17
ELI5 why is everyone boot licking AI?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
17 points (63.9% liked)
Explain Like I'm Five
21886 readers
11 users here now
Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!
Rules
- Be respectful and inclusive.
- No harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
- Engage in constructive discussions.
- Share relevant content.
- Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
- Use appropriate language and tone.
- Report violations.
- Foster a continuous learning environment.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Corporate AI as a service is cancer. But I don’t completely discount locally hosted AI for certain tasks. If you know it’s capabilities and trade-offs, it can be used as one of many tools in a toolbox.
For example, vibe coding entire projects is shit but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a locally hosted AI spitting out ~6 lines of boiler plate code that you can edit for your needs. It’s a huge time saver when you don’t code for a living but enjoy it as a hobby. I don’t have unlimited time for hobbies and my local chatbot does let me accomplish some tasks faster.
Edit: for those of you who disagree, I’m curious to know at what scope you’re thinking about AI at. Are you just thinking about the tech and/or larger social consequences and/or environmental impacts etc. If we’re just talking about the tech, the tech is amazing and has its uses but if you’re thinking about it more broadly then I get it.
One example where it may be truly revolutionary is astrophysics research. I saw a lecture by an astronomer talking about it. Astrophysics works well with the limitations of AI. A lot of their work is building simplified models to study large complex astrophysical systems. Imagine someone modeling the formation of planets in a circumstellar disk.
The key is that these are very contained problems. You're just trying to simulate a little toy solar system. The code can all be completely self-contained and doesn't need to deeply integrate with tons of other existing software and infrastructure.
Articles come out all the time that mention AI being able to detect different diseases months or years before symptoms present. It can be trained to sift through lifetimes worth of data and recognize patterns. There’s no way that’s not useful.
The wider social, economic, and environmental impacts are definitely issues that should be looked into but the tech itself is a marvel. The AI hate, I think, mostly comes down to chatbots and the companies pushing them.
You have to be very careful with such articles. They're vulnerable to the same AI hype cycles as anything else. And those systems rarely work as well as the people selling them claim they do. Those articles you're reading are written from the press releases of for-profit companies. The technology is also being used for mass medical fraud.
Sure, all articles should be read with skepticism.
It’s not a huge logical leap to go from identifying faces in photos at some confidence level to identifying some diseases in imaging at some confidence level. Your first link mostly talks about the human factor and specifically states that with bad ai models, the radiologist is less effective but with good ai models, the radiologist is more effective which suggests the technology works. That link isn’t commenting on the technology, it’s commenting on the human using it.
Same source claiming the tech does work: Source1 Source2
Your last link is talking about people being able to forge medical documents. To be honest, I don’t get the point you’re trying to make. I agree that, like with most technologies, people can use AI nefariously. However, generating a photo with AI to forge a medical document and using AI as an assistive tool to scan medical imaging for diseases are two different applications.
Sorry FBI, you’ve hacked into the wrong mainframe