The Case Against Generative AI

Agreed. And I mean, I think the nuanced investigations of what AI is and is not good for or capable of, and how it might or might not be made sustainable going forward both economically and environmentally, are a much more meaningful, interesting, and worthwhile check on the hype than dogmatic rejection, because just as hype won't convince anyone sane, neither will dogmatic rejection built on a biased accounting of what's going on with no vision of the possible futures available to us. No one will be swayed by that that isn't convinced already, and many will be repelled. Especially given how wrong or incomplete their accounts often are (like Gary Marcus talking about how AI can't run searches to retrieve information lol).

To be clear, I started out as a fan of Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, and a rabid anti-AI hater, because I tried GPT 3.5 soon after it was released and was extremely unimpressed with any of its capabilities. But after a while, I started to get uncomfortable with my closed mindedness, and so decided to try to give the tools a fair shake, and by the time I had decided to do so, the capabilities had expanded so much that I genuinely became impressed, and the more I stress tested them the more I began to gain a more nuanced understanding where there are serious traps and limits and serious problems with how the industry is going but just because a tool is not perfectly reliable does not mean it isn't very useful sometimes.