Ask Lemmy

LLM's have their use, there is no doubt about that. I'm in the middle of creating a home brew campaign for my D&D group and unfortunately I'm a lousy artist and I wanted a few things visualized. Well, I used a photo generating AI to create something that had the visual I wanted. I'm going to use it for my campaign and it will probably just sit on my hard drive after I'm done.

My employer is rolling out AI and is asking us to find places to insert it into our workflows. I am doing that with my team, but none of us are really sure if it will be of any benefit.

The problem right now is we're at the stage where idiots are convinced it is something that it is not and they have literally thrown 10's of billions of dollars at it. Now... They are staring at the wide abyss that is the amount of money they invested vs the amount of money people are willing to pay for it.

I've seen arguments for and against the presence of an AI bubble... Personally, I think it's a bubble that's so large that it will take down several long established computer industry manufacturers when if pops. Those that are arguing its absence probably have large investments that they do not want to see fail.

It's not ready for commercial use by the general public.

We see this ALL the time in America - a new disruptive technology emerges. We jump all over the benefits and the profits without regard to consequences or expense. We suffer.

New cheap pesticide? Hell yeah, spray that DDT everywhere, it's super effective! (Insert other endless examples here, from microplastics to asbestos.)

AI (and information technology in general) has shown itself to be a danger to human beings. Its effects are not felt so much in the short term (5 or 10 years) but generationally. We've seen that information technology has already impacted quality of life. It's used as spyware, as a tool to collect and correlate massive amounts of data. It's used to shape our media experience, our purchasing, our social circles. There are great things, like online banking. But they seem more and more to be outweighed by a loss of humanity. So much misinformation that I question my own reality some days.

What we call "AI" is the evolution of these obtrusive, coercive practices. It exists purely to replace human thinking skills. I've spent a bit of time in r/teachers over the last 15 years, and the stories keep getting worse. The rise of AI means that detecting plagiarism/cheating is exponentially more difficult. But, more importantly, the kids don't have any stress when it comes to cheating. They don't have to find a friend or know the bare minimum. They can just...cheat. And they never learn to problem solve or overcome adversity.

None of this matters, though. Ready or not, here we are. A new kind of slavery for a new world order.

Probably programming, i used Claude Code recently and it's wonderful because i can use it for debugging stuff that i can't undersfand or i can make him do boring ass stuff that i could do myself but just eat my time uselessly (So i can go make a mug of tea or a cup of coffe! Not work XD)

But i want to underline that it will NEVER replace a programmer, to stupid to do it rn, but it can really help our work and that we need to push for self-hostable AIs, right now there are many models but they either require too much resources or are stupid...i hope that we improve their efficency more...

I agree that they are unethical rn because it's all stolen stuff, i hope to be able to make my own AI in future that is trained in a more ethical way(just as hobby open source project tho)

Strictly from an environmental perspective, no. This tech generates massive emissions and consumes a large amount of fresh water at a time when both are at critical points. We are going full speed towards a planet inhospitable to human life and the other life we share the planet with.

its the next abstraction of search. A search does not answer a question correctly necessarily. Its pretty much not going to stop the same as having people not search online and instead go through newspapers and encylopedias and refernce texts. Energy wise if they are entertaining themselved and not generating images and just screwing around with text then its preferable to streaming vidoe if replacing it. The scariest part is it being used ineffectively and people not realizing it. I sometimes feel we are in a new dark ages with blood letting, trepanning, and curing demon possession.

1. The sciences obviously

2. For me personally, data collation

3. Learning

4. Assisting with Linux sysadmin stuff (used to be a "how do I X" meant hours of scouring online forums and asking questions that might be deleted because draconian forum rules or get answered weeks later if at all, now I can get shit done in minutes)

   5. I also use it a lot to explore ideas and arguments, like a sort of metaphysical sparring partner.

It's never justifiable because it can and will output incorrect information. It's made my job worse because it means confidently incorrect people bug me when it's wrong and I have to explain why it's wrong.

I think it's useful as a starting point for a lot of things. I can ask AI a question about a topic I know nothing about, which will typically give me some context on the topic and the terminology to do further research.

I think we should be building localized, smaller, more finely-tuned LLMs.

1. They wouldn’t require data centers.
2. They would be forced to become more energy efficient or resource aware because they add costs to organizational profit margins - forcing innovation and creativity instead of throwing data centers and billionaires at the problem.

I used AI to help with debugging and coding, as well as exploring a theory I came up with a long time ago - and with my framework and notes and research papers and everything else I’ve collected to support my theory, I was able to put it into application with my own AI cybersecurity I’ve developed.

We’ve created 26,000 new cyber threat datasets because I had access to an LLM that could help me take the frameworks, notes, and research I’d gathered in my attempts to build this out and within a couple months I had something that blew my prototype out of the water.

• there is a lot of value in these LLMs. What I’ve been exploring is on-hardware AI. Not a friend. Not a chatbot. A program that does what it’s supposed to and that’s it.

