I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.
It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.
It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place.
People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?
To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was necessary.
I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.
There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN.
If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.
Or worse, things like "Real science and real engineering doesn't rely on tools that behave randomly.".
I'm not sure why all the replies under this comment are full of projections of extreme opinions I do not hold and never said I did.
If you want to have a conversation with someone who thinks like this you can probably find one in this very thread, so why do you respond to me?
Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media?
I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can study the math behind the model, the transformer architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see how it can get more purely technical than that.
(Which they might even justify because they've read the transformer paper or whatever. That doesn't help inform you if these things actually have practical applications!)
