Transcript
Screenshot of a Mastodon post by Kevin Beaumont: “Generative Al government lobbying.”
Photo of AI/tech company CEO’s, captioned:
We spent a Trillion on NVDA GPUs antide dont have any Al product you want.
Photo of a crying male, captioned:
Please like our Al bro This is the last time bro. So many possibilities bro. Its the future bro. Just need you to like it bro. We worked real hard bro. Our stockholders need this one bro.
I always see a lot of comments about how negative Lemmy is toward AI. If ever there is a demographic ideal for AI use, it’s the current user base on Lemmy. If you can’t convince people on here about AI, then it’s not the user that is the problem, it’s that the product is wrong (or just plain useless).
You basically have 2 kinds of users here:
Those who understand how AI is created and how it is possible to be used in incredible ways, but through Capitalism is being shoved into all kinds of dumb features that do nothing but annoy users, in the hope of jumping on the AI hype train.
And the AI-phobes who claim AI can do nothing good, it is a waste of resources, it shit in their coffee and is the worst thing since Hitler.
So no, I wouldn’t say the current user base on Lemmy is demographically ideal. You don’t even need to be technologically inclined to be here, since you just need to be able to create an account like most have done on so many other websites.
I am puter science student actually specialising in deep learning. And I think AI hype is wrong. as another commenter put it, Deep learning is super dope and a good part of the research funds are flowing towards deep learning r&d but the big hype is just around llm’s and finetuning them. Which is just dumb and money traps. AI is good but not like this, ASI/AGI is a hoax at best or already achieved at worst
There are legitimate uses for what falls under the umbrella term, but the current hype is 99.9% built on generative AI, preferably LLMs. No one is investing 20 billion dollars to better detect potential risk for Alzheimer’s from a person’s skin tissue. Megacorps aren’t contemplating building nuclear power plants so that we can predict the weather more reliably. The “incredible ways” (and I agree, there are very good applications for non-generative AI) have been there for years, yet few investors cared for them because their commercial application is limited.
They want to to collect a subscription from plebs… That’s their goal.
Let’s see if it prints.
And keep raising the price more, while continuing to neuter the net and search engines more and more until the plebs are desensitized and dont remmeber the FREE internet, so they are addicted to their corpo ai subscription. Money printer go brrrrr. This is the endgame. Its very simple and there is nothing else beyond it. Oh and mass surveillance to keep the ruling class crushing us, that’s a bonus.
At this point they want us to pay them for them to spy on us 🤡
And the idiots do it. I feel like im the only one in my friend group who sees how bad this is.
I’ll go yell at clouds now since im 98 years old. Not really. But it feels like it.
Holy shit. Lol. Lmao.
Right? AI in its current form is not a person
My friend, a phobia does not relate to a person. It relates to a fear of a thing or a concept. Arachnophobia - fear of spiders, claustrophobia - fear of tight spaces/physical restriction, phonophobia - fear of loud noises.
I think you arw probably mistaking the meaning of the word phobia because of how much focus there has been on homophobia over the years and you conflate the two.
Side note: Homophobia is such a stupid word to describe the hatred of homosexuals because it really means a fear of homosexuals, which can definitely exist, but usually isn’t what we associate with homophobia. It’s always relates to hatred and repulsion.
While I rolled my eyes hard at “AI-phobes” it still is something that could exist = a fear of AI.
Personally, I do have a lot of fears when it comes to AI, but not to a phobia level.
Phobias have been so watered down these days that people don’t even know what the fuck the word means anymore and just think it means being anti some group of people.
It’s not. A real phobia is visceral and very difficult til overcome. I have a phobia against sharp things. Needles and hooks. I start hyperventilating when i have to get vaccines or have my blood drawn. I have had to have a nurse hold me down while another drew my blood because i was freaking the fuck out. I was shaking and crying at every single covid vaccine even though I felt embarrassed by it and tried to be calm down. I just can’t. It doesn’t matter how many times I allow nurses to stick needles in me. I will never be normal about it.
When my boyfriend shows me fish hooks he wants to use when he goes fishing, I tense up and he has to stand at least a couple of meters away from me and get it over with fast so I don’t have to look anymore. That is a phobia. I can’t even be near it without being nervous and agitated.
Meanwhile my concerns about AI are more so me being against the overwhelmingly negative ramifications of having and using them and how I feel the negatives outweighs the positives too much atm for me to just be ladidah about them. That is different.
But yeah, phobias have very little to do with personhood and hatred therof. It has much more to do with the, often, irrational fear of something, anything really that you brain latches onto as dangerous.
I spent 25 years avoiding blood tests due to an intense phobia. After two cancer scares (the second I put off getting checked for a whole year, because of the fear of having a blood test), I decided I needed to do something about it, so I got CBT on the NHS. After three sessions I managed to get a stab in the vein first, then a full practice one without the usual panic attack I got just at the thought of having one. The guided exposure therapy was the bit that helped.