My startup in cybersecurity- we use less than 1GB of ram, at peak use maybe 30% of a single cpu core, and it was build with ethics and safeguards in mind. Not LLM but real Machine + reinforcement learning.

To me ethics also meant resource awareness. If I’m poisoning the planet and the people then it’s not a good product.

Building smaller, more specialized local models is not only better from a cybersecurity perspective, but smaller local LLMs mean new startups to build them, a race to innovate and improve resource usage, more data privacy, smaller attack surface, no obscenely expensive API calls and overage fees…

What we should have is a Symbiotic approach to AI - a partnership sort of understanding.

LLMs helped me with debugging and putting this research and theory together. And in a fraction of the time it took me to build the framework.

I pushed autonomous operation because I felt that it was about giving people their time back. Providing freedom. If my cybersecurity can take care of 94.1% of all threats before they reach an analyst - that analyst doesn’t have to wake up at 2AM to sift through 10000 false positives. We do it.

Now that analyst can do what they got a degree to do - actually defend a network. Build and explore threat research and databases. Find their purpose again.

We require that a human is always in the loop and help protect cybersecurity jobs by ensuring that all human input is always the final decision. Let our AI do the heavy lifting so you can take care of this shit that matters and what you really want to do.

Sorry I think my adhd took control of this conversation.

I think anything with text generation is fine. Your multiple Google searches are highly likely to eat more resources than that. Also, fuck Google, use Ecosia. But when I suspect an answer isn't one quick search away, I happily rather use Le Chat for answers, than give Reddit traffic, or have to wade through the shite that is Fandom, Wikia or whatever. Not to mention using AI helps me get past the issue of having to check multiple sites for an answer, just to find that the answer is "Google it" or "Nvm, solved it". Some of you fuckers did this.

However people need to understand that an AI is exactly as fallible as any person. Yes, it has access and capability to handle way more data but between trying to please you and just it getting it's wires crossed, it's going to make mistakes. YOU need to be able to assess the accuracy of the output. The more important the topic, the more careful you need to be and always assume that the possibility of error is there no matter how hard you try - JUST LIKE WITH ANY BIT OF INFORMATION. I see so many people cite academic articles like they prove whatever claim they are making, just to see that the study in question was funded by The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim and sample size was 3 people who work for The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim. At least AI has a small chance of pointing the issue out if YOU yourself tell it to be critical - and I actually suspect this is part of the reason some people hate AI. They don't like that it absolutely can be more intellectually rigorous than a person with an emotional investment in whatever they want to be true. Yes, you can have an AI asspat your grandest delusions but if you actually try to get it to be critical, it will be. You can use a hammer to hit people, or you can use it on a nail as intended (and how many times you hit your own fingers is on you, not the hammer).

I would draw a line on artwork, videos, music. While I'm not going to crucify actual artists using AI assistance to take out some tedium from a project, I still wouldn't encourage it. Stolen artwork to train AI is one thing and the environmental impact is VASTLY greater than just text. Generating one AI image can use as much energy as even a 1,000 text responses. I would also really like to be able to completely opt out of AI slop in media sites. I fucking hate that Soundcloud allows it.

And a last point on AI text responses: if you saw the rise of alt-right and the anti-vaxx stuff, you probably are familiar with gish galloping and Brandolini's Law. If not, you really fucking should be. AI can make it so much easier to debunk misinformation. YES it can make it easier to perpetuate too but this is where we see the AI weapons race. Bad actors can AND WILL use AI to fill any void with their rhetoric. If you value truth and facts and want to prevent misinformation from spreading you are gimping yourself if you're not using AI.

The best use of AI I've seen thus far is reading legislative bills. Those monstrosities are so fucking long and filled with earmarks that it's next to impossible to understand what is in them.

Having an AI not only read the bill but keep a watch of it as it goes through Congress is probably the best use of AI because it actually helps citizens.

I am on record saying we need an AI that can track prices of various things that can then predict when the best time it is to buy something.

I want an AI bot that saves me money or gets me a good deal or extracts money from the capital class.

Absolutely not — it's a computer program, a piece of software, pretending to be human. I've always been against that, especially now that it's less obvious if it's a real person talking 🙆, or just a computer program someone prompted 🤖

I value honesty, and, sincerely, I hate that the web is filled to the brim with AI 'slop'. As a human being who values creativity, I don't want to see that. Fundamentally it is made to mimic human output — it's not just annoying, it's disingenuous.

All I ever do with AI is use it to correct my grammar or tone.

Medicine.

Evidence shows that some highly specialised models are better at things like detecting breast cancer in scans than human doctors.

Properly anonymised automatic second scans by an AI to catch the markers that human doctors miss for another review by a specialist is an excellent potential use case for an LLM AI.

Transcription services can save doctors huge amounts of admin time and allows them to focus on the patient if they know there's a reliable system in place for typing up notes for a consultation. As long as it's treated as a "please review these notes are accurate" rather than treated as a gospel recording and the data is destroyed once it's job is complete and the patient has been able to give informed consent.

The way these things are being used in actual medical contexts right now is frankly terrifying.