Right now its almost impossible to escape the AI insanity. As soon as you get in a discussion about art or coding, you can be almost be sure, that someone will bring up AI and (depending how artsy the person is) tell you how easy it is.
I do not write this for any other reason, than to get something of my chest. I am annoyed by the discussion about AI. Wait no… not annoyed, fed up is the better word for it. I specifically write this, so I have something I can just send to someone, when its about that topic, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time.
Now my opinion is more nuanced than just: “AI bad and every who uses it is too.”, tho it does contain my opinion.
General overview
Lets start with a fun fact: AI (or what ever we call this now) is way older than ChatGPT. The word “Machine Learning” was first used in 1959 (Source) and “AI” today is exactly that. The Machine learns patterns, that it then repeats. In fact, to stay at ChatGPT, LLMs are from the 1990s, so also not really something new. Funnily enough, both the word “Machine Learning” and the concept of LLMs came from IBM. (Source)
Machine Learning (ML) isn’t just a concept. It has not been for a long time. Google used/uses Machine Learning for Search. Both DeepL and Google Translate (and every other services, that provides translations) used/uses ML.
So, the current iteration of “AI” in its concept is quite old. But, obviously the system got better and more efficient so now we can run it without waiting ages and with more robust responses and that’s impressive.
The good, …
Now, that those things are clear. We can talk about the use cases. Because yes, I agree. AI has the capabiltiy of doing great things.
- For Translations, its impeccable.
- OCR, the thing, where you can get digital text from a picture, is really good with AI. Tho it does tend to halucinate.
- For some nieche use-case: AI is really useful for Malware Inspection, since the code for a malware is often obsucated, people have used AI to quickly find patterns,
- In general… every thing, that has patterns its good.
- For coding it can be quite the help. I personally use the JetBrains AI at work, and sometimes its really good.
… the bad, …
Now the problem is not the AI. Lets be real. Some would say, its the people who use it. I tend to agree, but in a different way.
The people have a point. When someone is fully reliant on the AI, the actual work will be worse.
Vibecoding rant
There is a trend called “Vibe Coding”, which consists of people letting the AI (and only the AI) create an Application. That has multiple flaws. You have no control what it does. Like yes, you can check if it works, but if you have no clue, on what it does, you have no control.
And for me personally, you need to learn everything anyways and using it, for me, feel like programming with the handbrake on. But I see people, that don’t like writing code, but can program, like thinking about how a program should be structured and all that, and just the AI do the typing. I will never unterstand this, but its not my place to understand.
The real bad thing, for me at very least, is the fact, that you need to work with the AI-generated code, even if you don’t work with AI, because in your team, someone uses it.
Economics and Climate
Ok, apart from me wining about how AI generated code is bad, there is more stuff, that is not good about it.
Now, AI uses a lot of power. A fucking hell of a lot. Now there is the voice, that tells everyone: “AI can be used to help combat climate change”. And yes. It could, but it won’t. Because Shareholders in the companies running the AIs have only one thing in mind… MONEY. Instead, AI data centers are run with gas or coal, which is… exactly what we don’t need. There are better ways of generate power, like solar or geothermal plants, but these are more expensive to either build or maintain, or take longer to get running. (Source)
In fact, to quote the MIT Technology Review:
There’s something familiar in the suggestion that it’s okay to build data centers that run on fossil fuels today because AI tools will help the world reduce emissions eventually. It recalls the purported promise of carbon credits: that it’s fine for a company to carry on polluting at its headquarters or plants, so long as it’s also funding, say, the planting of trees that will suck up a commensurate level of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, we’ve seen again and again that such programs often exaggerate the climate benefits, doing little to alter the balance of what’s going into or coming out of the atmosphere.
And honestly, its not like, the Climate is in a good state.
… and the ugly.
Data…
Now, remember how I said, that the AI just learns patterns.
Where do the patterns come from?
Think about it. You need insane amounts of data, to teach an AI. Where does that come from?
Correct, from you and me… and the other people, who uses the internet and uploaded there stuff. All of it is scraped (the act of a program going though the internet and downloading everything it finds.) and used to teach the AI, without people knowing or asked or, god forbid, payed.
The concept of copyright, which artists and, honestly, everyone, had fought for, for decades, … ignored. Right now, no government is stopping this. So, great. Corpos decided, that your copyright, your right that something you make, is yours, is worthless. This extends to both Text and Images (Image-Generation rant, later). Heck, if this blog exists long enough, it too be part of an AI. Sure, I could implerment some measures against it, but either its a hint for an scraper, which the AI will ignore, or it will majorly inconvience the human readers. (Kinda jealous of artists with Nightshade)
This is already bad. Bad enough to honestly throw the entire AI in the trash.
… and the human cost.
If you think Human Rights are neato and should be provided to everyone, it gets much worse. Because the AI has no fucking clue, what is good and bad. They need humans to learn, and where people from poverty come in. Because, Amazon (and some other companies) have services, where you give people simple tasks, that need to completed, f.E. captchas. The people doing that, don’t do it because its fun or something. Its usually shit. But they need money to survive, so such a system exploits the poor, and its not a living wage in any sense of the word. What does that have to do with AI? Well, you need humans to tell stuff apart. So, you pay these people pennies to do it.
In addition, AI is often used for Content Moderation and for that, its very… hit or miss. For mainstream languages, it may work sometimes, but for non-mainstream languages, you need humans. We all know how the internet is, especially the social media. They see shit… you don’t want to see. (Source) This also applies to the people that defines what content is good for the AI and what not.
Image, Video and Voice generation
Now for the Image generation rant, where I’m just gonna throw video and voice generation in there as well.
First of all: If you call it art and you get punched by an artist, you kinda deserve it.
When you are around Pen ‘n’ Paper communities, you quickly find people use AI to generate the images for characters or areas. I mean, thats literally a selling point of AI Image Generation. PnP areas can change quite rapidly and the game master, can’t paint enough characters for a session and for characters, its just more economic. Instead of paying an artist to paint your character, you just tell an AI to do it, which I think makes it more lifeless.
On the other hand, if you around artists, which I am, you see a huge frustration. They were never payed well in any way, and now the AI even takes that away.
Voice generation has so many issues, its hard for me to like. It takes away work from voice actors, it sounds like shit and at its worse you can fake a video where someone talks… great new world…
Conclusion
You may notice, the bad and ugly part is each at least twice the size of the good part. I feel like that already sums up my opinion. The thing is, I see things, where the AI can be useful and a benefit, but right now the bad part is way stronger than the good part.
One Part of me wants to sleep 10 years and see where it goes. But the other part wants to be part of the discussion, because if you are not part of it, you can’t control it. So, I agree with that we need to deal with AI. But we can change it. Only because the AI we have right now it doesn’t mean it needs to be the thing, we have to have.
Honestly I don’t want to deal with discussions about AI anymore. I am sick of it and sometimes I get the feeling, that it can break a friendship. That’s the major reason, why I wrote this. If you, dear reader, use AI and don’t want to not do it and see no reason to stop, then nothing changes. But maybe reading everything makes you think about it.
After all… this is only the ramblings of an opinionated person on the internet.