Fuck AI

One of the issues with LLM is that it attracted all attention. Classifiers are generally cool, cheap and saved us from multiple issues (ok face recognition aside 🙂)

When the AI bubble will burst (because of LLM being expensive and not good enough to replace a person even if they are good in pretending to be a person) all AI will slow down… including classifiers, NLP, etc

All this because the AI community was obsessed by the Turing test/imitation game 🙄

Turing was a genius but heck if I am upset with him for coming with this BS 🤣

analytical AI is great

generative AI is cancer

Plant ID is soooo disappointing - works sometimes though.

Always gotta run the ID, web search for images of the recommendation, compare images to plant.

Semantic search can be helpful:

Guess OP image could be about e.g. Perplexity repeatedly HAMMERING (no caching?) the beautiful open web and slopping out poor syntheses.

With respect to the original-original poster, this is wrong. AI plant identification is terrible. It gives you confidence but not enough nuance to know that there are similar plants, some of which look almost but not quite identical, some of which will provide some really nice sustenance, some of which will literally kill you and it'll hurt the whole time you're dying.

It's almost as bad as those AI-written foraging guides that give you enough information to feel confident but not enough information to be able to tell toxic or even deadly plants apart from the real ones.

If you ever are an executive and you need to explain a product idea you made up and don't want to bother with actual proof of concept, then AI has got you.

If you want custom porn, AI has got you.

These are its two competing functions. And judging by my last foray into what AI is about, the latter is winning hard.

Definitely do not use AI or AI-written guidebooks to differentiate edible mushrooms from poisonous mushrooms

People are saying you shouldn't use AI to identify edible mushrooms, which is absolutely correct, but remember that people forage fruits and greens too. Plants are deadly poisonous at a higher rate than mushrooms, so plant ID AI has the potential to be more deadly too.

And then there's the issue that these ID models are very America and/or Europe centric, and will fail miserably most of the time outside of those contexts. And if they do successfully ID a plant, they won't provide information about it being a noxious invasive in the habitat of the user.

Like essentially all AI, even when it works it's barely useful at the most surface level only. When it doesn't work, which is often, it's actively detrimental.

rage against the machine learning

Just dealt with an AI bot this morning when I called a law office. They try so hard to mimic humans. They even added background people talking sounds. But was 100% easily given away when they repeated the same response to my asking to speak with a human. "I will gladly pass on your message to (insert weird pause) "Bill""

It’s a decent evolution of the search engine but you have to ask it for sources and it’s way too expensive for it’s use case.

"AI"'s best uses are the Machine Learning aspects we were already using before we started calling things AI

It's so painful watching this tech be forced down our throats by marketing departments despite us already discovering all of its best use cases long before the marketing teams got ahold of the tech.

Honestly good rule about Machine Learning is just "predicting = good, generating = bad." Rest are case by case but usually bad.

Predict inflation in 3 years - cool
Predict chance of cancer - cool.

Generate image or mail or summary or tech article - fuck you.

Generating speech from text/image is also cool but it's kind of a special case there.

Idk, when I Google Lensed a Sunflower plant, the AI told me it was a Peruvian ground apple....

It also has a lot of trouble identifying lambs quarters and other common wild weeds.

It didn’t mention the star finder apps!

Save yourself the money and time. It’s Venus. That cool star you’re looking at? Yeah that’s Venus. Just trust me.

genAI is the enemy. other kinds are useful.

Friendly reminder that automatic transmissions were sometimes considered to be artificial intelligence.

“Fuck business idiots waxing poetic about the inestimable value of LLMs” isn’t a good community name though.

To be fair, some of the memes are bangers as well.

AI noise reduction and spot removal tools for photo editing get a pass too.

+1 for WhoBird