I am a programmer in the year 2024 who doesn't use AI.
I'm not even curious about it.
It's not just the mistakes. Hallucinations. Artificial confidence.
It's not just the unconscionable energy use. Laundering and reinforcement of historical biases. Ripoff of creative works. Exploited workers. Scams. Bots. Political propaganda. Mass surveillance to train the beast. And this is just off the top of my head here.
1/N
It's not just about how the story of how AI will make us all so much more "productive" that we'll all have much more free time, which has been told many times in modern history and has never been broadly true.
It is all that.
And.
2/N
On a personal level.
I got curious about computers because they are things I'm able to be curious about. That's it. That's the spark. I can explore them and learn how they work.
Computers are hard sometimes. Sometimes we can figure out ways to make them easier. But if we instead automate doing hard things, using AI to make doing hard things less effort, it doesn't lead to a place I'm excited about.
3/N
@sunfish
For me it's also the complete loss of control — systems can be insanely complex, but it would still not impossible to figure out how it works, given necessary time, but neural network is something infinitely complex, not cleated consciously, but by feeding it amounts of data that are even hard to measure, without making conscise choices about what data it is and without understanding how every piece of that data changes it.
@sunfish
I do understand how neural networks can be applicable as a "unit" you can use in your software as it is with OCR for example (also the data used to train it wouldn't be random in this case), but when you use the neural network to design the "control unit" itself — it is, like I said, complete loss of said control.