Yes, a pencil can do a whole bunch of different. things. GenAI cannot do things. It has no purpose. Pencils were made to write stuff. GenAI was made to ???. It is a technology in search of a problem to address. A niche to fill. It has no purpose as it stands, yet it is supposedly the most important thing ever to the point where the rich and wealthy are losing their minds investing into it on the vague hopes that it’ll do something. They’ve even got our government in on it; the US economy is being dangerously propped up by this industry that doesn’t solve any problems or fulfill any purpose. All the things it does are novelties and even then, it does those things poorly and unreliably.

Tools at home improvement stores were made to fulfill a specific purpose. GenAI still does not have a purpose it fulfills despite having hundreds of billions of dollars invested, not to mention all the other resources it’s sucking up.

An intern probably would not go on a mass deletion spree. Also, an intern doesn’t eat a billion gpus.

I hope you are not seriously advocating using the lying machine for therapy. You would get more value talking to a finger puppet.

The Onion has you covered

Bro, the AI delusion is destroying the USA. Environmental protections are being rolled back to power it. It’s inflating US econony with fake deals. It is being shoved in our faces by clueless C-suite admin.

The Tech Bros are the ones repeating over and over again that “GenAI” is the future while outputting garbage at real human cost. This artist wants to express their frustration with the constant badgering.

I must be misunderstanding your meaning because it sounds like you are claiming this tech will eventually become advanced enough to kill people all on its own. I’m making the argument it’s the people controlling the tech who will kill us, regardless of what the tech can or cannot do. The tech is largely irrelevant here.

Different people can have similar opinions. Nothing is lost from multiple people expressing similar ideas in different ways. I’m glad my comment resonated with you, but maybe someone else will better understand this idea from chuckleslord’s explanation.

The danger here is not the tech developing into an uncontrollable beast that will kill us all. There is no way that GenAI can advance far enough to develop conciousness; that’s a completely different tech tree. It is not a baby whose development we need to guide, it is a puppet dancing on strings.

The danger is the people in positions of power who are pulling the strings. The idiot C-level admin who thinks GenAI will magically develop consciousness and replaces a bunch of essential staff. The incompetent CEO who can’t write an email to save their life believes GenAI is just as useful for all their workers and forces workers to babysit AI Agents. The unscrupulous politicians who relax regulations to allow AI companies to suck up resources that the rest of us need. These are all people who will benefit from the GenAI boom at the cost of literally everyone else.

The focus should be on these irrational, powerful people who are destroying the planet and ruining lives to make their puppet dance a little more convincingly.

GenAI doesn’t “know” anything. A 15 year old who spends a year copying his friend’s physics homework will learn a tiny bit of physics. GenAI is just generating something new without actually learning information.

It’s a fancy auto-complete that looks at the entirety of human writing and guesses what word should come next based on statistical probability. That isn’t learning, that’s rolling dice 10,000 times and seeing what number comes up most often.

GenAI cannot “intend” anything. It cannot develop consciousness any more than Akinator or a Tickle-Me Elmo can. The correct way to handle this technology is to treat it with reality: as a tool that can quickly look at a lot of stuff and not as a developing mind.

Beethoven composed music while deaf and you are complaining about not having steady hands. If you really want to make art, just start doing it. It really is that simple.