You can use a hammer to build a cupboard, or to bash someone’s skull in, but you can’t use it to make cupcakes with (well, not very effectively, anyway, or hygienically). My point is that each tool has a limited set of purposes it can really be used for and there’s no law of nature that states that all things considered “tools” always have more good purposes than bad, or that the benefits of the good purposes always outweigh the problems caused by the bad.
So it’s not good enough to flatten “AI” to the broader category of “tools” and say because something is considered to be generally true about the category as a whole, that means it’s also true for this specific case; you actually have to look critically at the specific case: who does it empower, in what way, to what extent? And frankly, the ability of the current paradigms of generative AI to empower good people to do good has been minimal to non-existent, whereas bad people have been greatly empowered to do bad. People who do not value truth and to whom the end justifies the means now have an infinite propaganda machine, those who do value truth do not. So the intentions of the people who made the AI isn’t even the biggest problem (though it does make things worse), it’s the intentions of the users. A community-made hammer is just as effective at bashing skulls in as one made by a greedy corporation.
You can use a hammer to build a cupboard, or to bash someone’s skull in, but you can’t use it to make cupcakes with (well, not very effectively, anyway, or hygienically). My point is that each tool has a limited set of purposes it can really be used for and there’s no law of nature that states that all things considered “tools” always have more good purposes than bad, or that the benefits of the good purposes always outweigh the problems caused by the bad.
So it’s not good enough to flatten “AI” to the broader category of “tools” and say because something is considered to be generally true about the category as a whole, that means it’s also true for this specific case; you actually have to look critically at the specific case: who does it empower, in what way, to what extent? And frankly, the ability of the current paradigms of generative AI to empower good people to do good has been minimal to non-existent, whereas bad people have been greatly empowered to do bad. People who do not value truth and to whom the end justifies the means now have an infinite propaganda machine, those who do value truth do not. So the intentions of the people who made the AI isn’t even the biggest problem (though it does make things worse), it’s the intentions of the users. A community-made hammer is just as effective at bashing skulls in as one made by a greedy corporation.