Added zero actual value to humanity: debatable for both. Both of them make information, right or wrong, more easily accessible to people, whether that’s a net value to society is debatable. The me too movement would’ve been impossible without the Internet, but so would the MAGA movement.
Can do any task about 70% correctly about 70% of the time: I’ll give you that one
Drove up electricity demands through the roof: check, happened slower then AI, but especially in the early days it was increasing demand, and the Internet in general is a cause for far more demand then AI
Gave humanity the option to make childporn from their armchair: can’t make child porn, but made it exponentially more accessible and prevalent.
Is generating such hardware shortages that computer hardware prices have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and more to come!: I’ll give you that one
Increased misinformation by factors of thousands, if not more: check
Broke CAPTCHAs for good, thanks for that: didn’t break captchas but increased spam and made it harder to detect bots which made it necessary to make captcha
Caused wild random growth of super datacenters that pollute like crazy and take away all the groundwater everywhere: check, most data centers these days are still running traditional servers that hold up the Internet.
Steals all data from everyone everywhere with impunity: check
Highly confident in giving the wrong answer: check, it just used to be that a human would give you that wrong answer confidently. People didn’t need AI to write thousands of articles and posts about vaccines causing autism.
Literally made ma y people lose their mind into AI psychosis: check, it’s made large chunks of society delusional, and many people have lost there minds on it
Do I still need to continue?
9/11, so most. LLMs are the Internet distilled, and thus they have the same problems, and benefits of it.
General non-AI internet server generally stayed under 300 W and could frequently server thousands to tens of thousands concurennt active users. AI servers are now clocking in at 10kw and can generally server dozens of users. The internet datacenters were an couple orders less magnituted than what the AI people are doing.
So too with the pollution angle. Even worse because the traditional datacenters pretty much lived within the grid and their super high demand causes them to roll out their own generators with less emissions controls.
AI
AI tech bro’s look at that list and ask: why do people not like AI?
Don’t forget the big one. These massive data centers only have 1 real use case. SURVEILLANCE.
You could say the same about the Internet for nearly all those points.
You really couldn’t.
Ok:
9/11, so most. LLMs are the Internet distilled, and thus they have the same problems, and benefits of it.
General non-AI internet server generally stayed under 300 W and could frequently server thousands to tens of thousands concurennt active users. AI servers are now clocking in at 10kw and can generally server dozens of users. The internet datacenters were an couple orders less magnituted than what the AI people are doing.
So too with the pollution angle. Even worse because the traditional datacenters pretty much lived within the grid and their super high demand causes them to roll out their own generators with less emissions controls.