this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
-6 points (43.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43336 readers
776 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I'll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.

My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won't budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won't change his mind, doesn't hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.

Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren't displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it's more privacy-focused and that I didn't like Mozilla's implementation of AI in their browser.

Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it's fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it's an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn't steal jobs etc. essentially that it's just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.

What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don't have any sources to prove my points so they're essentially void.

How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with "counter"-arguments. I've sent him articles that he doesn't accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don't know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?

Thank you in advance

Edit: A thing to add: I wasn't trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won't ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don't need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative "art"; that it's used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago

AI in the public space is a joke. It is all based off of the transformers library in one form or another. Go read the introduction page for the Transformers documentation on hugging face. It clearly states that it is incomplete and its intended use is as a simplified example code only. AI is enormously complex in its real capabilities. Most of the issues are due to the simplifications made to allow the ignorant public to use it.

Which page/passage are you referring to? I'm pretty sure you're misreading or misinterpreting something because Huggingface has a good chunk of the state of the art models implemented. They're complex in capabilities, but the implementations are incredibly simple, and that's part of why it's taken off the way it has.