Re: Maybe It's Time For Lots of Little Indie AIs To Take Over

In his paragraph entitled It's a shame, Anil states:

But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.

I feel a little called out here! I do definitely have my gripes with AI, but have found myself using it a good deal. It's got a bit better, since I've now blocked access to ChatGPT on my personal computers, but I still use it at work. I'm not really sure what to do on that, since I don't have the skills to do what I need to do in the time I have. So I end up using it despite not necessarily wanting to. The company is trying to make us AI too. Maybe I've succumbed to it in a bad way.

I can take a hard-line approach to it at home, but at work I suppose is a different matter. In a way, I feel like it's been lost time, all the amount of time I've spent using it anyways. I guess I feel the same way about screens generally.

Small AI

The small AIs, like the one mentioned in his (one) good AI article, are not really AI that people have problems with. Me neither. AI in terms of just better tools, like AI used for detecting cancer, or graphics processing in this case, aren't really an issue. It's the general chatbots, the LLMs, that are foisted into everything.

The AIs that "Big AI" produce are of this kind, really. Chatbots and LLMs.

The ethical objections I have to it are a bit vague, though. I don't know exactly what I object to. In a way, I guess it's sort of similar to factory farming. Sure, the ethical problem is bad, and the environmental problem is bad, and the extent of it is egregious, but I don't think it's any of these specifically that's the problem. It's the overall vibe of it. It's a I know it when I see it type situation.

There's a middle ground though. I know growing my own veg is the "best" situation, but there's still a middle ground to take. I still buy my food from the shop. It's not reasonable to expect everybody to grow their own food.

I think these small scale AIs, dedicated to a specific task, are the best middle ground. I wonder if the LLM style AIs just have to be done away with totally.