I think this category is shrinking much faster than the AI ingroup thinks, and most people are moving from this group to the group that defines AI as an adjective that means "shitty and trying to manipulate you while being utterly unhelpful and wasting your time"

Yesterday, my 7yo criticized something by saying it looked like AI.

There is no AI ingroup here. Not a soul on Lemmy will argue spicy autocomplete is-too AGI. But like expanding the word "slop" from the worst nonsense to literally any use, you label anyone who disagrees an oblivious techbro. 'You hate it with us or you're one of them' is effective recruiting for a tribalist movement. But it's not an argument.

You can ask randos to "behave like robots" and they'll do jerky motions and harsh voices. They're not gonna follow up with 'Haha, anyway, let's destroy all machinery.' Joking about when Siri misheard you didn't start the Butlerian jihad.

Ask people what they've done with this. Will it match the cocaine fantasies of Sam Altman? Of fucking course not. But you'll find people who recognized value in this slightly stupid science fiction. The guy who built a two-billion-frame-per-second camera took jabs at the model which wrote all his code - but he still used the thing to do the thing. I was surprised to hear him mention it at all, because y'all have made it such an identity razor, people hesitate to admit when it's worked.

Even talking in terms of winning or losing is deeply conservative. It's software. And it will at least half-ass a bewildering variety of tasks, just by asking, in plain English. You can describe video into existence, and there's an overconfident minority who think that's completely useless, because its wine glasses are half-full.

Do you remember when people hated CGI? Not bad uses. Any uses. Pointing it out became criticism. Now it's just another tool. If anyone's still mad that How To Train Your Dragon didn't rely on puppets, and turns to go 'Right fellas?,' the fellas are long gone.