Just in case- I am not angry about it. I am very vocal on my views on just about everything.
Again, I am genuinely angry about tax dollars going to professional sports teams. I have never been a fan, but didn’t actually care until the 1990’s when the Eagles threatened to move if Philly didn’t give in to their demands. The whole thing played out on the nightly local news and in The Philadelphia Inquirer. To sum up- despite a variety of experst showing that the team had nowhere to go, and that the Eagles’s reportes of how much revenue they brought in to Philly were inflated by a factor of ten, the city gave in completely.
I’m not trying to point this out as like a gotcha, but Apple Maps uses AI.
So are you saying you don’t want or need any of the user-facing AI features (like Siri), but the under-the-hood AI stuff (like Maps or improving your battery life) is okay?
Me neither. I’m annoyed that these services keep getting pushed in my face and that I have to expend an increasing amount of effort just to navigate around them so I can continue to do the work of my own hands in my own way; I’m dismayed that the internet is becoming a less useful and less accurate source of information, having a thin but rapidly-thickening layer of bullshit spread all across it. I’m concerned about what this means for the information age. I’m irritated when, as more frequently seems to be happening, someone ‘corrects’ me with misinformation that they uncritically accepted from generative AI. I’m not prepared to trust that huge corporations trying to attain return on their huge investment, will act in any way that benefits anyone, including themselves, in the long run (that has always been the case, but the stakes have been driven very high in this particular bubble).
I use maps because the official Septa website (Septa being the local public transit authority) went from very poorly designed and very dificult to use to an even worse design that is even harder to use. When I lived at my second apartment, the one bus route in the area was often delayed or shut down entirely due to lack of drivers. The Septa website never- literally not even once- updated the route’s status to inform me either one was happening. If I entered my location and destination in Maps and selected transit, it informed whether the bus would be delayed or if it had stopped running for the day - every time.
So, I use MAPS because, as usual, Septa is worse than useless. If the Septa web site had a decent design, was easy to use, and was updated with new information when new information was available, I wouldn’t need Maps either
What other under-the-hood AI stuff is there?
AI ‘improves my battery life’ how exactly? I would need more information on that beforeI can give you an answer.
In the ways that AI actually is bad, your personal choices cannot possibly affect this.
You should explore ways that it can benefit your life. It can do quite a bit. But you should never take its information at face value, you shouldn’t use it to pretend to know more than you do, you shouldn’t believe that there’s any sentience or real intelligence under it.
It can do a lot for you, or it can mislead you, and it’s actually driving some people insane. Choose wisely.
Could you clarify on this? It was my understanding that many AI’s were ‘trained’ by being given the full text of things still under copyright. The people who hold those copyrights are not compensated in any way. Is that incorrect somehow? If it is correct, how is it not theft?
Of course it is. Plenty of other things are too. The question with all of them, including AI, is not ‘Is it bad for the environment?’ The question is ‘Do I personally find the benefits are worth the environmental impact?’
This makes no sense to me. I have objections to various businesses. I am quite vocal about them. I do not expect that my boycotting them and urging others to do so will ever actually make a difference to these places. I will not give them one cent as long as I live. I will not enter their stores for as long as I live.
Some people feel that AI is somehow cheating or unfairly using other people’s work to make copies or create derivative works. We can’t stop people from saying “I know in my heart it’s wrong”, but copyright is a legal construct, and AI hasn’t been found to violate copyright.
If AI isn’t demonstrated to be worse for the environment than other computations we take for granted (such as encrypting the communications used in banking communications), then it’s not “bad for the environment” in any way that makes sense to talk about, unless you’re someone who frets about environmental impact every time you check your bank balance online.
People toss around viral claims like making a picture of a lady with 3 boobs costs enough energy to boil a lake, but it’s not really true. Training an AI takes a lot of up-front electric power, it’s true, but amortized over millions of uses, it’s really not much.
If it offends your own personal ethics in some way, by all means, live by your code and don’t use it, but AI isn’t problematic in the legal or physical ways you think it is, it’s in how others other consumers choose to misuse it. That kind of thing isn’t responsive to a boycott. It’s like boycotting the electric company because you saw a cop tase a suspect in handcuffs.
First what is right is not always legal and what is legal is not always right. Second. as in many cases, the law lags behind.
I disagree rather strongly. I need money to pay rent, bill and to buy food. I remember the days before ATMs. They made life much easier. So does online banking. Obviously, people will try to access bank computers for evil purposes. We can either stop using computers for banking, or we can make the computers and our communications more secure. The second seems a lot more practical.
As I said previously in this thread, a lot of things are bad for the environment. I ask- just how bad is each one? Is it worth it?
Is the legal question settled?
Second, you admitted earlier that it was bad for the environment. You then argued that a bunch of stuff is also bad for the environment. That is not an argument for ignoring the environmental impact of AI. It is an argument for examining the environmental impact of a whole bunch of other things too.
I don’t really care how people misuse it. That is not why I am boycotting it. I find nearly all ‘legitimate’ uses of AI not worth the environmental impact. So far, we have Maps. I do use that. But again, if Septa had a decent website, I would not need to.
I never got an answer to this
I don’t need it to generate imaeges or text. I do not need it to summarize text. What oher ways are you thinking of?
