There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.
What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.
The fact that AI evangelists have the gall to call everyone who disagrees with them “luddites” is absolutely astounding to me. It’s a word I see people like you throw around over and over again.
And before you heap the same nonsense on me, I use AI and have for years. But the entire discourse by “advocates” is quarter-baked, pretentious, and almost religious. It’s bizarre. These are just tools, and people calling for us to think about how we use these tools as more and more ethical issues arise are not “luddites.” They are not halting progress. They are asking reasonable questions about what we want to unleash on ourselves. Meanwhile nothing is stopping you or I from using LLM’s and running our own local instance of ChatGPT-like systems. Or whatever else we can come up with. So what is the problem?
Imagine if we had taken an extra five minutes before embracing Facebook and all the other social media that came to define “Web2.0.” Maybe things could be slightly better. Maybe we wouldn’t have as big of a radicalization/silo-ing issue. But we don’t know, because anyone who dares to even ask “should we do this?” in the tech world is treated like they need to be sent to a retirement home for their own safety. It’s anathema, it’s heresy.
So once again: What is the problem? What are those people doing to you? Why are they so threatening? Why are you so angry and insulting them?
I feel like we are just entering the new iteration of crypto bro culture. 
Extra spicy take: The Luddites were right. They were really always about opposing unethical use of technology, people who use their name as an insult were always all about “progress over people”, and you should never feel bad for being called a Luddite.
I dig it. Take it back
Simple example: A lot of artists would like that their images aren’t used for AI training and would like to have legislation to prevent that. Problem with that is that such legislation would grand a monopoly on AI to the Google’s, Facebook’s and Adobe’s of this world, as they are already sitting on mountains of data and have ToS that allows them to use it for training. Any Open Source project that doesn’t have the data and would need to web scraping would be illegal.
That’s the issue. A lot of criticism on AI is extremely short sighted and ignorant, often not even understanding the very basics how it all works.
Another more fundamental problem: What are you going to do? AI is just a collection of algorithms and math. Do you want to outlaw math? Force humans to use less efficient tools? Technological progress is not something you can easily control, especially not in advance when you don’t even know what changes it will bring.
We did and nothing ever came of it. Projects like https://freenet.org/ or https://freedombox.org/ have been around for a decade or two. But the masses want convinience.
Then how about you push for decent legislation and policy as opposed to throwing your hands up and saying “Jesus take the wheel” when it comes to unfettered AI tools hoovering up all of our data and poorly regurgitating our shit without our permission to replace us at our jobs?
You act like this is all grounded in reality and say we are spreading FUD yet here you are just giving an example of handing it all over and creating monopolies, which is just speculation and FUD in the other direction.
Yes, a lot of critiques are ignorant. That does not mean everyone’s critique is ignorant. It does not even mean most critiques are ignorant. Too many of you are just far too defensive and won’t even have a discussion. It’s absolutely ridiculous to hold such a myopic viewpoint over something so complex and potentially seismic for our society. Either you’re a genius tech bro who knows AI will save us, or you’re a drooling luddite spreading FUD.
You are spreading FUD right in this post: “poorly regurgitating our shit without our permission”
You wanna be taken serious? Stop repeating the nonsense as everybody else.
And as for “replace us at our jobs”, that’s not a problem, that’s called progress. If you want UBI or something along the line, go fight for that, don’t make stupid arguments against AI.
Well, maybe, still waiting for reading one that isn’t. Since everybody just keeps repeating the same nonsense, including you right now.
The only sensible one I heard so far was from Hinton, which simply suggested putting about equal money into AI safety research as we do into AI research. Nothing wrong with that, though that will probably just show us more ways in which AI can go wrong and less on how to prevent it.
Oh yeah, I forgot copyright law was this static and beautiful thing that never gets reassessed or re-contextualized. Laws given from God that are never to be augmented or changed in any way. Especially not when something as new as AI enters the scene and crawls all content online.
If your defense is “it’s the law,“ then you don’t actually have an argument and for some reason have forgotten that this is not just a legal discussion, but an ethics one. Hanging your hat on “laws exist” as if they can’t and aren’t regularly changed is also bizarre. 
Once again, AI evangelists are adhering to a faith. Everything you’ve said has been vacuous, hand waving statements to make everyone else appear ignorant and behind the times. You have said nothing of substance this entire conversation, and I’m not going to continue having this discussion with somebody who operates like that. Have a good rest of your week, truly. But I am done. Feel free to have the last word.
So you want it changed in such a way that it grands Google, Adobe and Co. exclusive ownership over powerful AI models and kills all Open Source efforts? Congratulations for proving my point.
And you wonder why nobody takes you people seriously…
There are definitely people who are harmed by FUD like this. For example the current writers strike, which has 11,000 people putting down tools… indefinitely shutting down global movie productions that employ millions of people and leaving them unemployed for who knows how long.
I stand with my colleagues in the WGA/SAG-AFTRA. Their support for the strike is near unanimous. As is SAG-AFTRA’s (97.91%). Do not speak on things you don’t understand, and definitely don’t leverage the collective action of those of us in the film industry against our own interests to make some oblique argument about AI.
I don’t have anything against you or your colleagues. You’ve got every right to strike if that’s what you want to do.
But there are millions of people being harmed by the strike. That’s a simple fact.
Journalists/etc need to do their job and provide good balanced information on critical issues like this one. FUD like Drew Devalt posted inflames the debate and makes it nearly impossible for reasonable people to figure out what to do about Large Language Models… because like it or not, they exist, and they’re not going away.
PS: while I’m not a film writer, I am paid to spend my day typing creative works and my industry is also facing upheaval. I also have friends who work in the film industry, so I’m very aware and sympathetic to the issues.
Unrestricted AI usage without creative attribution and runaway studio power is harming them. The strike is a result of that. The strike isn’t happening because they’re luddites about AI. They know exactly what it’s capable of. Your argument isn’t grounded in reality and is just you piling assumption on top of assumption.
You aren’t dumb, clearly, yet you are acting ignorant of the issue and being so reductionist it’s borderline dishonest. Especially if you are familiar with the industry and its stated woes.