posted in Technology

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-business-incentive-to-lie-useless-chatbots-report-nikhil-suresh
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingThe NerveCory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingIt has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

Replying to @⁨floofloof@lemmy.ca⁩

What has AI changed so far?

  • Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
  • we have AI child porn now, awesome
  • we have AI undressing apps, cool
  • we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
  • we have AI, the great misinformation tool
  • we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
  • there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay

And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…

I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering

Replying to @⁨Snapz@lemmy.world⁩

The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.

I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.

One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.

AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.

An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.

en

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.

“But the charts say AI is helping”

Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.

Replying to @⁨aesthelete@lemmy.world⁩

As I said elsewhere, that’s like saying the internet is just websites (and apparently for some people, that’s all it is).

However, it’s irrelevant, Doctorow may have wanted to just discuss chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that’s all I’m allowed to discuss. I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not just talking about chatbots. If I wasn’t clear enough on that point, I apologise

Now that this has been cleared up, do you have anything further to discuss?

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

How is “helping the medical field” not compatible with better healthcare quality? If the end user isn’t experiencing benefits, then how can you claim that benefits have been provided? Who is getting these “benefits” if it’s not the end user? If someone IS getting benefits, yet the end users still haven’t gotten a better experience… Then can you agree that AI is only helping intermediaries? Like… The corporations who provide the garbage experience?

Do you see your logical fallacy here?

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

But is that happening? Have we seen better diagnoses? Can you reference a study showing that we are actually catching more cancer?

Or are you just feeding into the bullshit of “AI IS CHANGING EVERYTHING” because that’s what they tell you?

I’m sick of people like you claiming benefits from a technology that is literally raping us all. Our checkbooks, our jobs, our environments, our freedoms, our communities. “But but someone told me it’s helping” fuck off prove it.

You’re sick of luddites? I’m sick of being lied to, and sick of saps like you spreading the lies.

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

@joe if it's a tool for doctors to use then it will simply increase the costs of providing care even if there is an increase in the quality of that care. That means adoption of that particular type of "AI" will be limited. If it's possible to replace doctors with a chatbot, that will decrease costs even if the quality of care also decreases.

Which one do you think is more likely to be widely used in a profit-driven, anti-human system?

@mobyduck648

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

Super cool! Well we can base your personal healthcare on AI’s sole guidance and if you are misdiagnosed, injured or dead as a result of an “oopsie”, no human will be held legally liable - fun!

So no real stakes for anyone to get it right, as with human-led interventions (with careers on the line at every stage to keep people engaged and honest). But corporations will probably just naturally do the right thing.

But you’re brave, you offer yourself as tribute to the lying machine. Tight tight tight!!!

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

“AI” isn’t a thing. Computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and neural networks are. These can all be useful tools when regulated and maintained with active oversight to balance with society’s other core priorities. What’s at question is the current method and human cost for this frivolously hyped, deceptively marketed lying machine with a single tangible use to date, being the operating system for Facebook’s pervert glasses. You didn’t read, of missed the entire point of, this important article, shared from an important contemporary mind.

Name and cite SPECIFIC examples of anything you claim.

P.s. you don’t “cure cancer”… cancer is a broad heading for hundreds of unique types of disease, presenting in different, completely unique systems within the human body. Like AI, “a cure for cancer” is a broad generalization of complex underlying systems that ignorant people make frivolously - People who think they HAVE the entire knowledge of the world in their brains, when they actually only have a plastic rectangle in their pants pocket with privilege-gated access to a (mostly corporate) CURATED VERSION of the world’s historic knowledge. So if you’ve “cured cancer” friend, why aren’t you treating the 20-30k humans that will die from a form or cancer today worldwide?

Replying to @⁨joe@lemmy.world⁩

King's College LondonHealthcare bias in AI: A Systematic Literature Review