This is literally the only field in which anyone says it’s helpful, and I have made effort to reach out to users to see if it’s really helping. And even then, about half the programmers I’ve talked to about it (out of maybe a dozen) say that it’s either useless for their particular field of coding, or extremely hit-or-miss, it’s more like a quick dice-roll to see if the thing gives them something useful.

I also notice the ONLY people who can offer firsthand reports how it’s actually useful in any way are in a very, very narrow niche.

Basically, if you’re not a programmer, and even then a very select set of programmers, then your life is completely unimpacted by generative AI broadly. (Not counting the millions of students who used it to write papers for them.)

AI is currently one of those solutions in search of a problem. In its current state, it can’t really do anything useful broadly. It can make your written work sound more professional and at the same time, more mediocre. It can generate very convincing pictures if you invest enough time into trying to decode the best sequence of prompts and literally just get lucky, but it’s far too inacurate and inconsistent to generate say, a fully illustrated comic book or cartoon, unless you already have a lot of talent in that field. I have tried many times to use AI in my current job to analyze PDF documents and spreadsheets and it’s still completely unable to do work that requires mathematics as well as contextual understanding of what that math represents.

You can have really fun or cool conversations with it, but it’s not exactly captivating. It is also wildly inaccurate for daily use. I ask it for help finding songs by describing the lyrics and other clues, and it confidentially points me to non-existing albums by hallucinated artists.

I have no doubt in time it’s going to radically change our world, but that time frame is going to require a LOT more time and baking before it’s done. Despite how excited a few select people are, nothing is changing overnight. We’re going to have a century-long “singularity” and won’t realize we’ve been through it until it’s done. As history tends to go.

I would also add “hopeful delusionals” and “unhinged cultist” to that list of labels.

Seriously, we have people right now making their plans for what they’re going to do with their lives once Artificial Super Intelligence emerges and changes the entire world to some kind of post-scarcity, Star-Trek world where literally everyone is wealthy and nobody has to work. They think this is only several years away. Not a tiny number either, and they exist on a broad spectrum.

Our species is so desperate for help from beyond, a savior that will change the current status-quo. We’ve been making fantasies and stories to indulge this desire for millenia and this is just the latest incarnation.

No company on Earth is going to develop any kind of machine or tool that will destabilize the economic markets of our capitalist world. A LOT has to change before anyone will even dream of upending centuries of wealth-building.

They have no intention of occupation. They will raze every city to the ground to control the pipes and food. They just want the pipes and food, and people who don’t allow that are just going to be ground up like so much meat.

Putin wants every territory that used to be Russia.

And then when he gets them all, he will want every territory that’s near Russia.

And people will be like “Oh no, why didn’t anyone DO something when we could?”

He means what he says and there is no nuance or subtext.

Well, there is a sort of nuance here.

In that he’s also terrible at doing literally anything, and fails constantly at achieving promises.

He also has so many plots and schemes cooking at any given moment with so many other people and organizations that you absolutely cannot trust or predict any outcome. This is the real thing that nobody learned about Trump is that he is completely unpredictable because he can’t be honest about the color of the sky if asked.

If someone wanted to make a fast buck right now, I bet a game where you go hunt down CEO’s and virtually… you know, accomplish your mission goals on them, it would be wildly popular.

Good thing someone who can plan their attack and track their target for days or weeks, someone with absolutely nothing to lose and a single-minded purpose, would absolutely give up on their plans if they can’t find a public picture of a company’s CEO on the first page they check.

I think it’s more beneficial to look at their level of progress towards accepting individuality as a journey we can learn lessons from. I don’t think it’s good any more than I think many of our own cultural norms are good, and definitely worse in many ways, but I just wanted to drop a reminder that people who read this and say “Why didn’t [person] just do [thing]??” or other judgements are probably completely missing how any of these people feel.

The way many Asian countries view relationships between parents, offspring, and social status is very, very different than what we’re used to in the West, and while it’s all just more social constructs and norms being maintained like we know here, the similarities end there.

It would take a long to really explain, and several dozen people would chime in to say how their own family and upbringing was different, so it’s not really something you can “teach” but it’s worth pointing out that our normal lense in which we view family is not going to make sense looking at some families in other areas.

The relationship between family and social status is very, very different across many Asian countries than it is in the West generally. The same kinds of sentiments don’t really apply.

Not saying that it’s okay how the doctors and family treated this person, and it’s great that she got some justice after, quite untypical for the region, but I would discourage people from viewing these interactions through the lens of western norms. You likely have no idea.

