I don’t hate AI itself, but the amount of AI slop ruining the internet gives me a negative feeling about it whenever I see it. I used to enjoy fucking around with the early pre-2021 GANs, diffusion models and GPT3 playground before ChatGPT was around and actually liked the crazy dreamlike nonsense they made, but now it all feels like dead soulless crap getting used to replace humans. Probably going to get super downvoted for admitting to ever liking AI image gens lmao

  • Binette@lemmy.ml
    2·
    19 hours ago

    I dedictated my science fair on machine learning. I think it was one of my special interests, since I learned linear algebra and calculus + some statistics to understand how to make one.

    I tried making an AI that would learn how to play PuyoPuyo, but I used a single DQL neural network, so it was pretty bad 😅. It just spent its time putting the pieces on the side instead of actually getting more chains.

    I even remember telling my classmates about ML during an unrelated presentation, telling them that they should get ready for a new era of advanced AI (I cringe everytime I remember this. Hopefully they forgot lol)

    But yeah, chatGPT (or its predecessor. I remeber it being called something else) was pretty fun. I remember annoying my best friends by asking it te generate a donald trump speech on their favorite characters. They were verry annoyed, but nowadays they use AI like it’s their second brain haha.

    Needless to say, I got to experience beforehand how capitalism ruins certain aspects of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, good progress has been made, but I feel like slapping LLMs on every AI problem (or transformers in general) is not the way to go, even if it pleases investors. There are many types of machine learning algorithms out there, for different types of problems. I feel like LLMs are a part of the puzzle, but not enough for AGI, and putting all the ressources into trying to make LLMs what it’s not best at doing a waste.

    Also for the environmental side… All I’ll say is that companies knew the devestating effects on the environment that a large scale ML AI would have. I even remember feeling bad training my AI for the science fair, because I was essentialy leaving my computer open for hours running at max power. If a 14 year old knew this was bad for energy consumption and the environment, you bet google, meta and the rest knew as well.

    • Binette@lemmy.ml
      1·
      18 hours ago

      I would also like to add as a bonus section, but for those that say they would never have been able to do X or Y without AI, hear me out for a second.

      I’m not gonna go on a tirade about how you should’ve been able to, or that you’re a bad person for asking AI for help. Just trying to put a new perspective through it, as someone who used to use it compulsively (OCD be damned).

      I’m not sure if it is the case for everyone, but at least for me, using AI was mostly an insecurity thing. Things I’d usually be more comfortable looking up the internet, documentation, or asking people, I’d just ask AI. I just thought “I’m not that good at reading docs/looking up stuff”, or “People will just get annoyed and bothered if I ask too many questions”. AI never gets annoyed and “listens”. Plus it’s a relatively good search engine replacement for the median people.

      The only reason I’m bringing this up is because I’ve noticed similar behaviour from the kids I taught coding. They would ask chatGTP to generate code for a cool idea they had, because they didn’t feel like anything they would be able to do would be good enough. It’s like they felt that the stuff they would be able to do was too lame, so might as well generate the code (the hours of debugging time this caused 😭). To contrast to that, back when I started python, I was stoked to make a base 10 decomposition program that only went up to 10^3. It was fun to figure it out, and I wanted them to have fun seeing the ideas and ways they thought to implement it working. I also hear a lot of this almost self-defeatist attitude when people talk about using AI (and I’m not talking about in the workplace. That’s another can of worms).

      When I worked on my OpenBSD server, I thought I was “too unskilled” to read the documentation for setting up ikeV2, so I asked AI. After several back and forth of frustratingly explaining the issue, only to get stuff that doesn’t make sense, I gave the documetation a more in depth read, and managed to figure out the issue. This type of exchange happened several times, and after realising I was just using it as a glorified rubber duckie, I just flat out deleted my account. I would’ve wasted less time, energy and ressources if I had the courage to ask for help, and I feel a bit more ashamed about not doing so earlier

      All this to say: don’t be afraid to ask help on forums, look up stuff on the internet, or ask someone you know for help on a task. It doesn’t help that people are in a tight schedule nowadays, and that workplaces expect mote output because of AI. But if you do manage to find some time for your personal activities, don’t hesitate to take your time, and try some of the above.