At my last AI workshop, the main consensus we reached was that 'AI' is too broad of a label that doesn't have a definition or specific purpose. It's more like one of those marketing names that strongly implies it is something else, but is also broad enough to fit a lot of categories (for example, what is intelligence?)
Since then I have been trying not to use "AI" because it is essentially meaningless. I am trying to use more precise language. If the conversation goes to ChatGPT, I call it a large language model, and if the person Im speaking to is still confused, I say 'you know how when you write your emails, sometimes they try to help you out by predicting the next word? Well, thats what this is except it just writes the prediction for you based on your prompt."
If it is about Gemini, I say it has LLM capabilities now but otherwise it is a bit like an interactive desktop that connects you to Google's many services from one place. Instead of navigating and clicking though, you speak to it - "Remember when you would speak to your phone and say 'ok google, please set a timer for 10 minutes'? Well...same thing, except now that is called Gemini."
I think it helps for us to talk about our tools (no matter how simple or sophisticated) based on the type of assistance we want, and that can remove some of the buzz around the marketing scheme.
Obviously we cant ever forget about the cost of using it, but I think that ought to apply to anything we consume, whether it is food or gas/coal, our own energy, water etc,. That doesn't mean trying to give up consumption and starve, or the other extreme of saying everything is consumed anyway so why bother trying to manage it, it just means having more understanding about what things cost in more than just money or in the immediate sense. This enables us to plan our needs better. We look at cost management anytime we make up a shopping list or distribute our time in a day. Knowing exactly what an LLM or our laptops or our heating etc requires from our society to get powered helps us make decisions about what services are most important to us and what we are willing to give up to have these provided.
For example, what LLMs cost in terms of water, energy, intellectual property, youth unemployment, in return for what it provides: saved labor on the rough first draft of a difficult letter, a faster way to search through a mountain of data, getting something summarized and spoken to you, etc. Then we can think "okay what is valuable and how much of that am I using/getting, and am I overpaying for this?" Obviously those of us more directly affected by unemployment due to bad tech will feel more strongly about it, but even those who think sacrificing a generation for convenience is a good idea will face the very real pain of that and re-evaluate.
I mean, all that was essentially just me saying "I think we need to be more informed about what we use in our lives and what that costs in more than just cash terms." Because once we know that, it will be harder to be sold the wrong product, or the fake product. On that note, yes the biggest threat is that a handful of tech companies control so much of our information and what we have access to, but on the other hand, that knowledge and information comes from us. We can do better at directly speaking to each other as long as we are going in equally willing to listen to each other (for e.g., I know theres many services I would never need or think of as useful, but are actually important to someone else, and vice versa).
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