There is also a significant imbalance of power. Billion dollar corporations taking what they want from individual artists, writers and other creatives. If they tried ingesting the works Sony or Disney holds copyright on to train a model, I feel like the question might turn out to have a different answer.
Okay, well, you asked if it violated copyright and I explained why it doesn’t. If you’re very certain in your heart it’s doing something wrong, that’s a subjective thing I can’t dispute.
And as I said, do you lose sleep at night about how bad ATMs are for the environment? I’m guessing probably not. The personal convenience is self-evident to you. The personal benefit of AI is not yet self-evident to you, so there’s nothing stopping you from believing it’s bad, hence you’re uncritically swallowing misinformation.
Is any legal question?
I did not “admit it’s bad for the environment”. I agreed with your statement that a bunch of stuff is also bad for the environment, and pointed out that you have no problem with things you understand and like, so maybe your value judgment is more about what you understand and like than any special quality of being “bad for the environment”.
You have not investigated the environmental impact, you do not understand it, and you are not interested in understanding it, and you cannot articulate it.
I use it daily for my work. It makes me faster and more efficient at my job, principally by showing me how to do things that I don’t know how to do, preventing me from using manuals to understand how to do minor, labor-intenseive tasks that I’ll probably only do once. I like to be informed and effective, and I won’t be debating that with someone who has taken a position of determined ignorance on the matter.
You only said that it did not legally violate copyright. You never answered my question as to whether my description of the process was accurate.
Why are you “guessing”? I answered that explicitly
Why “yet”?
First, I never said it was “bad”. I said I don’t need it for most of the things people use it for.
How do you know I have ‘uncritically swallowed’ anything?
What “misinformation” specifically? I asked if my description of a process involving copyrighted works to train AI was accurate. You only said that ‘it does not violate copyrightt.’
Judging by your response, this one apparently is not.
I addressed this above. Computerized banking is generally held to be worth it.
It is not a matter of “understand and like”. Nor did I ever say that AI had
I asked if the environmental impact was worth it. Yeah, plenty of other things have an environmental impact. Some are worth it. Some are not.
You know this how exactly?
You know this how exactly?
Where in the nine hells are you getting that from?
I don’t need to. Again, what benefit counters that impact?
Once again, you are answering a question. It just isn’t the question I actually asked.
You said
I replied
Telling me what you use it for at your job does NOT answer that question. If I asked “Would buying a car help me?” telling me that it helped you is not an answer to the question I actually asked.
Here I was asking honest questions. You have failed to answer many of the questions I actually asked. You can now read my mind. Oh, goody.
Fine, but it doesn’t really matter why you’re using Maps, does it? If you are using it, you’re getting the benefit of AI. Maybe you just didn’t know that, but I’d say that makes it much more difficult for you to dismiss AI as something you don’t want or need. AI isn’t some one big monolithic thing.
One example is how the keyboard will dynamically make the keys it thinks you’re likely to tap next slightly larger. I don’t think there is a way to turn that off, so if you type something, AI is analyzing you.
Actually, I would argue that it does. If Septa just had a decent website. I wouldn’t need the Maps app.
I know that. That is why I have repeatedly asked ‘What else is AI doing on my iPhone that I might not know about?’ and ‘How could AI benefit me specifically?’
I have not noticed that. I suspect that when my sister helped me set up my iPhone, she set the onscreen keys to as big as they can go because I have so much trouble typing on them.
I do know that AI on my iphone autocorrects spelling when I type. I dislike that intensely. It is very rarely helpful. It very often autocorrects a word I have spelled corectly (like the name of a fictional person) into an entirely different word. If I don’t notice this before I hit send, the friend I am talking to may think I just don’t know the name of the Narn ambassador to Babylon 5. This annoys me deeply.
I do fine AI useful for various language related tasks. And it has been useful in putting together documents quickly. I tend to use Claude: some of the founders of ChatGPT split from to create Anthropic , a so-called ethical AI company. Their website says: “Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, whose purpose is the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity” …but as they have shareholders I’m unsure how any of that can possibly mean anything. And there’s no mention of the environmental impacts.
Anyway, their AI model is called Claude and it’s supposed to be roughly on a par with ChatGPT; however Claude is free to use, whereas the free version of ChatGPT is its previous model. Claude is considered to be better at natural and creative language and reasoning but ChatGPT is better at coding and generally more versatile (it can produce images for instance).
I find it really useful for sharpening my wording in documents or writing descriptions of my ideas. You have to teach it your style though through careful prompting, or reminding it of previous conversations. I think you can train and save its style more properly, but I haven’t played with that too much yet.
And no I have not used it to help me draft this response. As you can probably tell.
How can you just blanketly make declarative statements like these? I hadn’t read much further down until you started qualifying your second claim with a, “Well, everybody else does it?” Whataboutism.
I’m glad we have found common ground and from my brief and limited exposure to your posts, you seem like a genuinely smart person, generally, even if I’m not agreeing. fwiw.
I think there are legit uses of AI, like Maps and the Photoshop generative AI function I mentioned earlier, but I’m also getting annoyed with the Facebook reels I’m seeing lately featuring babies falling off of cliffs, or being rescued by dogs or cats from zombies or volcanoes or whatnot. They’re not even good stories.