To a lot of people AI is just image and text generation. And yes, these uses alone aren't worth the time, money, and energy.

But there are a lot of areas where AI is helping that people don't see, like in medicine. Drug development, cancer research and early detection, CT and MRI analysis, just to name a few. These uses cases are vastly more important but rarely get discussed. It's important to know that AI isn't this one singular thing or else we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

They do see those use cases. It's not surprising that they focus on the enormous number of other, negative use cases. It's misleading to describe the medical use cases as "more important" - yes, they are, in the same way that healing a person is "more important" than ruining their lives. That's not what you're implying by your usage of the term, though.

A person having a negative attitude about AI doesn't mean that they wouldn't keep the parts that are mostly positive if they could.

You know, perspective matters. When you sell a knife with the promise of a tool that helps you cut onions, is a completely different story from when you market it as a weapon to kill your neighbor.

AI is massively marketed by AI people as a tool to replace your job. So either the AI people are bad at marketing or the gains in other industry are insignificant/ do not generate shareholder value.

The problem is, it's not being pushed as just a tool that helps you or your subordinates do your jobs better -- that's nice but not going to generate $Ts in revenue -- but rather as a tool that replaces your subordinates, so your company can increase their quarterly profits -- that's the golden ticket.

“Think of the children!”

When AI produces those meaningful advances in those fields, great, we can start having meaningful discussions about them. The greatest medical advancement of the 21st century is likely mRNA, or maybe GLP-1 for some. Neither were LLM assisted in any meaningful way as far as I know (they predate ChatGPT, perhaps more primitive models were involved in ways I’m not familiar with). Until those advances come, this argument is fanfic.

Plus, in the most morbid way possible: who gives a shit about living longer if they are stripped of their career, are inundated with slop at every angle, and can’t trust any information. These are real problems that AI has already created, unlike the fanfic of ridding cancer.