Cory Doctorow"The reality is you can't build a $100b industry around techn that's kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations.You certainly can't justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed lofty promises of someday changing the world."
Chris Who@pluralistic @molly0xfff ikr? So it was a slightly better search engine that could also do Eliza and create a picture of the Statue of Liberty that looks like me to the amusement and hilarity of, well, just me...
VC was/is DESPERATE to pump it up but it remains what it was - a neat search engine extension, totally not worth dedicated small villages of server farms with ridiculous levels of resource consumption.
Ryan Jamieson@pluralistic @molly0xfff
It's a great article on the topic, and I agree with it in many counts. Your parallel to Web3 shenanigans is spot on, too - costs to create, maintain, and evolve GenAI are essentially immaterial to its backers, who are all trying to get rich quick, much like the Web3 folks.
My hope is that the issues of trust which AI will only exacerbate will spark a pivot away from social media and unmoderated online interactions. Social media is a pox, but I can imagine a world where people simply refuse to believe anything they read online and return to more traditional information sources as a result.