Don’t get me wrong, there are problems with it, both in the process that modern AI uses as well as the sources that it draws from, however, as of right now ai is just a tool like auto-tune or photoshop.
Even though it will change the media formats that it is attached to, it will not supplant them within the next 5 to 10 years, it will simply transform them.
As someone who daily drives ChatGPT for a lot of stuff, I agree. I heard someone put it this way “AI is perfect for stuff that is hard to find but easy to verify”.
The other day I took a photo of my liquor cabinet and told it to make a cocktail recipe with ingredients on hand. Or if I encounter an error on my PC I’ll just describe the problem. Or for movie recommendations when I have a very specific set of conditions. Or trying to remember a show from my childhood with only a vague set of memories. The list goes on.
Particularly for anything coding. If I’m trying to learn something I always learn best when I can just see an example of the thing in action as documentation is not always great. Or if I’m doing data manipulation and I have the input and output and just need the function to convert one to the other. I recently saved a whole afternoon of effort with that one. Or spec tests I’ll just drop my whole code file in and ask it for full coverage.
These are all things that traditional search engines are poor or incapable of. I’d have a hard time going back if they just turned all this off tomorrow.
I think there’s a lack of education around how to use AI which is actually a problem. Like you shouldn’t be using it to identify if a mushroom is safe to eat. You shouldn’t be using really for anything food or health related for that matter. You should ask it for its sources when you are unsure of its answers.
I just wish companies would stop cramming it into every product and making it the selling point for everything because they can’t think of anything else to do. It’s kind of fun to play with sometimes but it just isn’t useful at all for most tasks that companies seem to want us to use it for. I’m hoping it will be mostly forgotten outside of niche uses in a few years the same way we forgot about 3D TVs or NFTs as soon as the next new tech buzzword got invented
It will transform mediocre content into crap, and then it will regurgitate that crap into worse and worse crap. All of that at the expensive of untold Terawatt-hours of energy. AI will not take over the world, but it sure will help destroy it anyway.
Its energy usage and effectiveness vs human laziness that worries me.
