Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It's sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.

A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it's a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it's not being used that way.

Instead it's being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.

Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He's using local models, but they aren't LLMs. This is why I'm no expert. 😅

In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.

But it's still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. Even if you hate AI. If anything, so you can be prepare for what's to come.

consilidation of information, resources and potentially "the narrative".

oh, for the user you mean?

• it can be better than the enshittified search machines unless the llm decides to lie
• middle managers need to write less emails themselves
• some programmers deem it enough to write some boilerplate code while deskilling themselves
• scammers and slop creators love it

I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it's paired with Universal Basic Income.

I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people's income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they're being disenfranchised from society.

I think it could be good for faster language translations between different languages

Machine learning

I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:

• Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
• Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like "convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import".
• Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don't send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
• Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. "Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?"

What does this cost me? I don't pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:

• What I study (not very personal to me)
• Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
• The code I write and work on (already open source so I don't care)
• Random searches (I'm still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don't care)

There's also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I've read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don't know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.

I do use it quite often in my work. I just downloaded an Excel worksheet with all standard mailtexts (I work at a company offering courses), about 500x3. I gave it a list of criteria they should follow, and made it find those that didn’t. This worked pretty well. And it can work pretty well so long as you’re in control and you don’t take the result as truth.

That’s beside the obvious privacy issues, obviously. I hardly ever use LLMs outside of work (though when I do, I like to run models locally).