didnt read much of the thread so forgive me if i am repeating anyone
ai is a tool. it does things, this can be useful. for instance, i generated a report where i compared one product suite against a competitor's. in 5 seconds it did what would have taken mehours of sifting thru sources, citing the relevant info, and so on. note that this was a valid use case, and something ai was designed to excell at: a large data set needing to be dumbed down to its essence.
my problems with ai stem mostly from how it's marketed. it's NOT intelligent. it's NOT a catch-all for any problem. it's NOT a suitable replacement for socialising. it's NOT going to revolutionise anything (at least not in its current shape)
ai is a tool. it does things. this can be useful. but research is emerging that shows ppl who use AI a lot have a reduced capacity for learning (or: less grey matter in the brain). ai has been used in the largest ever documented, industrial scale copyright scandal. ai is driving ppl insane. ai is making the internet's problems (radicalisation, echo chambers, organised misinformation campaigns, wargaming, dead internet theory, etc) worse. ai is enabling scammers like never before. ai is the perfect cyberattacker. oh and the last 20-40 yrs of enviromental policy somehow being something the datacenters are immune to. just to name a few of the problems that exist
ofc then there is the fact that the ai bubble is just a closed circle of a handful of companies perpetually paying each other (we used to call this 'a money laundering scheme), there's the fact that outside of Enterprise use-cases, then application of AI is fairly limited, and especially inefficient on any metric that isnt time. and even within enterprises, the use-cases are still heavily limited. examples include, but are not limited to, microslop and the fiasco that is windows 11 and other companies that all-inned on ai at the start of the year, only to have to re-hire all their employees as they discover AI actually doesn't reduce workload, it increases it (the workflows didnt become more efficient, they just require extra work now because u have to interface with and fact-check AI). oh and the fact it's constantly being shoved down your throat, you, the end u-ser, who isn't interested in AI at all, is constantly being marketed to by companies that only exist to milk you for all the telemetry you got
i think overall it comes down to a net negative, for me. and this is from the perspective of someone who has to work with it daily. the average person will have much worse results from ai, bc they don't have basic training on how to prompt & they don't know what is and isn't a 'good' problem for ai. i dont think the times it saves me a few minutes are worth the earth burning down in 2050, the loss of privacy, the further infantilisation of the masses ('muh convenience') and so on but i suppose opinions might differ on that?
finally, the biggest AI critics i know went and studied AI in uni (keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer and all that) and the biggest ai glazers i know are, coincidentally, some of the most dumb-as-bricks mfs i have ever met. do with that what u will