AI is like a knife. You can use it to cut bread or…
Not sure.
I have not yet heard of any good use, have you?
Something good that we can’t do otherwise, without difficulties?
I do think AI as its uses, for exemple:
- Upscaling (Waifu2x is great)
- Reviewing things for mistakes (both in art and programming)
- Drafting ideas for arts
- Some scientific applications (Although gotta be careful still)
But I still will say the costs (Web scrappers, hardware, energy, water, mental health, etc…) are too high to justify its existence, and even worse, it’s commercialization.
I can tolerate self hosted AI (Or non profit hosting) for non profit applications, but the rest can go in the garbage
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I like “Automated Idiocy” as the meaning of AI.
Here are two different extremes of experience this last month with AI and websites.
Had a client’s website last month where some numpty had uploaded a 500MB PDF. (Okay, that is a different thread as to how someone makes bloated mess like that!)
Bing’s AI web scraping bots had got so fascinated by this 500MB document it would download it multiple times every few hours. The web logs were insane as to how often the same group of Bing Bots were grabbing this one document. Obviously chomping on the site bandwidth quota at an insane rate of knots.
I assume Bing’s AI bot was trying to teach CoPilot how to make utterly bloated PDFs. Or just downloading it to laugh at it. No idea. But the bot was misfiring so badly it was unreal. Dozens of times a day.
I have got one positive story for AI. A different client of mine needed a new website yesterday. She asked Claude AI to write it. She had never created a website before (apart from using Wix). Bit of poking and coaxing with the prompts. Shocking result - she had five screens of scrollable site in a single html page at 26KB! Add a few images and a contact form and we are good to go. The hours of Wordpress Mess that will be avoid is unreal. Still a few errors in it, but nothing a bit of proof reading can’t fix.
I am an AI sceptic - but sometimes a result can work.
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I don’t know art history well enough to really analyze the parallels, but this sounds at least slightly like the effect of photography on painting to me. Maybe we’ll get some weird new art forms out of this that show even more human creativity that GenAI can’t imitate as well.
Impressionism - Wikipedia says:
The development of Impressionism can be considered partly as a reaction by artists to the challenge presented by photography, which seemed to devalue the artist’s skill in reproducing reality. Both portrait and landscape paintings were deemed somewhat deficient and lacking in truth as photography “produced lifelike images much more efficiently and reliably”.[45]
In spite of this, photography actually inspired artists to pursue other means of creative expression, and rather than compete with photography to emulate reality, artists focused “on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph—by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated”.[45] The Impressionists sought to express their perceptions of nature, rather than create exact representations. This allowed artists to depict subjectively what they saw with their “tacit imperatives of taste and conscience”.[46] Photography encouraged painters to exploit aspects of the painting medium, like colour, which photography then lacked: “The Impressionists were the first to consciously offer a subjective alternative to the photograph”.
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I’m sorry but this is just destroying simple IT jobs while increasing pollution and society poverty.
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In the town I live in the “simple IT job” supplies a website like in example 1. Charging thousands of pounds for a bloated resource hogging mess created in Wordpress. And then is totally unmanageable going forward. Companies with zero skill are creating a mess with tools they don’t understand that leads to huge unnecessary costs. Now we have left that “web design company” we have an awful monstrosity to maintain.
Example 2 needed a simple page to act as an online business card. In the long run she will pay less for server hosting and resources than the mess made by the arrogant group of people who created the awful site in example 1.
Yeah, this is more of a problem with a market full of scummy humans running “web creation companies” and not really an AI issue. What AI has done for her is to put HER in control of her website instead of a web design team with all the talk. She does not have the money to waste on that arrogant bunch of salesmen who create a mess. She just needed a simple solution.
If I could find a simple web designer who would have done a simple html page then I would have used them. I hate to say it, but Claude AI did the job far too well. This put the power back into the hands of my client and not that arrogant web dev who made a site like example 1.
Yeah, I am biased. I have dealt with far too many bad web development companies.
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Image identification, general translation and video captioning - which all helps make our world more accessible (e.g. for disabled people or non-english speakers). And surely some specific science/study applications (that use LLM trained on specific datasets, rather than the ‘ingest everything’ monstrosities that are now called “AI”).
The rest can go in the dumpster.
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I’ll change the subject a bit.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polskie_komputery
Polish computers – the totality of computers manufactured in Poland. This article includes links to computers with their own Wikipedia articles, as well as mentions and brief information about those that do not yet have their own articles. Despite the 21st century, computers manufactured in Poland are still being discovered, about which little public knowledge was available, especially on the Internet or even in traditional sources.
