AI You're Wasting my Time!
Let me start by saying that I am actually somewhat excited about the potential of AI!
When used appropriately, it has the potential to be a great research tool and help tool. Just consider something like medical diagnostics, where AI can pull together millions of white papers and provide a diagnostician with most likely outcomes with far greater depth than any human being could hope to.
At the moment, though, I am being really annoyed and frustrated by stupid humans with AI!
In this case, I'm referring to people who use AI to create fairly convincing looking "news stories" that serve little purpose other than to promote their point of view rather than actually sharing tangible news.
I think my favorite comment under such a new story (that I have run into so far) was one that went "I'll take 'things that never happened' for $800 please, Alex," referring to the Jeopardy TV game show.
While I can appreciate that it may be fun to play around with this new tool, I find it annoying how much time I have to spend doing my own research to determine whether something that "sounds interesting" actually is interesting, or just a made-up piece of fiction.
It may seem "innocent enough" if you take the stance that "it's just entertainment" but spoofing a public figure as having passed legislation that supports some fringe fantasy you have is not humorous.
You might ask "why bother" protesting, but my personal sense of ethics and what constitutes right action dictates that I'm not going to share garbage with other people online without having vetted it first. This, in spite of the fact that those things were sent to me by people who should know better!
Sadly, in the hands of somebody with fewer scruples it would seem that AI could become a giant time sink, but also a significant way to spread misinformation surrounding politics, religion, finance, healthcare and other such things.
Seems to me like we're on the road towards a place where it will become closer and closer to impossible to verify whether any given piece of information we receive actually reflects reality or is just conjured up by someone's imagination or wishful thinking.
I have better things to do with my time!
But I'm also concerned that there are other people out there who are the same opinion that they have better things to do with their time, but instead choose to take whatever information they get more or less at face value.
Of course, it's not really AI that is wasting my time so much as sketchy people with dubious motivations.
Thank you for listening to my (non-AI!) rant!
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I find AI useful for fact checking. It can scan entire books. This is really helpful when I want to present an opinion about a book.
Since is a large language model, I can get insight into how authors were using a term.
AI does a good job summarizing current scholarly sentiment about subjects.
Lazy people who don't engage with the AI in writing a piece and just publish ai slush are doing the world a disservice.
!WINE
!BEER
!BBH
While there are some great use case for AI, it indeed makes things harder in life. When I do read something, it always makes me think is it real or not. There were ages that we could just trust what we did read, to a certain point of course.
But now sometimes complete bullshit is broadcasted around the world.
Let's take funny cats videos as example. When we did one of those 5 years ago, there were real. When I do see one now, I doubt that they are real.