AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?
But there is a yawning gap between “AI tools can be handy for some things” and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that “well, they can sometimes be handy…” doesn’t offer much of a justification.
Molly White is well known for her deep, thoughtful well researched but also funny criticism of crypto currencies.
Here she turns her attention to AI.
While I am a big user of generative AI technologies, and proponent of their use, This is a thoughtful position.
A lot of the criticism of these technologies I hear comes from folks who have clearly decided They don’t like them, and their critiques are largely vacuous, and coming from a place of clearly far less experience with them than some have.
My instinct is these technologies have been massively over hyped, and we are focussed on use cases that will appear as misdirected at the obsession with personal computers in the kitchen for recipe keeping that was an abiding use case for early personal computers.
But others are exploring much more interesting and transformative uses–I point to folks like Ought, among many. I can tell you the uses we are putting this technology to internally is enabling things that would otherwise be almost entirely infeasible at scale, that are additive in value.
But there’s no little value in Molly’ observations here either.
