for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
here's my super-quick, easy-to-digest summary that i use when i can't spend more than like 15 seconds on it but need someone to know the basic distinctions:
generative AI - bad evil AI. chatbots, LLMs, image generators, etc. this the one that steals shit.
analytical AI - helpful medical AI. this the one that helps detect cancer early.
game "AI" - fake AI. 100% human created and dictated. this the one that determines game mob behavior n stuff.
losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.
