Mkay, I think we agree more than we disagree. For instance yeah, I agree that AI has its uses and I actually agree with the top-level comment. Like you, I also don’t particularly wish to join in the chorus of un-nuanced “AI bad!” takes (as opposed to more nuanced anti-AI takes). If there’s a post that’s exaggerating the environmental impact of AI, I will upvote a well-researched comment that dissents. (Environmental impact strikes me as one of the places where AI fears are really overblown – golf courses currently use over 15× more water than datacenters in total, but they don’t have even a 15th the outrage.) So yeah, I would rather that the “fuck AI” crowd be more level-headed when agitating against AI and not use poorly-researched, poorly-reasoned arguments when there are much better arguments against AI. If you were to really boil it down, I would say I agree with you here:
I also think that with the overwhelming number of anti/fuck ai posts it’s worth highlighting upside when there is upside.
But it’s the same principles that lead me to upvote thoughtful dissent that makes me dislike the top-level comment here. It’s not thoughtful. It might be a good comment in a thread about how AI is completely worthless with no redeeming qualities – and I’d upvote it there – but I am not going to take my frustration with threads like that and upvote the comment in this context, where a dozen other reasons were given to rally against AI (some I agree with, some I don’t) and top-level-comment chooses the one time to bring up a good point in a context where it’s not relevant.
Sure, the OP here is being rather overzealous, and if I were going to leave some dissent in this thread I would choose one of the things they said I disagreed with. But I just don’t think this thread specifically is an appropriate place to say “actually, AI has some good uses.” That strikes me as rounding the OP toward zero, and we don’t need more of that.
Mkay, I think we agree more than we disagree. For instance yeah, I agree that AI has its uses and I actually agree with the top-level comment. Like you, I also don’t particularly wish to join in the chorus of un-nuanced “AI bad!” takes (as opposed to more nuanced anti-AI takes). If there’s a post that’s exaggerating the environmental impact of AI, I will upvote a well-researched comment that dissents. (Environmental impact strikes me as one of the places where AI fears are really overblown – golf courses currently use over 15× more water than datacenters in total, but they don’t have even a 15th the outrage.) So yeah, I would rather that the “fuck AI” crowd be more level-headed when agitating against AI and not use poorly-researched, poorly-reasoned arguments when there are much better arguments against AI. If you were to really boil it down, I would say I agree with you here:
But it’s the same principles that lead me to upvote thoughtful dissent that makes me dislike the top-level comment here. It’s not thoughtful. It might be a good comment in a thread about how AI is completely worthless with no redeeming qualities – and I’d upvote it there – but I am not going to take my frustration with threads like that and upvote the comment in this context, where a dozen other reasons were given to rally against AI (some I agree with, some I don’t) and top-level-comment chooses the one time to bring up a good point in a context where it’s not relevant.
Sure, the OP here is being rather overzealous, and if I were going to leave some dissent in this thread I would choose one of the things they said I disagreed with. But I just don’t think this thread specifically is an appropriate place to say “actually, AI has some good uses.” That strikes me as rounding the OP toward zero, and we don’t need more of that.