I know Lemmy hates AI with a fiery passion (and I too hate it for various reasons), but the ability to make this sort of prediction in a way far more stable than whatever else came before with natural language processing (fancy term of the day for those who havem’t heard of it), and however inefficiently built and ran it is, is useful if you can nudge it enough in a certain direction. It can’t do functional things reliably, but if you contain it to only parse human language and extract very specific information, show it in a machine-parsable way, and then use that as input for something you can program, you’ve essentially built something that feels like it can understand you in human language for a handful of tasks and carry out those tasks (even if the carrying out part isn’t actually done by an LLM). So pedantically, it’s not AI, but most people not in tech don’t know or care about the difference. It’s all magic all the way down like how computers should just magically do what they’re thinking of. That’s not changed.

My point though, and this isn’t targeting you specifically dear OC, is that we can circlejerk all we want here, but echoing this oversimplification of what LLMs can do is pretty irrelevant to the bigger discourse. Call these companies out on their practices! Their hypocrisy! Their indifference to the collapse of our biosphere, human suffering, letting the most vulnerable to hang high and dry!

Tech is a tool, and if our best argument is calling a tool useless when it’s demonstrably useful in specific ways, we’re only making a fool of ourselves, turning people away from us and discouraging others from listening to us.

But if your goal is to feel good by letting one out, please be my guest.

Peace