I am so tired of the breathless LinkedIn posts and the corporate media manufacturing consent for this technology. We need to stop calling it “AI.” That implies there is some sort of sentient thought process happening behind the curtain. There isn’t.
It cites court cases that don’t exist. It writes code filled with security vulnerabilities. It tells you to put glue on your pizza. It can’t even do basic math without being hand-held by a prompt engineer.
The only reason the ruling class is pushing this Actually Incompetent slush so hard isn’t because it’s better than human labor. It’s because they are desperate to break labor power. They would rather replace you with a broken, hallucinating chatbot that costs pennies to run than pay a living wage to a human being who actually knows what they are doing.
As long as it destroys the bargaining power of the working class, the VCs don’t care if the product works or not.
The name of this community is an example of why you need to use the common terms, even if you disagree on it being bastardized for marketing purposes. You can explain in your reasoning why it’s not really the intelligent part, but you aren’t going to get people’s attention if you use other terminology that they aren’t hearing everywhere else.
I can’t say if I’m on a fence here, or something else. I see the dangers, the ethical problems, the claims that aren’t true. I also see some incredible technology and science, even if it’s used badly and wrongly. It would have been great to approach this level from a better route, but we can’t change the past, only fix where we’re going. And I would agree we’re heading to a mess.
But I’ve said before, attacking the core problem by arguing against what most people call it is not the way to get traction.
If I’m wrong, I expect some posts calling for a renaming of this place. That will make it less visible to those not yet realizing the problem.