Ask Lemmygrad

I found out about gen AI some years back when I discovered some chatbot service that was a step up from Cleverbot. Prior to that, I'd had passing hobby interest in machine learning as a topic, but didn't realize it had started progressing. The service was kinda mindblowing, even though its AI relied on scripts a lot to cover for the model's zaniness. I think it was a <1b parameter model, which is tiny these days and this was before people started training models on more data for longer, too.

Anyway, that service was interesting for a time, but I was starting to look for better. Then long story short, in the process of "upgrading" the model, the company does a filter rug pull. On the surface, you might think, "Is it really such a bad thing to have some filters on an LLM?" The problem is, no matter how you feel about filters, these things would always be rife with false positives. The result is there were people who used the AI for simulating companionship (yes, that kind) and people who used it to have a simulated friendly relationship, who were both impacted. You had stuff like somebody trying to roleplay hug their AI and the AI being unable to do it back because of the filters. And keep in mind this company had also marketed that AI as a companion (including as a romantic companion) in the months leading up to the rug pull. This is where I was introduced to the problems of private companies being able to decide on a whim about AI models, and the pain for real people that would happen as a result.

I did end up finding a more dependable AI service (that isn't one of the huge ones), but I found that the rug pull with chatbots was a repeat phenomenon. Kept happening to people over and over, no matter where they went. Over the years, I had lots of discussions with people about gen AI, among people who actually used it. Even among people who use it, it wasn't always a clear cut "I love it and have no qualms" thing. And I largely reflect that.

For my own part, I largely avoided using the big corp AIs until Deepseek was a thing. Partly for privacy reasons and partly because I didn't want to support the big corps on it.

In the long-term, the right kind of gen AI helped me overcome writer's block on a long dry spell for creative writing. It helped me cope with life and process things. In being around other people online who were using the same stuff, it helped me connect with other people more. More recently, Deepseek helped me with coding a number of times.

In terms of negative impact, I've always been careful of the pitfalls and approached it more with wonder than with trust, if that makes sense. I see the large scale negative impacts as being a capitalism thing and have a hard time seeing it as more than acceleration or differing form of what capitalism was already doing. IIRC, there was a period where there was more of a belief that gen AI was going to mass replace workers and AGI was right around the corner (AGI being a nebulous term that could mean "general capability beyond one mode at a time, like text" or "infinitely self-improving sapient being that is going to take over the world" depending on who you asked). Nowadays, I think that has hit upon reality more so and the reality is that capitalism is the one choosing to replace workers, sometimes on vague promises of payoff that aren't reliable at all, and that they really need to dial the hype back.

Gen AI sits in this weird place where it is actually incredible how powerful and useful it can be, but it also cannot possibly live up to the hype of the hucksters who promote it like a panacea. So like, it's pretty "wow". But it's not "nothing will ever be the same" level of wow. It is a new form of automation, but it is not something you can drag and drop into any and every facet of life and get uniform results.

So for me, it's an often helpful part of my life, but so is a car if I need to go long distances. I still don't love cars fundamentally and I especially don't love that better options (like high speed trains) exist as a possibility and that the possibility has gotten shunted aside for decades, where I live. In other words, in the type of world I live in, it's a tool that can help with navigating that particular world. I wish its negative facets didn't exist and I hope they can be largely overcome on the larger scale of things. But I think for that to happen, we'll need control over the means of production. Fossil fuel companies didn't bend to climate research that said what they were doing is destructive. People have to take organized power seriously, not view things as a matter of getting mad long enough to force minor concessions and then going back to sleep (mainly thinking of the Yankee school of thought when I say that).