Long rambling thing about AI:
I feel very conflicted about AI as someone who's followed topics like neural networks and generative AI since 2010ish. First off, there's tons of extremely legitimate immediately useful tasks that are handled excellently by this technology. It currently outperforms human doctors in analyzing and diagnosing scans, is basically the only way to scale medicine development complexity, is by far the fastest and most reliable method of classifying huge amounts of data, etc etc. At the same time, some of the most evil uses of AI also falls under this "actually really useful" methods, like drone weapons or mass identification in crowds. I think regardless of what happens with the more publicized gen AI tech, these uses will just keep rolling along, for better or worse...
When it comes to gen AI and other such tools, I really think it's better to think of them as toys. You should never expect it to produce anything profound, truly compelling, worthy of deep emotional investment, etc. You certainly shouldn't expect it to give you good guidance or accurate info. But I do think that it can be a great way to have fun, in a wholly unique way. Thinking of weird prompts to surprise yourself and your friends is a really novel type of play that can even spark some creative inspiration. But as much as I love playing around with this stuff, I basically never do anymore because of how bad the vibes are around Gen AI these days.
I basically think these idiotic techbros do NOT know how to market gen AI as a product. IMMEDIATELY they started trying to claim it could do EVERYTHING, all these major consequential things, driving cars, being your secretary, making your ideal music and movies... things that a) these models were nowhere near capable of doing (and may never be capable of) and b) no normal person had any interest in having an AI do for them anyways! They focused immediately on all the jobs it could replace, which just immediately makes you the enemy of anyone with that job title. They highlighted so consistently the "artistic" output of gen AI, which put a huge spotlight on training controversies and lead to inevitable "AI was supposed to do tedious work so I can draw, but now it just draws and I'm just left with tedious work" rhetoric. They desperately pushed for as many customers as possible using it as much as possible, drawing attention to their truly horrendous energy usage.
This was in part done to wow FOMO-driven uneducated VCs who ended up funding a lot of AI companies on the basis of nonsensical promises, but I also truly think a lot of techbros just have absolutely no idea how to market a product like this. If it was me (a successful tech marketer lol) I would have pushed for more specific productization, making Jackbox-style games using gen AI, or other limited tools that would let specific audiences have a lot of fun, like teaming with Lego to make a "Legoify any drawing" tool, something like that. This could build up goodwill to support a slow expansion of capabilities. You can argue that since so many companies were working with gen AI, someone among them would make a generalist chatGPT-esque tool and crush the market, but I honestly think it would have the opposite reaction. I think we're seeing now that specific product experiences have a lot more staying power than just an open box that does "everything" (only sorta well).
It basically felt like all these AI companies were in some sort of bizarre standoff where they all just had guns pointed at their own feet. Everyone had to be as greedy as possible, disrupt as much as possible, fly as close as possible to the sun. And as a result now I think the whole technology will have a stink on it forever, no matter how much better it gets. Technology so mindblowing that it took the whole world by storm - pictures from a sentence! Answers every question! - now has the aura of an evil scam, one that it's earned.
I ended up rambling on for a while here, oops. Just stuff that's often on my mind I guess. I wrote a whole other thing about it too if you're curious:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/...AuOjsvEd54Zhz9ejpI/edit#heading=h.5h366c6pjc4