In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now

Report: Thinking about using AI? - Green Web Foundation

A solid detailed in-depth report.

The sheer amount of resources needed to support the current and forecast demand from AI is colossal and unprecedented.

A short note on AI – Me, Robin

I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.

First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever

At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

Why “AI” projects fail

“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.

And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.

Does AI benefit the world? – Chelsea Troy

Our ethical struggle with generative models derives in part from the fact that we…sort of can’t have them ethically, right now, to be honest. We have known how to build models like this for a long time, but we did not have the necessary volume of parseable data available until recently—and even then, to get it, companies have to plunder the internet. Sitting around and waiting for consent from all the parties that wrote on the internet over the past thirty years probably didn’t even cross Sam Altman’s mind.

On the environmental front, fans of generative model technology insist that eventually we’ll possess sufficiently efficient compute power to train and run these models without the massive carbon footprint. That is not the case at the moment, and we don’t have a concrete timeline for it. Again, wait around for a thing we don’t have yet doesn’t appeal to investors or executives.