Late Stage Capitalism

There's no inherent difference. It's people mistakenly generalizing after hating on current image and text generation AI models. And there's obviously a discussion to be made about how these models were trained unethically by stealing data, but a) that is irrelevant to their usefulness as a technology b) it was recently shown that you can train them with purely public domain data with good results (yogthos posted an article from Stanford the other day).

GenAI is not (inherently) a grift, unless you believe the following applications are nothing but grifts:

• machine translation
• image upscaling/restoration/coloring
• support chatbots
• etc

Generative AI is the one people tend to hate, but it's still not a grift; more like grifters are ancillary to it. Grifters try to jump on it like they jump on anything they can hype and make a quick buck, but the funny thing about it is if anyone is actually making easy money that way, it's the ones who are popping up as fast businesses providing a frontend for an already-existing model (the cheapest way to attempt profiting). But even some of these crash and burn because they do a free tier to get users and attempt the "grow until you're big then majorly monetize" thing, but can't sustain this due to the high costs of generative AI and bleed investor money. And the major corps doing generative AI? They're just burning money like it's going out of style, training massive models with massive datasets.

So (in the western AI context, can't speak for China) it's a capitalist style race, but it's more of a race to see who can position themself as market leader than it is some kind of easy cash infusion.

It's not like crypto or NFTs where it can be called an actual scam. Generative AI does do something that can be functionally useful and/or entertaining. It's just complicated because beyond a baseline of it not being total crap, there all kinds of questions about where it is actually useful and for what, and the ethics of pushing it in this or that area by whom.

I mean, AI as a word has been used in tons of different ways. We still say "NPC AI" in video games and that's just a whole bunch of if statements, no LLM involved. And on the other end of the spectrum we still talk about AI in movies like I, Robot, with fully sentient machines. My line when I say "AI" with no qualifier is neural networks, the parameters that we hear so much about.

And I don't think GenAI is "the" grift like the tweet implies, because the AI they describe (machine learning, ML) is the exact same - neural networks with trained models. They talk about the Kinect using ML - you can do machine learning without the neural network - but was the Kinect not "wasteful", "unethical", and "useless", to use their words? It was an expensive system that worked okay (on some tech demos) but barely had 3 games. The EyeToy for the PS2 was more fun.

A lot of the conversation around Generative AI surrounds image generation and I feel that's harmfully reductive. It centers a lot around artists and the purity of their art (as if they're the only people impacted by AI) when there's so much more to talk about; GenAI can do code - there was a whole discussion around it here the other day, and maybe it's not super great code, but it can do code nonetheless and for people who don't code and need something, it gets the job done.

Yes, there is also a whole lot of stuff you can do with AI without LLMs. In fact, I'm not sure how LLMs specifically became so ubiquitous because you can do neural network AI stuff without ever needing an LLM. I remember back when AI became big (2022 or so), China announced they'd used an AI to map the wiring on a new ship model. What took an engineer one year to do was done by the AI in 24 hours.

GenAI including LLMs have hard limitations that I think are, conversely, overlooked. LLM AI will not do everything, but it can get you part of the way there. The grift is moreso tech companies trying to pretend their toy is a panacea. When asked about AI making stuff up in an interview, OpenAI's CTO "well you know, it's very human in that regard [emphasis mine], because when we don't know something, what do we do? We make stuff up". They admit it themselves that they have a bullshit generator. But when it works, it works - you can use GPT 4o or o4 or whatever the new model is called as a tutor, for example, for photoshop, guitar, or whatever other hobby you have. It works great! You can ask it any question you have like a tutor, instead of being limited to what the page cares to tell you about! And yes I could ask someone, but: a- people are not necessarily available the moment I have a question and b- google is crap now and if you ask on most forums they will tell you to google it. So chatGPT it is. We just have to take into account that it might be making stuff up to the point that you need to double-check, and that OpenAI clearly has no plans to fix that (not that they even could).

For coding my choice nowadays is start with chatGPT then pass it over to deepseek once I have the prototype, it works great.

Even generative AI like as a technology isn't evil. It's just that tech bros were like lets do this the most immoral way possible and be really obnoxious about it at the same time. A good analog would be like planes. Like planes can be very useful in many circumstances, but because the people who run the world are stupid evil and boring they overuse them where trains could do a better job for many routes. They use them to bomb innocent people for no reason, and even the ones that are technically being used where and how they should be you get squeezed in like sardines and charged an arm and a leg for it.

None of those older technologies were ever referred to as AI until AI became the new venture capital buzzword dejour.

There's AI The Brand that is the next thing silicon valley corps and investors are hoping is a repeat of the smartphone, and there is the much more ordinary machine learning and neural networks that have been used in a wide variety of industrial and consumer applications for decades. Those things don't tell you how right and how smart you are though.

Let's not gloss over AI in games which may not actually involve machine learning at all.

Machine learning is also used in medical research and other things, if we did a modern version of Cybersyn it would almost certainly use machine learning at some level, it's a powerful technology.

I would suggest targeting your hate specifically at language and image generation slop.