I am staunchly anti gen-ai and am well versed in it, but I will hold up my hands and say I don't get ai ai (like video games, algorithms, so on).
You said you've been wanting to rant about it? Free pass.
I did say that yeah, in the tags of this post, and I think it kind of summarizes my entire gripe with the attitude around ai very well.
The thing is, one can't deny that some ai is useful. The ones in video games and such have existed long before genai came into existence. The field of research is moving increasingly in the direction of using machine learning and ai algorithms to streamline their work. Fields like medicine would benefit tremendously by utilizing the pattern recognition capabilities of ai. But when it comes to generative ai, then it's just plagarism.
The truth of the matter is that what we call ai right now is not really ai. By definition, Artificial Intelligence should be able to showcase human like intelligence, that is the ability to think and create new ideas. Ai as we now know it can't do that. It's all made using a database of information, mixed and mashed together but never something new. Humans like to joke that we never have any original thoughts but truly, ai has quite literally never had a thought. GenAi is a machine that commits unchecked plagiarism and actively destroys the environment by capitalizing on the human urge to 'make something else do it'. There's a reason why the people who are most against genai are artists and writers, because they do these things for enjoyment, and making something else do it is taking what they love away from the activity. It's not the only reason, but it definitely is one.
GenAi negatively impacts the human mind and its ability to do things, as we see there's a rising trend of people using it for the most stupid and mundane stuff ever. I keep getting ads for genai and chatgpt whenever I watch something on youtube, and all I keep thinking is when did we get so dumb we had to ask a machine about these simple things? Why is this ad trying to sell me this bullshit by showing me a man who can't reorganize his own closet without ai? Why would I want an ai recipe when I can just find a tried and tested one? Why would I want something that isn't made with human ingenuity and is instead spat out by a machine?
I had an argument with my parents a while back about this actually. My dad asked me to write a short message for him to send to our apartment management regarding some issue with the water tanks (he wanted me to do it in English and make it look professional). I said sure but I was doing something then so I just finished my work and then asked him to send the draft to me. Instead, he had put his 'prompt' into chatgpt and it gave him a frankly crappy mail that he ended up sending. It pissed me off so much, because my dad's draft hadn't even been bad! It was perfectly serviceable, and I would have done the most minor grammatical changes and sent him on his way. Instead, he turned to genai which gave him a worse draft than the one he already had.
GenAi takes advantage of the people who aren't very good at English like my dad, or haven't had experience in professional settings like interns, or people who are tired of repetitive tasks like students, and somehow sells this mediocre product as the cure all for their issues when it is not. It makes the average human incapable of doing tasks they had no problem doing before. Just last week, one of the people working with me pulled up chatgpt on her phone to do a basic calculation that I did in my head in barely a minute. Its cross multiplication! At the very least open a calculator?!
It's being shoved into every aspect of life and it's just so irritating. If I had a dollar for every time one of my faculty incharges or mentors told me to just use chatgpt for something or the other, I'd have enough dollars to buy merch. The director of the entire institute told me to use chatgpt for interview questions, as if the purpose of an interview isn't to gauge your own ability! Its in my syllabus, its everywhere, genai is everywhere and people start looking at you funny if you say you don't use it.
But I don't care if I sound pretentious when I say I refuse to use genai, because I won't. I can't and I won't in good conscience, when I know that I will be alive to live through the consequences of everyone else using this soul sucking machine in the future, as if we didn't already have global warming and habitat loss to deal with.
I hate genai in particular. I hope it crashes and burns. I hope people who lost their jobs to it are well. I hope we as one realise just what kind of scam these genai models are. They are capitalizing on ignorance and laziness. I hope we will be able to differentiate between the algorithms that will help us in the future and the plagarism machine that doesn't deserve the hype.
I hope the genai bubble bursts.
