#That there's this knee-jerk reaction to even READING the word AI because it's immediately connected to something like midjourney

[delta-chan]

The whole situation with AI is particularly frustrating because all these issues with the horrid swiping people's stuff and doing a nonsense with them is it's spoiling the legitimate applications of this technology within the correct contexts, particularly when it comes to robotics.

AI can be legitimately trained to use naturalistic speech (either written or spoken) for the sake of many legitimate applications--many of them that can be used for assistive and therapeutic technology. AI assistants that keep track of things for people but entertaining besides is the most obvious application, but robots with these sorts of functions are already used for a number of things: there are a couple of commercial companion bots for children that are largely educational, and therapeutic robots are often used in retirement homes and hospices.

Image training can help robots recognize things. While this power can absolutely be used for evil beyond a shadow of a doubt and already has been, it has also been and can be used to help robots identify things and locations. Robots like this can be used in an assistive and service context, and have been. This is what feeding images to an AI was used for, is supposed to be used for, and still is. But people found an entertaining and "easy" use case for it, and now things are... like this.

The thing is, AI can be trained in a closed system. It doesn't need to scrape, but people keep doing it because it's easy. Why create your own dataset when you can just cast a wide net and just use whatever? To me, that shouldn't be the point. That shouldn't be how it's done at all. In an ideal world, people would tailor their AI to fit a specific use case. But it's hard. To do that requires passion, the drive to see something come together. It takes as much work as creating anything else--depending on the sort of bot you wanted--say, a conversational bot that you'd like to have a specific voice--you'd have to write tons of text to draw from encapsulating a wide variety of contexts and scenarios in the appropriate voice. You'd have to bust your ass, to put your heart in it.

I miss when this was the case all the time. People feeding neural nets tons of random data or funny junk just to see what it'd spit back out--like that one time with all of the cookbooks and the cursed recipe that came out of it that called for one chunks and fresh surface. It was funny, but it also felt like we were on the precipice of having something like KITT or Johnny 5 come into reality if you knew what you were doing.

TL;DR: AI is being ruined for everyone because it's laziness all the way down. Developers don't want to put in the work legitimately training, so they scape, so here we are. It is, how do you say, absolute bullshit.