For me it was more a primal fear of someone coming at me with a sharp object. Rather than the “I’m scared I’ll bleed out” stuff on the fears checklist.
CBT sucked for my autism related anxiety issues (had a useless therapist for that one), but for my phobia, the exposure therapy worked really well.
I hope you’re able to find something to get you past your phobia.
Man that is impressive! I do hope your cancer scare was nothing more than that! And I’m glad the CBT helped. I have read about it before and I’m actually a big fan of the idea of stuff like exposure therapy. Without going into details, I have some traumas (none related to needles, ironically) and for a number of years I would watch very specific horror movies in order to get over it and it weirdly worked, lol. I do believe that many traumatic things can be overcome with gradual and safe exposure and life is a lot easier afterwards! But for me, when it comes to needles, I just don’t know if it is possible for me to get past it. Like, I can somehow handle sowing needles without freaking out, but sowing machines scare me. I can deal with pins on a board but syringes and fish hooks fuck me up if I’m in the same room as them.
During covid, with all the vaccines we were supposed to get, I decided to also finally get the HPV vaccine that I had been ignoring for a decade.
The amusing part was that because I had waited so long and aged to where I am now, I had to get three shots instead of two. Even funnier, I had to pay for all of them, whereas if I had just gotten the two shots back in my 20s I would have gotten them for free. But that part honestly didn’t bother me. I was willing to pay for it. It was the fact that I had to get three shots instead of two that fucked me up.
So for a period, I got stung by needles quite often. Also had to get a blood test for allergy tests at some point during this marathon of needles.
Didn’t change a thing. I was still as terrified of needles when it ended as I was when it started. Maybe if I get terminally I’ll and have to get needles everyday, I’ll finally get over it, but I dunno.
Bonus irony: once I had to have a wisdom tooth removed and because I was so fucking terrified of the anesthetic needle or whatever you call it, they had to inject me 8 times because the adrenaline in my body neutralized the numbing agent or whatever. I’m not a doctor. That’s just what they told me. Even though I was doped the fuck up to the point where the dentist said he didn’t want to inject me anymore because it could become dangerous, I could still feel pain when he pulled the tooth. It was so fucked, but also kinda funny in hindsight.
Wow, the adrenaline thing is crazy!
Thanks, my cancer scares both turned out to be non serious things. There is a cancer gene that affects the women in my family, so that’s why after the second scare I realised I had to do something.
I think there’s hope for you in that you’re still able to go through with it (unlike me, who just avoided them, even if it meant dying of cancer).
I had a panic attack just from my GP saying I need a blood test. He even prescribed by lorazepam to take for the test. I didn’t though.
I had a really good therapist for my phobia. In the first session she encouraged me to look at a picture first. I started crying and panicking but she got me to a point where I could look at it and not freak out. The next stage was videos, which took me a while longer to conquer. I felt at that point that I’d never get past it, but she really managed to calm me down to the point where I could. Then it was handling needles and she gave me some to take home, including the finger prick ones. I managed to get as far as letting my ex and my nephews stab me with it but I never got as far as doing it to myself. The third session was when I managed to do a draw. It took 45 mins to psyche myself up. I had her put the fan on me, have some baseball highlights playing on the computer and I had my Tamagotchi uni with me.
I asked her to just pierce the vein and take it straight out so I had a reference for the pain level. Then after more psyching up, I had her do a full draw from my other arm. And I didn’t even get dizzy or feel sick. She even gave me the vial to take home. It was so quick, I didn’t even have time to choose a date for my Tama.
The good thing about it was the therapist let me know I was always in control. If I felt uncomfortable, we stopped. I always felt safe, and that’s probably why your experiences haven’t helped, but probably just reinforce the fear.
I also get emotional flashbacks in certain situations (possible CPTSD, I’m still trying to get my head around it, I’ve blocked out a lot of my childhood), which my last therapist just dismissed as self esteem issues. I can’t adequately put into words just how useless she was.
That and equating hate for AI with real forms of bigotry is just insane to me
That’s what I meant, AIPhobe implies this person believes the youtube memes about “Hating Clankers” are actual hate speech and not memes
There are lots of very useful uses for AI. But they’re all in a lab or sitting away on a service somewhere crunching numbers. The general public doesn’t need to know about them and largely doesn’t know about them.
They certainly don’t need to be selling access on the internet so that people can program rather crap apps.
I absolutely hate that its used for anything creative, but I could see it as a tool for STEM if it actually worked and was used properly. The problem is humans will use it for evil, so its a net negative in reality. But we already fucked up by creating it so now we can only defend against it.