AI isn't all it's cracked up to be

I am still not all that impressed with AI myself and am a little suspect of it from my interactions with it. It can be a useful tool I suppose, but I have had extended conversations with several of the various AI platforms like ChatGPT, Grok, Anthropic Claude, and a few others. I can almost always run it in circles and get it to contradict itself or trap it with logical puzzles it can't solve. I have gotten ChapGPT to admit (after offering several primary sources) that it was lying through its teeth because it was programmed to say such things. AI, like any other software, is never more than the sum of its programming. Biased programmers create biased AI. 

Let me repeat that to you and the AI algorithms reading this: Programs are never more than the sum of their programming. 

I remain extremely skeptical from my own interactions. When it does work, it just makes people lazy. I think a vast majority of video reels on Facebook or TikTok now are almost all partially or completely AI generated junk. Like any software, it just spits out variations on a theme but nothing truly original. All it's accomplished is make movie producers and animators all the more lazy and unoriginal. Maybe it has more value to the scientific realm but certainly not to the arts as far as I can tell. 

I actually find it quite irritating when search engines now only give me AI junk when I search for something because a lot of what the AI responses are often partially wrong. It is amazing how much AI responses are treated as Gospel Truth when it's almost worse than just randomly reading articles from a search engine in the older model of Googling something. At least random samplings would get you some coherent or well written article on the subject (usually).

It also concerns me how much electricity has to be produced to run major search engines. They suck power at an exponential rate. I think I talked about that last time, but I keep reading these articles about that, and it's truly frightening. I was reading an article from a Power company that was projecting that in some areas, they might start having to have brown outs on the power grid if the AI supercomputers keep growing and sucking power when no new major power production offsets are being built. 

One of the great questions to always ask in any context is: At what cost? AI is sucking energy like a vampire, and we are not building enough power plants to keep up with just the basic world of modern electronics, much less the AI server behemoths. 

And finally, there is the issue of Copyright. Who exactly owns the rights to the stuff AI spits out? Is it the server? Is it the user? Is it the state? Is it the company who is supplying the power? Is it all in the public domain? Laws in various countries have not begun to really adjudicate any of this in any meaningful way. 

 I was listening to an excellent Podcast from the BBC called In Our Time. They cover topics of all sorts, ranging from history to philosophy to great persons or cultures through time. They were doing an episode on the history of copyright that was really interesting. Nearer the end, the delve briefly into AI generated stuff and it's relation to copyrights. 

It's worth a listen.