As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a little older. I hear a lot about AI. I’m just trying to figure out what’s “good” AI, what’s “bad” and if there’s even a difference. I do know that there’s the whole stealing content to train AI bs going on, but is it deeper? Is there such a thing as good AI? Just trying to learn so I can be better person
Oh my. This is a huge can of worms—especially on Lemmy. There’s a lot of anti-AI hate on this platform. Almost to the point of it being a religion.
For reference, when people say, “AI” they’re usually talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI (e.g. diffusion models that make images). Having said that, “AI” is an enormous topic of which LLMs are a small, but increasingly popular part.
Furthermore, when people here on Lemmy say, “AI” they’re normally talking about “Big AI” which consists of:
Is AI inherently bad or evil? No. It’s just the latest way of giving instructions to a computer. Considering that all computer programs are literally just instructions, an AI model is just a really fancy and often expensive way of performing the same function. Albeit with a lot more breadth and flexibility. Note that I didn’t say “depth”, haha.
The “bad” or “evil” part of AI is mostly due to the large players (aka “Big AI”) spending literally over $1 trillion so far on data centers and hardware. There’s so much demand for their services that they’re having to build their own—often dirty, fossil fuel—power plants just to power it all.
A lot of the talk around data centers is based on myths. For example, generating an image with AI doesn’t use a liter of water. A study came out that no one actually read (beyond the summary) that stated that a really long conversation with an LLM could in theory use up half a liter of water, assuming the data center was powered by a fossil fuel power plant that was using water for cooling (as in, the heat dissipation required 0.5 liters of water from the cooling pond next to the power plant, not potable/drinking water).
LLMs do use up a lot of power though! People often assume this is from training the AIs (which I’ll get to in a moment) because everyone “knows” it’s a long, involved process that can take months (even with a $50 billion data center specifically made for AI). However, it’s actually all the people and businesses using AI that uses up all that energy. The biggest, most power-hungry step is “inference” which is the point where the LLM tries to figure out what you just asked of it.
The important point here is that AI is actually being used.* There’s real demand for it! It’s not just fools asking ChatGPT for strange pizza recipes. It’s mostly businesses using it for things like writing and checking code or investigating server logs for malicious activity or any number of very businessy IT things.
The demand for AI services is so great that they can’t build data centers fast enough. Big AI, specifically is having trouble keeping responses within satisfactory time windows. The business models are still developing but they’re actually not charging enough to make up for their spending in a lot of cases. Specifically, OpenAI and Microsoft are losing money like crazy, trying to compete.
I ran out of time… I’ll reply again about the copyright situation, training costs, and open weight (aka open source) models in a bit…
Are you forgetting the IP theft, unconsensual data harvesting, increase in price for consumer electronics, reduction in critical thinking, and the vast amount of public money and space given to these companies that could’ve been used for something more beneficial to society?
I used to like tech but the tech industry ruined it.
I’m going to come out and say it: IP theft isn’t a thing. IP is not something that can be stolen. It can have its license violated or it can be copied against the wishes of its owner. What it absolutely cannot be is “stolen”.
A car can be stolen. A phone can be stolen. A book or a CD or a DVD can be stolen. The concepts or ideas or literal content of what amounts to Intellectual Property cannot be stolen. It can only be copied.
If anything has been stolen it’s the commons that is the public domain. It was taken away for about four generations. Long enough that no one remembers the IP that’s only just now becoming public domain. It’s a loss far greater than anything related to AI.
I’ll also say this: Even if an AI were trained on nothing but public domain works (like most image generating AI a la ImageNET) people would still be spouting bullshit like, “it’s stealing IP!”
What bullshit is this? Copying without authorisation is a form of IP theft.
There’s a lot of justified hate, outside of Lemmy as well. The irony of saying it’s like a religion when there’s people worshipping their AI out there is notable.
While that’s sort of true, it’s obfuscating what actually happens. You’re technically just giving instructions to a computer, but it’s not like a software program on your personal computer. You’re sending a message out to a very large computer to do a very complicated large program, while a lot of other people are doing so.
There’s more than that. There’s the ethical concerns of making pornography of people without their consent, especially minors. There’s art theft. There’s people losing jobs. There’s the environmental issues. There’s the mental issues. There’s the problems with people trying to get jobs. There’s the drop in reading comprehension. There’s the people being driven to kill or kill themselves over it. There’s people falling in love with their AI and avoiding other people for it. There’s the noise. The water usage. The electrical pull. The Ponzi scheme funding.
You’re trying to preemptively say that these complaints are only about the big AI, but these are inherent for all of them.
Source? People are already having to pay more for electricity. Tahoe is about to not have any electricity because of the AI center.
Also those sus dash marks.
Ok, but where do you think that water was acquired to fill that pond? It’s from local sources. Closed loop systems aren’t actually great for the environment, either. You remember the water cycle? Where water evaporates, turns into clouds, turns into rain, then dries up and repeats itself? Well, there’s only a specific amount of water on the planet, and only some of it is usable by humans. Data centers and AI centers using closed loop systems take a huge chunk of water out of that water cycle. With global warming in the mix, we’re starting to run out. Oh, and data centers and AI centers don’t disclose how much water they are taking out of the local system, so we can only guess, but the best estimate is summed up as “a fuck load”.
Saying “it doesn’t use power unless you use it” isn’t really an argument against it’s power usage. And saying it uses more power after it’s started is worse.
That demand, though, isn’t profitable. That’s why companies have been upping their rates and the building of AI centers have been stalling.
That’s not why people have been trying to build a lot of data centers. There’s a lot of speculative investing going on, and there’s a lot of people trying to get onto the ground floor. So these people are dumping a crapton of money into it, trying to get ahead of everyone else.
This isn’t coming from some bandwagon, or anti progress/tech sentiment. Ai is just bad.
This is a well thought out comment and I agree with most of what you have to say.
The part about data center and water use needs a caveat though. Some of them (but not all!) use a massive amount of water (a google dat a center in oregon was found to have used 25% of the local water supply) and wastewater that comes from the plant could potentially just be getting dumped into the water supply. Companies that are lax in what they do with waste water are what concerns a lot of people. It’s a lot like how mining companies would leave behind tailings ponds, pits full of water filled with large amounts of toxic materials like lead and arsenic. Some companies are only using wast ewater to cool their systems though. Others use a closed-loop system which reuse the same water continuously and use much less water.
This article breaks it all down better than I could: https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
Just want to point out that nearly all new data centers use closed loop water cooling. That only makes sense in very, very dry places in the world that also have extremely cheap water.
For example, cooling towers would make no sense in Florida because the ambient humidity is too high. Even though water is plentiful.
That em dash you used is very suspect… 😆
Before AI, I didn’t even know what an em dash was, it was basically something word (or other software) occasionally corrected my hyphens to. I learned about it because people realized AI uses it all the time and it seemed like a good replacement for all those damn parentheses I always use.
Didn’t end up using it much though.