I don't get the ai hate sentiment. In fact I want ai to be so good that it steals all our jobs. Every single "worker" on the planet. The only job I don't think they can steal is that of middle management because I don't think we have digitized data on how to suck your own dick.
After everybody is jobless, then we would be free. We won't need the rich. They can be made into a fine broth.
Sarcasm aside, I really believe we should automate all menial jobs, crunch more data and make this world a better place, not steal creative content made by humans and make second rate copies.
The problem is that it will be the rich that are the owners of the AI that stole your job so suddenly we peasants are no longer needed. We won't be free, we will be broth.
Option 1. Halt scientific and technological progress and be robbed anyway because if capitalists do not get more money out of tech they are getting it out of making you work more hours for less money.
I don't get what's not to get. AI is a heap of bullshit that's piled on top of a decade of cryptobros.
it's not even impressive enough to make a positive world impact in the 2-3 years it's been publicly available.
shit is going to crash and burn like web3.
I've seen people put full on contracts that are behind NDAs through a public content trained AI.
I've seen developers use cuck-pilot for a year and "never" code again... until the PR is sent back over and over and over again and they have to rewrite it.
I've seen the AI news about new chemicals, new science, new _fill-in-the-blank and it all be PR bullshit.
so yeah, I don't believe AI is our savior. can it make some convincing porn? sure. can it do my taxes? probably not.
When I hear "AI", I think of that thing that proofreads my emails and writes boilerplate code. Just a useful tool among a long list of others. Why would I spend emotional effort hating it? I think people who "hate" AI are just as annoying as the people pushing it as the solution to all our problems.
You are ignoring ALL of the of the positive applications of AI from several decades of development, and only focusing on the negative aspects of generative AI.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of some applications:
In healthcare as a tool for earlier detection and prevention of certain diseases
For anomaly detection in intrusion detection system, protecting web servers
Disaster relief for identifying the affected areas and aiding in planning the rescue effort
Fall detection in e.g. phones and smartwatches that can alert medical services, especially useful for the elderly.
Various forecasting applications that can help plan e.g. production to reduce waste.
Etc...
There have even been a lot of good applications of generative AI, e.g. in production, especially for construction, where a generative AI can the functionally same product but with less material, while still maintaining the strength. This reduces cost of manufacturing, and also the environmental impact due to the reduced material usage.
Does AI have its problems? Sure. Is generative AI being misused and abused? Definitely. But just because some applications are useless it doesn't mean that the whole field is.
A hammer can be used to murder someone, that does not mean that all hammers are murder weapons.
If AI image generation is so bad why we have so many etsy and patreon artists complaining about it?
If no one would use it because it is so bad why would anyone care that it is trained on their products?
Do you know this joke about MAGA and the Schrodinger's immigrant? They somehow believe that immigrants are both stealing people jobs and lazy and living on wellfare.
AntiAI bros are somehow similar. AI is at the same time stealing artists jobs and completely useless incapable of producing nothing that people would want.
The whole "all AI bad" is disconnected and primitivism.
John J. Hopfield work is SCIENCE with caps. A decade of investigations during the 80s when computational power couldn't really do much with their models. And now it has been shown that those models work really good given proper computational power.
Also not all AI is generative AI that takes money out of fanfic drawers pockets or an useless hallucinating chatbot. Neural networks are commonly used in science as a very useful tool for many tasks. Also image recognition is nowadays practically a solved issue thanks to their research. Proteins folding. Dataset reduction. Fluent text to speech. Speech recognition...
AI may be getting more track nowadays because the generative AIs (that also have their own merit, like or not) but there is much more to it.
As any technological advance there are shitty use cases and good use cases. You cannot condemn a whole tech just for the shitty uses of some greedy capitalists. Well.. you can condemn it. But then I will classify you as a primitivist.
Scientific theory that resulted in practical applications useful to people is why the nobel prize was created to begin with. So it is a well given prize. More so than many others.
Generative AI is part to AI. And it has its own merits. Very big merits. Like or not it is a milestone on the field. That it is mostly hated not because it doesn't work but because it does.
If generative AI could not create images the way it does I assure you we wouldn't have the legion of etsy and patreon painters complaining about it.
To be fair, the protein folding thing is legitimately impressive and an actual good use for the technology that isnt just harvesting people's creativity for profit.
Actually I endorse the fact that we are less shy of calling "AI" algorithms that do exhibit emergent intelligence and broad knowledge. AI uses to be a legitimate name for the field that encompasses ML and we do understood a lot of interesting things about intelligence thanks to LLMs nowadays, like the fact that training on next-word-prediction is enough to create pretty complex world models, that transformer architectures are capable of abstraction or that morality arise naturally when you try to acquire all the pre-requisites to have a normal discussion with a human.