What About AI? What Do You Think?
The issue I see here is that most of the general public have no idea what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is. Most think of AI as LLMs and even though they are a significant part of AI today they did not evolve in AI until 2018, at least not to the general public. Yet AI has been a field of study and implementation since 1956. Take a look at the history of AI. Obviously it is not a new idea. I cannot tell you what all scientists think of AI. I can tell you what this scientist thinks of AI.
AI is a practical tool that can be used to make your research a lot more productive. AI can parse data sets far faster than humans can. With that said keep in mind that Natural Intelligence (NI) is not perfect and AI is modeled after NI, using an Artificial Neural Network that can be taught. Just like our own NI it can be taught wrong, it can produce bad results, just like us. It can even produce mistakes faster than any team of engineers could!
Yet most of the time it produces useful results. So it is a vastly useful tool and one of the greatest achievements of our era.
I do not use general purpose corporate offerings for AI. I use domain specific LLMs that I train locally. They have a far better accuracy rate as they are not trying to evaluate every possible evaluation as they are limited in scope by the domain they are trained in. I see this as the optimal way for a data science research. Also it is great for code analysis though I personally do not have AI generate code. I do not have an issue with those that do. In my opinion any one that has a code base of over 100,000 lines of code and is not using AI analysis is being irresponsible.
The anti-AI collective aka the general public have a very misinformed view of what AI is. Machine Learning (ML) is used to produce an LLM but an LLM is not the extent of what can be done with ML. AI is not chatbots on some corporations unregulated Data Center trained by nefarious methods. Contrary to popular belief. No, it does not take a data center to train a LLM, it can be done at home with a rather modest data science rig, using no more power than a gaming computer. LLMs are not typically built on others Intellectual Property this is an attribute to how unregulated corporation train their LLMs not most data scientists. The whole topic is very skewed. What those AI Data Centers are for is to provide a service, to monetize AI, for the general public and corporations. They are not necessary to train AI nor to implement it.
I am against unregulated corporation doing whatever they please. I am against the way AI Data Centers are being developed with no concern for the environment. I am a humanitarian I am against pretty much anything that is a negative impact on humanity. I am not against AI or ML or LLMs. They are just tools that can be very useful to a data scientist or even the layperson providing they know something about what they are researching in order to vet the information they get.
It seems like everyone has forgotten all the bad advice given by obscure websites and the peer ask and answer sites that excel in being rude but often produce unreliable results even more so than AI. Because people associate LLMs with the behavior of unregulated corporations they do not like LLMs despite the fact that they have no idea what an LLM is. They just know they hate how corporation are monetizing them. I guess it has not occurred to them to address the actual problem and to push for regulations on the corporation in their demographic? Why address a problem by looking at the root of that problem when we can just use derogatory slurs about something we have no idea what it even is? Yes, I was being sarcastic as well as passive aggressive, my apologies. 
We have real concerns with how unregulated corporations are destroying the environment. That has to be addressed. Yet, AI would still be in heavy use even if there were no AI data centers at all. The difference is that it would only be available to people like me with the knowledge of how to build a data science rig and implement the technology stack. The general public would be left out. So you decide, do you want to be left out? Great that is easy just do not use AI. If you do enjoy the benefits of this tool then do the ethical thing and push for regulations on corporations in their development of AI data centers. Enough said. 
Unus Nemo
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