Plant ID has its own drawbacks, now I'm actually aware of the major invasive species in my region and I see them everywhere now.

At least I have some cute wild carrots.

Other universally gud AI

• text to speech
• speech to text
• language translation

Classifying > generating

the Ai that isn't bad is not getting shoved down my throat every day.

Except its¹ not even useful for that.

¹not ai. And if it were there would be ethics/labor concerns.

Definitely do not use AI or AI-written guidebooks to differentiate edible mushrooms from poisonous mushrooms

rage against the machine learning

People are saying you shouldn't use AI to identify edible mushrooms, which is absolutely correct, but remember that people forage fruits and greens too. Plants are deadly poisonous at a higher rate than mushrooms, so plant ID AI has the potential to be more deadly too.

And then there's the issue that these ID models are very America and/or Europe centric, and will fail miserably most of the time outside of those contexts. And if they do successfully ID a plant, they won't provide information about it being a noxious invasive in the habitat of the user.

Like essentially all AI, even when it works it's barely useful at the most surface level only. When it doesn't work, which is often, it's actively detrimental.

analytical AI is great

generative AI is cancer

Just dealt with an AI bot this morning when I called a law office. They try so hard to mimic humans. They even added background people talking sounds. But was 100% easily given away when they repeated the same response to my asking to speak with a human. "I will gladly pass on your message to (insert weird pause) "Bill""

Idk, when I Google Lensed a Sunflower plant, the AI told me it was a Peruvian ground apple....

It also has a lot of trouble identifying lambs quarters and other common wild weeds.

"AI"'s best uses are the Machine Learning aspects we were already using before we started calling things AI

It's so painful watching this tech be forced down our throats by marketing departments despite us already discovering all of its best use cases long before the marketing teams got ahold of the tech.

One of the issues with LLM is that it attracted all attention. Classifiers are generally cool, cheap and saved us from multiple issues (ok face recognition aside 🙂)

When the AI bubble will burst (because of LLM being expensive and not good enough to replace a person even if they are good in pretending to be a person) all AI will slow down… including classifiers, NLP, etc

All this because the AI community was obsessed by the Turing test/imitation game 🙄

Turing was a genius but heck if I am upset with him for coming with this BS 🤣

If you ever are an executive and you need to explain a product idea you made up and don't want to bother with actual proof of concept, then AI has got you.

If you want custom porn, AI has got you.

These are its two competing functions. And judging by my last foray into what AI is about, the latter is winning hard.

It didn’t mention the star finder apps!

Save yourself the money and time. It’s Venus. That cool star you’re looking at? Yeah that’s Venus. Just trust me.

Honestly good rule about Machine Learning is just "predicting = good, generating = bad." Rest are case by case but usually bad.

Predict inflation in 3 years - cool
Predict chance of cancer - cool.

Generate image or mail or summary or tech article - fuck you.

Generating speech from text/image is also cool but it's kind of a special case there.

Plant ID is soooo disappointing - works sometimes though.

Always gotta run the ID, web search for images of the recommendation, compare images to plant.

Semantic search can be helpful:

Guess OP image could be about e.g. Perplexity repeatedly HAMMERING (no caching?) the beautiful open web and slopping out poor syntheses.

Friendly reminder that automatic transmissions were sometimes considered to be artificial intelligence.

“Fuck business idiots waxing poetic about the inestimable value of LLMs” isn’t a good community name though.

It’s a decent evolution of the search engine but you have to ask it for sources and it’s way too expensive for it’s use case.

AI noise reduction and spot removal tools for photo editing get a pass too.

genAI is the enemy. other kinds are useful.

+1 for WhoBird

To be fair, some of the memes are bangers as well.

Honestly I like when it writes for me too. I tend to be very blunt and concise in my messaging and AI just puts that corporate shine and bubbliness on my messages that everyone seems to feel is important.