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

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

• two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment

Trust me, bro!

They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.

But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!

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.