this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Fuck AI

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[–] roude@lemmynsfw.com 27 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

Alright I don’t like the direction of AI same as the next person, but this is a pretty fucking wild stance. There are multiple valid applications of AI that I’ve implemented myself: LTV estimation, document summary / search / categorization, fraud detection, clustering and scoring, video and audio recommendations... "Using AI” is not the problem, "AI charlatan-ing" is. Or in this guy’s case, "wholesale anti-AI stanning". Shoehorning AI into everything is admittedly a waste, but to write off the entirety of a very broad category (AI) is just silly.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 49 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

I don't think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn't understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn't trust an AI summary for anything important.

Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in "population of london", i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don't want a guessing machine to tell me.

Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it's hard to take any of it seriously.

[–] roude@lemmynsfw.com -3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I guess this really depends on the solution you’re working with.

I’ve built a voting system that relays the same query to multiple online and offline LLMs and uses a consensus to complete a task. I chunk a task into smaller more manageable components, and pass those through the system. So one abstract, complex single query becomes a series of simpler asks with a higher chance of success. Is this system perfect? No, but I am not relying on a single LLM to complete it. Deficiencies in one LLM are usually made up for in at least one other LLM, so the system works pretty well. I’ve also reduced the possible kinds of queries down to a much more limited subset, so testing and evaluation of results is easier / possible. This system needs to evaluate the topic and sensitivity of millions of websites. This isn’t something I can do manually, in any reasonable amount of time. A human will be reviewing websites we flag under very specific conditions, but this cuts down on a lot of manual review work.

When I said search, I meant offline document search. Like "find all software patents related to fly-by-wire aircraft embedded control systems” from a folder of patents. Something like elastic search would usually work well here too, but then I can dive further and get it to reason about results surfaced from the first query. I absolutely agree that AI powered search is a shitshow.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Its just a statistics game. When 99% of stuff that uses or advertises the use of "AI" is garbage, then having a mental heuristic that filters those out is very effective. Yes you will miss those 1% of useful things, but thats not really an issue for most people. If you need it you can still look for it.

[–] Mustakrakish@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I have ADHD and I have to ask A LOT of questions to get my brain around concepts sometimes, often cause I need to understand fringe cases before it "clicks", AI has been so fucking helpful to be able to just copy a line from a textbook and say "I'm not sure what they meen by this, can you clarify" or "it says this, but also this, aren't these two conflicting?" and having it explain has been a game changer for me. I still have to be sure to have my bullshit radar on, but thats solved by actually reading to understand and not just taking the answer as is. In fact, scrutinizing the answer against what I've learned and asking further questions has felt like its made me more engaged with the material.

Most issues with AI are issues with capitalism.

[–] parody@lemmings.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

Congratulations to the person who downvoted this

They use a tool to improve their life?! Screw them!


Here’s hoping over the next few years we see little baby-sized language models running on laptops entirely devour the big tech AI companies, and that those models are not only open source but ethically trained. I think that will change this community here.

I get why they’re absolutist (AI sucks for many humans today) but above your post as well you see so much drive-by downvoting, which will obviously chill discussion.

[–] PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee -3 points 4 weeks ago

But what about me and my overly simplistic world views where there is no room for nuance? Have you thought about that?

[–] detun3d@lemm.ee -4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Edit for clarity: Don't hate the science behind the tech, hate the people corrupting the tech for quick profit.