless permitted by creators?
The problem with trying to police the output is there isn’t a surefire way to detect the fact it’s generated. That’s why I prefer targeting the companies who created the problematic models.
But let’s say the model is released for free but people use it for commercial purposes. It seems the only solution is to mandate that all content a model is trained on and accesses has provided express permission or is original content. Nobody can release a model to the public which generates content based on “illegal” material.
I agree with that I think.
Other people have some really good responses in here.
I’m going to echo that AI is highlighting the problems of capitalism. The ownership class wants to fire a bunch of people and replace them with AI, and keep all that profit for themselves. Not good.
Nobody talks how it highlights the success of capitalism either.
I live in SEA and AI is incredibly powerful here giving opportunity for anyone to learn. The net positive of this is incredible even if you think that copyright is good and intellectual property needs government protection. It’s just that lop sided of an argument.
I think western social media is spoiled and angry and the wrong thing but fighting these people is entirely pointless because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Big tech == bad, blah blah blah.
You don’t need AI for people to learn. I’m not sure what’s left of your point without that assertion.
You’re showing your ignorance if you think the whole world has access to fit education. And I say fit because there’s a huge difference learning from books made for Americans and AI tailored experiences just for you. The difference is insane and anyone who doesn’t understand that should really go out more and I’ll leave it at that.
Just the amount of frictionless that AI removes makes learning so much more accessible for huge percentage of population. I’m not even kidding, as an educator, LLM is the best invention since the internet and this will be very apparent in 10 years, you can quote me on this.
You shouldn’t trust anything the LLM tells you though, because it’s a guessing machine. It is not credible. Maybe if you’re just using it for translation into your native language? I’m not sure if it’s good at that.
If you have access to the internet, there are many resources available that are more credible. Many of them free.
Again you’re just showing your ignorance how actually available this is to people outside of your immediate circle, maybe you should travel a bit and open up your mind.
You shouldn’t trust anything the LLM tells you though, because it’s a guessing machine
You trust tons of other uncertain probability-based systems though. Like the weather forecast, we all trust that, even though it ‘guesses’ the future weather with some other math
That’s really not the same thing at all.
For one, no one knows what the weather will be like tomorrow. We have sophisticated models that do their best. We know the capital of New Jersey. We don’t need a guessing machine to tell us that.
For things that require a definite, correct answer, an LLM just isn’t the best tool for it. However if the task is something with many correct answers, or no correct answer, like for instance writing computer code (if its rigorously checked against its actually not that bad) or for analyzing vast amounts of text quickly, then you could make the argument that its the right tool for the job.
Nobody talks how it highlights the success of capitalism either.
it definitely does both
Make it unprofitable for the companies peddling it, by passing laws that curtail its use, by suing them for copyright infringement, by social shaming and shitting on AI generated anything on social media and in person and by voting with your money to avoid anything that is related to it
Energy consumption limit. Every AI product has a consumption limit of X GJ. After that, the server just shuts off.
The limit should be high enough to not discourage research that would make generative AI more energy efficient, but it should be low enough that commercial users would be paying a heavy price for their waste of energy usage.
Additionally, data usage consent for generative AI should be opt-in. Not opt-out.
Out of curiosity, how would you define a product for that purpose? It’s pretty easy to tweak a few weights slightly.
You can make the limit per-company instead. With big fines if you make thousands of companies to get around the law.
Ah, so we’re just brainstorming.
It’s hard to nail down “no working around it” in a court of law. I’d recommend carbon taxes if you want to incentivise saving energy with policy. Cap and trade is also seen as a gold standard option.
Carbon taxes still allow you to waste as much energy as you want. It just makes it more expensive. The objective is to put a limit on how much they are allowed to waste.
I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know how to make a law without possible exploits, but i don’t think it would be hard for an actual lawyer to make a law with this spirit that is not easily avoided.
Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.
I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.
Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.
Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.
I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.
I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.
Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.
I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.
Fwiw, I’ve been getting called an alarmist for talking about Trump’s and Republican’s fascist tendencies since at least 2016, if not earlier. I’m now comfortably living in another country.
My point being that people will call you an alarmist for suggesting anything that requires them to go out of their comfort zone. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, it just shows how stupid people are.
Did you move overseas? And if you did, was it expensive to move your things?
It wasn’t overseas but moving my stuff was expensive, yes. Even with my company paying a portion of it. It’s just me and my partner in a 2br apartment so it’s honestly not a ton of stuff either.
Admittedly very tough question. Here are some of the ideas I just came up with:
Make it easier to hold people or organizations liable for mistakes made because of haphazard reliance on LLMs.
Reparations for everyone ever sued for piracy, and completely do away with intellectual privacy protections for corporations, but independent artists get to keep them.
Public service announcements campaign aimed at making the general public less trustful of LLMs.
Strengthen consumer protection such that baseless claims of AI capabilities in advertising or product labeling are legally dangerous to make.
Fine companies for every verifiably inaccurate result given to a customer or end user by an LLM
I’d want all of these, and some way to prevent companies from laying off so many people and replacing them with AI - maybe some government-based incentives for having actual employees.
I don’t have negative sentiments towards A.I. I have negative sentiments towards the uses it’s being put towards.
There are places where A.I can be super exciting and useful; namely places where the ability to quickly and accurately process large amounts of data can be critically life saving, ie) air traffic control, language translation, emergency response preparedness, etc…
But right now it’s being used to paint shitty pictures so that companies don’t have to pay actual artists.
If I had a choice, I’d say no AI in the arts; save it for the data processing applications and leave the art to the humans.
That stealing copyrighted works would be as illegal for these companies as it is for normal people. Sick and tired of seeing them get away with it.
