I gotta say, as a place for getting undifferentiated and breathless “ALL AI BAD” takes, Mastodon as a whole remains peerless. Bluesky is a close second.
It’s fucking exhausting, because any semblance of nuance is gone.
On one side, there are the hyperactive “AI RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME” motherfuckers who want to disrupt/steamroll all the things, and who, for some reason that escapes me, assume they’re immune to the ongoing and coming shifts in both society and markets. (They’re very likely wrong.) You know the type: the dudes1 who still think that tech will solve every problem, contrary to empirical evidence from the last 50-500 years.
TBF, I guess I was one of them, 20-30 years ago, but I’ve evolved as a person.
On the other side, there’s the “never AI” & “all AI is fascist”2 crowd, whose majority flat-out refuses to entertain the notion that the tech in question might be excessively useful to others and is already enabling many people all over the globe to participate more fully in life. I’m not talking just about devs like me but about people like my own mother (who suffers from clinically deteriorating eyesight) and less fluent folks who have to deal with fields they’re not trained for, like, say, any type of bureaucracy. For example, having tech translate German gov’t documents into your native tongue in the blink of an eye and for free, that’s helpful. Having an infinitely patient something help you understand what’s asked of you in those documents, now that’s a goddamn game changer.
I know AI is neither a panacea for all our ills nor without flaws (and often questionable training), but at the same time I see it as very useful. Both those things can be true at the same time. You know, because nuance.
But the FUD and vitriol from both sides is exhausting AF, and not helpful in any way.
