Just utility? I can probably generate a bunch of school textbooks, fan fiction stories and children books with generative AI. Put them on some print on demand service and once some sorry soul is fooled and buys them, it's some utility. At least to me...

I think it's super involved to assess utility in a good way. Not even the large companies know whether AI coding makes their workforce more or less productive once everything is factored in. So, if it's the kind of utility they're looking for. And then there will be downsides so we gotta balance and weigh everything...

If you're putting it there as some impossible first step to do... Well done 😄

... or banned until we have adequate time to study the long term effects this technology will have on child development.

we already struggle as a society with educating and shaping kids into well rounded, emotionally stable, socially competent adults.

we need to do a better job funding and prioritizing child welfare in general before we sign off on allowing billionaire owned Fortune 5 companies a direct pipeline into the consciousness of still developing human minds. just as a matter of public health policy, let alone performance/utility.

There is more to ai than just its potential use.

Many of us grew up expecting ai due to reading and watching science fiction. I doubt the majority expected it to be controlled by the worst people on the planet, or that it would be used to manipulate society, or that it would be environmentally destructive, or that it would be deliberately used for privacy invasion/control/fascism.

It was meant to be a good thing.

Based.

I think that AI as, for example, a super-summarizer, or a search engine on steroids, is fairly good, but it at least should give ALL the sources that were used, put a big disclaimer, and a huge liability of responsibility, as user SHOULD and MUST be reviewing all sources.

Basically, it should be just a tool to find rather niche, rare, obscure or otherwise buried by SEO sources.

But if you just want it to do all the work for you, then you probably should be automatically disqualified from your educative or public institution.

There is some utility, and frankly it won't go away so kids should eventually be taught its use and its failures.

These LLM models can be very useful for organizing large data sets. I know I've saved hours of time by feeding it very specific instructions to create some data classes and subsequent symbology for a couple of hundred points.

However, it never would have worked if I didn't already have the knowledge on how the software I was using to display my data worked and a strong knowledge of my data. It only worked because I was able to give it hyper specific instructions on how to process my data. Even then I still had to proof and make some tweeks, but ultimately a time saver.

This is what kids need to be taught. The first assignment given in high school allowing the use of AI should task students with running a selection of prompts to produce an incorrect statement or answer. Then students should be instructed to "trick" the AI into giving a wrong answer themselves.

Diagnosing is a separate process that involves several steps, so I’m setting that word aside but

Identifying cancer in imaging or pathology smears is one of the better things certain types (not generative, not LLM) of AI is actually good for. But again it’s specifically tweaked programs that aren’t just general usage.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-pastries-cancers

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31110349/

Leasing to unnecessary procedures and costs is probably the reason why dental offices would be interested, lol.

Though to clarify, did dental offices started using LLMs?

The things is that LLM and to a lesser degree other generative AI (generating pictures, music, videos) are the things that generated current hype and they have the hallucination issue.

The traditional AI that we had for years like image recognition, or solving specific problems (for example driving a car), machine learning (back then we were more humble and that name was used to emphasize that it doesn't actually think) etc those things are as they used to be and they don't have this specific hallucination issue. The hallucination is really problem of the LLMs, but looks like now people call everything AI, which technically is not wrong (even things that we take for granted like GPS navigation or speech recognition are AI), but that help LLM obscure itself with other intentions.

I actually hope dentists use the old proven image recognition not asking chatgpt which is a chat bot that also incorporates other technologies to make it look better than it actually is.

Man, we can't even teach basic media literacy

I definitely agree with this, tech literacy should absolutely be taught. I view this as similar to how elementary aged children aren't allowed to use calculators in math, because it's actually pretty important that you learn to do the basics. But the reality is that AI is being used in all sorts of professional environments in very productive ways now, and it will be important to learn how to utilize it skillfully and ethically.

The article link works (it's an archive.today link, not the WashPost site itself)