I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.
I’ve tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)
But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone’s throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.
The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)
At the end of the day, the reason we’re burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can’t criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.
So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit
And given the way it impacts user’s thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.
Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.
Very rarely I see the argument that apart from being harmful directly, it’s also a GIGANTIC surveilance tool, and the most vulnerable people trust it with their inner thougths, which is to me scarier that ‘just’ copyrights.
Absolutely agree, the data collection feels like even a step beyond the already horrifying amount of people’s personal information we’ve normalized scraping directly into the pockets of corporations
Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary
Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the CEO now.
Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I’d need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Replace AI with something like Flex Tape, and you really get a sense of how stupid the push to get AI into everything is. Flex Tape is great, but I don’t need it when ordering a pizza ffs.
I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.
I’ve tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)
But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone’s throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.
The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)
At the end of the day, the reason we’re burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can’t criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.
So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit
And given the way it impacts user’s thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.
Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.
Very rarely I see the argument that apart from being harmful directly, it’s also a GIGANTIC surveilance tool, and the most vulnerable people trust it with their inner thougths, which is to me scarier that ‘just’ copyrights.
Absolutely agree, the data collection feels like even a step beyond the already horrifying amount of people’s personal information we’ve normalized scraping directly into the pockets of corporations
Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the CEO now.
Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I’d need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Replace AI with something like Flex Tape, and you really get a sense of how stupid the push to get AI into everything is. Flex Tape is great, but I don’t need it when ordering a pizza ffs.