I don’t think we should ever listen to moral opinions from ANYONE who has dedicated their lives to skimming as much money as possible off other people’s hard work, and not just a few people but millions and millions. They are whatever the capitalist, economic version of a serial killer is.

Everyone shares some level of accountability, and I know nobody wants to hear it and will stomp and huff and gnash their teeth at the notion, but it’s true. Some carry a much larger chunk of that responsibility than others, from of course the people who didn’t care and didn’t vote, and the people who cared and still didn’t vote, to just the people who rolled their eyes every time someone posted a “political” picture in /r/funny and had to start a 300+ comment deep thread about how stupid politics is, down to the small pieces held by everyone who did everything right but never valued their community, didn’t make a stand against people saying and doing things we didn’t agree with, and lets not forget everyone who never involved themselves in their local elections even enough to vote for the people who represent them, they allowed many to go unchallenged and those people went on to prop up a government run by and representing a minority ideology.

Or until the American people get bored with talking about it, like with everything else, then stop caring and just let whatever happen.

Additionally, from what I’ve read there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable health benefit.

I think it has a lot to do with how our nutrition and dental care has improved in many ways since they decided adding fluoride to water would benefit people.

It is one point I will give to the conspirturds and nutcases, but a small point. None of this is critical or dire, the effects are marginal and nobody is going to really notice a difference whatever happens. I wish they could have been this concerned about people’s health and well-being when we were you know… being ravaged by an actual lethal virus that was killing millions and is still active and harming people every day.

you just angered the entire AI/singularity community. Expect a sternly worded, AI-generated notice.

I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, young people are definitely not “more chill” if anything they’ve just had to grow up faster in a world that bombards everyone with every adult concern as soon as they can read or pick up a phone.

There are some good things, like the massive drop in teen pregnancy and general decline of violence all around. But there’s now an epidemic of loneliness and depression affecting people of all ages, starting early in life. People have largely retreated to personal safety of their own online lives, and the shift to online dating hasn’t been good to people. Social media and scrolling is killing everyone’s attention-spans and ability to compromise and socialize. Women still are in danger of assault. Men are still desperately lonely. Existing is still a massive challenge if you don’t fall into the gender or sexuality binary and conservatism is on the rise among many young men because of sexual frustration and emotional vulnerabilities to the narratives of grifters. Definitely NOT chill shit going on and we have the dawning of technology that will make it even harder for people to connect. AI that can reliably fool people is going to throw a massive wrench into our entire culture. It’s worth being concerned about but we also have to encourage each other and ourselves to actually do challenging things like going out and talking to live humans as much as possible.

I am an adult and I do this too, but not because sex bothers me, it’s because the vast majority of sex in mainstream media is incredibly stilted and embarrassing to watch. Cinema has had over a century to try to portray and capture actual relationships between people and still hasn’t even come close to accurately portraying attractive, affectionate chemistry between two people.

The fact that in mainstream programs and movies, the lead characters ALWAYS have to have this “enemies to lovers” dynamic makes me gag. It was funny once or twice, but that’s not remotely how real people have real intimate relationships, so why does Hollywood lean in SO HARD to the same trope of the sassy female proving she’s as tough as the rugged male anti-hero and they always have to have this weird battle-of-wills where they have separate goals and can’t show affection openly to each other.

It’s no longer interesting. I have seen porn with better, loving, attractive relationships.

Water doesn’t care about your imaginary lines. Water always wins.

Because they have successfully lied and manipulated their current marketing material to make a sizeable portion of the population believe some kind of technological rapture is imminent, and that all we need is to invest, invest invest in AI tech. It’s a full-on cult now. The people they have roped in are fanatical, unpaid marketing mobs who don’t sleep, don’t waver, and can’t be reasoned with. They are the engine that is driving the hype train.

They had a legit, non-satirical post on reddit the other day making their plans for what they’re going to do when Artificial Superintelligence comes and changes the world and makes every human rich and immortal without the need to work. I am not even exaggerating, this is what they believe and there are probably millions of them.

Currently over 80% of AI startups fail, and the remaining ones are often bought up by larger companies trying to control intellectual property and future patents. And we have ZERO useful models in our hands. I still don’t use my copilot app for anything other than setting a 30-minute timer for my lunch break. I tried to activate an AI helper on Adobe to see if it could help my productivity. The thing can’t read graphs and charts and has zero contextual awareness and can’t do math. WTF GOOD IS IT?