Any thoughts on the paragraph following your excerpt:
The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.
With that in mind, here are some things that AI has done in 2024.
- Cut customer losses from scams in half through proactive detection, according to the Bank of Australia.
- Preserved some of the 200 endangered Indigenous languages spoken in North America.
- Accelerated drug discovery, offering the possibility of breakthrough protections against antibiotic resistance.
- Detected the presence of tuberculosis by listening to a patient’s voice.
- Reproduced an ALS patient’s lost voice.
- Enabled persecuted Venezuelan journalists to resume delivering the news via digital avatars.
- Pieced together fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest texts.
- Caused hundreds of thousands of people to develop intimate relationships with chatbots.
- Created engaging and surprisingly natural-sounding podcasts out of PDFs.
- Created poetry that participants in a study say they preferred to human-written poetry in a blind test. (This may be because people prefer bad art to good art, but still.)
I've been using AI to troubleshoot/learn after switching from Windows -> Linux 1.5 years ago. It has given me very poor advice occasionally, but it has taught me a lot more valuable info. This is not dissimilar to my experience following tutorials on the internet...
I understand your perspective. Personally, I think that there's a chicken/egg situation where free AI versions are a subpar representation that makes skeptics view AI as a whole as over-hyped. OTOH, the people who use the better models experience the benefits first hand, but are seen as AI zealots that are having the wool pulled over there eyes.