The Spacebar – “Ever since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, the tech industry has been in a frenzy to push generative AI anywhere and everywhere. It’s now in every corner of our lives, even outside of direct interactions with technology… but frequently in a negative context. Tech companies wanted “AI” to be the brand for innovation and technological progress, but instead, they turned everything we can’t stand into “AI.” The AI age didn’t start with the ChatGPT website. The large language models (LMMs) powering many of today’s AI services and features are just an evolution from more basic natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and computer vision (CV) innovations. These days, it’s fairly common for those technologies to be lumped in with LLMs and small language models (SLMs) with a general “AI” label, especially in marketing materials or other non-technical contexts. The advancements in LLMs and general machine learning have created some positive improvements. It’s not difficult to imagine how local AI models with the ability to process video and images with low latency can be helpful for blind or partially-sighted people.

• Microsoft is testing an update to Windows’ screen reader that can describe images in detail using a local AI model, even if alternative text or an image description were not provided. There have been some positive results from using AI models in scientific work.
• Firefox can now translate web pages without Google Translate or any cloud-based tools, thanks to built-in neural machine translation (NMT) models. Many AI models are fantastic at tagging and sorting documents, like a super-charged OCR system. The problem is none of those advancements are exciting to the general public, or even most businesses. However, a lot of the general public is interested in cheating on homework and exams—I say that from experience with Wolfram Alpha in my high school days. There’s also all the company owners and executives interested in replacing human labor with machines, scammers wanting to do social engineering, product managers and marketers in search of selling points for next year’s smartphone, and so on.

Today, AI is the voice in the drive-thru that can’t hear our orders. It’s killing the livelihood of creative workers. It’s the thing you have to do at work, whether you like it or not. It’s making search engines unusable. It’s a justification for corporate layoffs. It’s plagiarism. It’s killing information access. It’s taking credit for the work of visual effects artists. It’s a serial liar. It’s harming our critical thinking and memory skills. It’s mecha-Hitler. It’s the really annoying popup. It’s wealth inequality. It’s a crutch for the loneliness epidemic. It’s the industrial polluter. It’s the scammer faking your voice for predatory phone calls. It’s the military-industrial complex. It’s the book that could kill you. It’s exploiting social media algorithms with fake content…”