First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I’ll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.
My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won’t budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won’t change his mind, doesn’t hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.
Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren’t displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it’s more privacy-focused and that I didn’t like Mozilla’s implementation of AI in their browser.
Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it’s fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it’s an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn’t steal jobs etc. essentially that it’s just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.
What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don’t know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don’t have any sources to prove my points so they’re essentially void.
How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with “counter”-arguments. I’ve sent him articles that he doesn’t accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don’t know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?
Thank you in advance
Edit: A thing to add: I wasn’t trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won’t ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don’t need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative “art”; that it’s used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like
AI is a hot topic and most info in the public space is dead wrong. Unless you’re a developer and getting into the code base, you’re likely wrong. I’ve spent a year dabbling with that code base and have only barely scratched the surface.
Sam Altmann is behind a massive misinformation campaign to try and create a monopoly in AI. That is hard to prove, but in abstract, ALL the pieces fit well into this puzzle.
AI in the public space is a joke. It is all based off of the transformers library in one form or another. Go read the introduction page for the Transformers documentation on hugging face. It clearly states that it is incomplete and its intended use is as a simplified example code only. AI is enormously complex in its real capabilities. Most of the issues are due to the simplifications made to allow the ignorant public to use it.
Models have very limited scope, and the model itself is static. It can’t learn, predict, remember, or abstract ideas with mobility across information spaces.
The fear of AI in the present is based on a Greek pantheon like mythos of the machine gods. That has no basis in reality. At present the only thing to really fear is image recognition AI in drones just because that combo is poised to massively change war technology and cost effectiveness relative to any prior breakthrough in technology. There is very little relationship between this tech and what is in the public space.
Arguing with a belief system is an entirely pointless affair. If the person is more attached to their fantasies than reality, you’re never going to influence them with reality. The easiest tell is if they are spiritual. If they have exceptions to factual reality in this space, they will be gullible and blind to their biases elsewhere as well.
I’m an atheist, so to me…
Believing that humans are so special that we’ll build a God-like intelligence that will surpass us…
That’s almost stupider than believing in a God with zero evidence for its existence.
We’ve already built machines that can surpass humans in many specialized domains. Why is it so hard to believe that we can put all of that together and have a machine surpassing us in all domains?
Which page/passage are you referring to? I’m pretty sure you’re misreading or misinterpreting something because Huggingface has a good chunk of the state of the art models implemented. They’re complex in capabilities, but the implementations are incredibly simple, and that’s part of why it’s taken off the way it has.