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Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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"A solution in search for a problem" is a phrase used way to much, and almost always in the wrong way. Even in the article it says that it has been solving problems for over a year, it just complains that it isn't solving the biggest problems possible yet. It is remarkable how hard it is for people to extrapolate based on the trajectory. The author of this paper would have been talking about how pointless computers are if they were alive in the early 90s, and how they are just "a solution in search for a problem".
My issue with generative AI is not that it doesn't have uses, but that it seems to me that the vast majority of those uses are nefarious.
As far as I can tell, it has the most potential for:
Creating sock puppet accounts on social media to sway public opinion
Make fake media/ identity theft
Plagarize various art mediums and meld them together enough to make attribution difficult
Other positive use cases like summarization or reformatting seem to pale in comparison to the potential negative effects of the bad use cases. There are many marginal use cases like coding or law where you may save some time but the review required is likely not that much different than the time it would take for a good programmer or lawyer to just write it.
Most positive use cases are agent-based and the average user doesn't have access to good agent-based systems yet because it requires a bit of willingness to do some "coding". This will soon not be the case though. I can give my crew of AI agents a mission, for example, "find all the papers on baby owl vocalizations and make 10 different charts of the frequency range relative to their average size after each of their first 10 weeks of life", and come back an hour later and have something that would have been 100 hours for a grad student just last year. Right now I have to wait an hour or so, soon it will be instant.
The real usefulness of these agents today is enormous, it is just outside of the view of many average people because their normal lives don't require this kind of power.