Counterpoint: London.

It’s easy to complain, with it being £2.80/$3.70 for a single zone peak single, the frequent strikes, the noise, etc. but the trains are at worst every 5 minutes or so, they have the most frequent rail service in the world (Victoria Line), they’re constantly making improvements (Elizabeth Line, Battersea extension), it has fairly good coverage (when including national rail for south London), overnight service, and the busses are absolutely amazing.

Is it on par with Seoul & Singapore? No. But it’s certainly significantly better than most cities worldwide.

I went to four different cities in China and at least a significant proportion of people seemed very selfish and out for themselves across the board, I’m not going to say never but it’s definitely at the bottom of my list of places to return to.

I don’t think it’s ok.

I think it’s not the state’s job to dictate whether people can do it. I have the exact same opinion for cheating.

Yeah nah.

People (normal people) like having their messages, facebook comments, whatever else coming up somewhere even more accessible than their phone in their pocket.

It depends how you define “racial hate” and how you define mental or social harm. I also do mean social harm, not societal, meaning to catch things like sunset communities (ie restricting where people can live, or where they can go), rather than “society is worse off because of people’s opinions.”

Again, in my opinion, it depends on intent. If you make a post on your blog with 200 followers saying “I’m tired of X race moving to my city,” I don’t think that should be illegal, even if it is disgusting behaviour. If you post it to (eg) a community group for those people, I’d say it should be illegal.

That said, I’m very liberal on policing, so believe that the state shouldn’t be responsible for policing morality, which people may not like when they realise it involves making things that are pretty much objectively immoral legal, regardless of what they are.

I would say intent matters and while it’s impossible to truly determine it, we still have a distinction for murder/manslaughter and negligence.

If a politician lies or hides something for personal gain, that should be illegal, but there’s so much stuff the state does where it’s best if the general public don’t know, public order would probably break down pretty quickly otherwise.

Same with racial hate. If it’s just stating an opinion, fine, I probably don’t agree but go ahead. If you’re actively trying to harm (mentally, economically, socially or physically) that group, or inciting others to do the same, then that’s not fine.

Everyone has a different definition, but yeah generally free speech in an ideal sense extends to just before you start causing what a reasonable person would concern harm to someone.

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Eh, there’s a lot of blending of conjecture, opinion and fact all presented as truth, and their handling of mistakes could be better - they’ve openly said if they consider a mistake to be minor then they don’t even issue a correction or update.

I personally think that attitude towards production pushes it towards slop, as for things like entertainment one of the key defining things that separate slop from quality media is passion, but if you don’t care about making accurate content then are you any better than just getting AI to write a script?

That’s why you ask 6 of them, and of they all come to the same conclusion then chances are it’s either right, or a common pitfall.

Nah, as a European this is pretty un-American

Their propaganda is usually much more subtle

I don’t know about “art”, one part of ai image generation is of replacing stock images and erotic photos which frankly I don’t have a huge issue with as they’re both at least semi-exploitative industries anyway in many ways and you just need something that’s good enough.

Obviously these don’t extend to things a reasonable person would consider art, but business majors and tech bros rebranding something shitty to position it as a competitor to or in the same class as something it so obviously isn’t.

You’re bringing up edge cases for #1, and it should be replacing google translate and basic human translation, eg allowing people to understand posts online or communicate textually with people with whom they don’t share a common language. Using it for anything high stakes or legal documents is asking for trouble though.

For 2, it’s not for AIs finding issues, it’s for people wanting to book a flight, or seek compensation for a delayed flight, or find out what meals will be served on their flight. Some people prefer to use text or voice communication over a UI, and this makes it easier to provide.

For 3, grammar and spelling are different. I said it wasn’t useful for spellcheck, but even then if you give it the right context it may or may not catch it. I was referring more to word order and punctuation positioning.

For 4, yeah for me it’s on par in terms of results, but much much faster, especially when asking followup questions or specifying constraints. A lot of people aren’t search engine powerusers though, so will find it significantly easier, faster and better than conventional search than having to manage tabs or keep track of what you’ve seen without just scrolling back up in the conversation.

For 5, recipes have been in the gutter for a decade or more now, SEO came before LLMs, but yeah, you’ve actually caught on to an obvious #6 I missed here of text summarisation…

What I’m getting overall though is that you’re not considering how tech-savvy the average person is, which absolutely makes them seem less useful as the more tech savvy you are, both the more you’re aware of their weaknesses and the less you benefit from the speedup by simplification they bring. This does make ai’s shortcomings more dangerous, but as it matures one would hope that it becomes common knowledge.

Who said you were scary?

Frankly I pity you more than anything.

And no matter what I picked, you’d reject them because you’re not actually considering them, you’re just either a troll, a contrarian or a luddite.

Nice, here’s a gold star for finding one case of it doing something wrong. I’ll call the CEO of AI and tell them to call it off, it’s a good thing humans have never said anything like that!

I’m going to limit to LLMs as that’s the generally accepted term and there’s so many uses for AI in other fields that it’d be unfair.

1. Translation. LLMs are pretty much perfect for this.

2. Triaging issues for support. They’re useless for coming to solutions but as good as humans without the need to wait at sending people to the correct department to deal with their issues.

3. Finding and fixing issues with grammar. Spelling is something that can be caught by spell-checkers, but grammar is more context-aware, another thing that LLMs are pretty much designed for, and useful for people writing in a second language.

4. Finding starting points to research deeper. LLMs have a lot of data about a lot of things, so can be very useful for getting surface level information eg. about areas in a city you’re visiting, explaining concepts in simple terms etc.

5. Recipes. LLMs are great at saying what sounds right, so for cooking (not so much baking, but it may work) they’re great at spitting out recipes, including substitutions if needed, that go together without needing to read through how someone’s grandmother used to do xyz unrelated nonsense.

There’s a bunch more, but these were the first five that sprung to mind.

it’s more that the only way to get some anti AI crusader that there are some uses for it is to put it in an analogy that they have to actually process rather than spitting out an “ai bad” kneejerk.

I’m probably far more anti AI than average, for 95% of what it’s pushed for it’s completely useless, but that still leaves 5% that it’s genuinely useful for that some people refuse to accept.

Except you’re expecting it to do everything. Your car is too “technically advanced” to walk on the sidewalk, but wait, you can do that anyway and don’t need to reinvent your legs

A six year old can read and write Arabic, Chinese, Ge’ez, etc. and yet most people with PhD level experience probably can’t, and it’s probably useless to them. LLMs can do this also. You can count the number of letters in a word, but so can a program written in a few hundred bytes of assembly. It’s completely pointless to make LLMs to do that, as it’d just make them way less efficient than they need to be while adding nothing useful.