AI isn't useless. But is it worth it? (blog post recommended by AI experts Gary Marcus and Grady Booch)

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From Molly White - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_White_(writer) and https://www.mollywhite.net/ :

https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/

As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to become the subject of the tech world's overinflated aspirations, I have had people express surprise when I've remarked that generative artificial intelligence toolsa can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised myself.

But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a justification.

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When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

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I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.

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The boldface emphasis added was added by her, not me.

Much more at the link. I hope you'll read all of it, especially the last two paragraphs.

My emphasis has been on the harm GenAI does. I will always side with writers, artists and teachers. And as someone who's been interested in politics since grade school and majored in poli sci, I think GenAI is an existential threat to democracy. I don't personally need GenAI to do anything for me. I don't need it to write for me, and although I sometimes wish I were a skilled musician or visual artist, I'd feel like an incompetent fraud pretending I'd created something by giving prompts to AI models trained on datasets of stolen work and directly competing with the artists who were robbed.

But I wanted to post about this thoughtful piece from Molly White to show that even people who have found some uses for GenAI in their own lives don't think that its usefulness outweighs the harm it does.

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