Determining which computer was the first developed in Poland depends on the criteria adopted. It is generally accepted that the first relay machine was the GAM-1.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAM-1
GAM-1 – an experimental, zero-generation computer developed by Zdzisław Pawlak. It was the first computer built by the Mathematical Apparatus Group (GAM) at the State Institute of Mathematics in Warsaw in 1950. However, it was never used for practical calculations and served exclusively for educational purposes. It was dismantled for parts in 1955.
A similar relay-based educational computer was built in 1959 at the Military University of Technology (WAT).
Technical Data:
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Arithmetic: binary
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Word length: 2-bit machine word
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Number range: 0–3 (binary: 00, 01, 10, and 11)
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Address bus size: 4 bits
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Memory (RAM): 16 bits (8 memory cells)
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I/O devices: input – punched tape, output – two lamps
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Speed: 1 instruction per second
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Instructions: addition (code 00), complement (01), comparison (10), and selection (11)
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Technology: relays
Then the Odra and others.
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Sorry that I continue my anti-AI campaign.
What’s the use? To track people, like in China?
It’s all shitty French since Google translation is used. Same lousy unnatural mistakes with AI.
Now you can see the few things that are translated by real people, it’s very pleasing but it’s now a minority.
The shitty French translations will make everyone dumb and dumber.
For deaf people… Well I don’t know if deaf people really need shitty videos from speaking YouTubers. They should feel lucky not being contaminated and keep on reading and signing.
“Surely”, like in “surely / believe me, scientists will find a way to get rid of nuclear wastes, let’s rush and produce thousand years of nuclear wastes”, as they said when they invented atomic power, and yet no one will ever know how to make them disappear.
No you can’t convince me.
I would also be so grateful if internet would completely disappear and emails too, by the way.
In retrospect, it was so much better without all this crap, less wasted time, ranting in forums included. 
Yeah, let’s start by shutting down MusicBrainz. Too many arguments anyways.
And if we can’t we can at least boycott it by stopping editing or posting in its forums
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The Internet is a creation of Satan.
Flip this the other way round. I have a friend who lost her voice due to a brain injury. Clever people have taken some of her recordings from answerphones and fed it to AI processing. She can now talk again. With her voice. Bit like the Steven Hawking system where she types, but now she can sound like she used to.
This I agree with. I know a translation company that was put out of work by Google translate. Not sure if we should credit translation to “AI” when the algorithms already existed before then. I can’t talk or read anything but English so an algorithm translating for me is really handy.
I know deaf, blind and other differently abled people for whom technology has made a huge difference. Even before we painted an “AI” tag on everything technology can be a great leveller. There are some areas where technology can be used in a very positive way.
Where the waste happens is some influencer using “AI” to improve their views on YouTube. The “Look at me” generation is a waste of this energy. There needs to be a qualification of “do you really NEED this”
This stuff is cool. But comically I then had to hit the “translate page” option of Vivaldi so I could read it. 
Old computing was amazing. My dad worked on this from the same era: Harwell computer - Wikipedia
Now we have throw away supercomputers in our pockets. I read the other day that a £40million Cray 2 super computer from the 1980s can be outdone by your iPhone. You phone is 40 TIMES more powerful than that computer was…
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Poster by Polish cartoonist Andrzej Mleczko.
Translation:
“I have a smart home, a smart fridge, a smart cream, and my husband is an idiot.”
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As Ivan has already talked about, image identification, translation and captioning are all for accessibility - I’m sure you can imagine why image identification would be useful for blind people. If you put yourself in the shoes of someone with disabilities (or a non-English speaker) you will be able to figure out some uses for the others as well.
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I am a non-English speaker, there is to read in French than I can read in my whole lifetime. I can learn languages, also. It is more interesting than reading dumb auto-translate that loses all the puns and the whole tone of text.
Human translation is of course also interesting and pleasant.
I have been non-English speaker since 1977, before internet and Google translate, and it made me learn English, Italian (forgot), Japanese (partly forgot as well) and Vietnamese. It opened up new worlds to me.
Not sure people would even think of learning languages, now, besides mandatory school stuff.
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I don’t think it’s their fault if someone in poverty (or a number of other circumstances outside of their control) doesn’t have the time to attend language courses.
I’m not saying that AI translation is superior to human translation, it is not, but a vast amount of the internet was not accessible to many people and now is. Professional translation is excellent, but no human is going to translate all the posts in this forum into all languages.
I also don’t like AI but I would not pretend that other people do not get some benefit.
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Yes yes.
Still, I think learning language by passion had far less money and time requirements than surfing the web, that requires expensive computer or smartphone, and that will suck all your time. 
Similarly, without GPS some people cannot travel 1 kilometer.
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Thousandth post.
Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government.