A problem looking for a solution, a cage looking for a bird, whatever you name it, the current AI craze has gone insane. It was just regular chatbots at first, but now it’s being added to search engines, browsers, programming apps, and other places where it shouldn’t have been added to.

I know this might sound very political, but unfortunately the way that things are, it’s impossible to decouple what I think of it and what it does around me. So this is more of a post of what I feel about it, rather than explaining why it’s bad (it’s bad). Or maybe it’s both.

Let me be as real as I can be with this, AI in its current form is essentially useless. There are some good uses but I’d rather not have a large bias about it. The uses sometimes can be so limited that you might as well not bother at all. Most of the things called AI are just automated tasks with a new name. Let’s go over a few.

AI Chatbots

AI Chatbots are just that, chatbots. They are better at replying to you than before, but make no mistake, these are just regular chatbots, funny some times, and hilariously wrong most times. The so called ‘AI Hallucination’ exists because they scrape their data from the internet, which isn’t the most reliable place. There’s plenty of websites with misinformation and unverified sources meaning that if you scrap them, you’ll bake this into your system. And that means… Bad data being fed back to you. This is called “Garbage In, Garbage Out“.

Another use for Chatbots is for programming. It can make things efficient, or so I heard. Usually and most certainly you already need to be a programmer to use it, right?

This sort of thing created something called ‘vibe coding’, which boils down to people that don’t know how to code asking the AI do their job for them and that’s it. They know nothing that the AI chatbot did, and just use it, because it ‘feels’ correct, which is where the ‘vibe’ name comes from. Absolutely trash. There’s no defense for this practice.

Rating: Bad and dangerous.

AI Image Generation

This is where I tend to like things, at least initially. AI Image Generation can be pretty sloppy and dangerous, yes, but overall it can be used in good ways, like creating concepts. However I’ve seen that the same idea with AI Chatbots can be done with Image Generation: A dataset trained with bad info can generate bad images. It used to be pretty bad and easily recognizable. Nowadays, it’s much better but even then, you can tell if it’s AI by noticing subtle differences. The real problem is causing things to be in the uncanny valley when it’s done in a realistic way.

The other bad thing is the amount of scammers that exist. Sure, they have always existed, but this has changed the game entirely. They’ll generate all sorts of things to get people hooked into their things. Or say they made things they absolutely didn’t make at any point. Of course, none of those are new things, they have existed for ages. What this did is to make easier to get away with it, and boy, they have done it. Oh and I can’t forget those AI image posts on the slop factory called Facebook.

Rating: Bad. I give it this rating because it made scammers scam even harder and misinformation much quicker to spread.

AI Voice Cloning

A very impressive aspect of the technology that was immediately blasted for being used for scamming. Although the prognosis was a good idea, the fact you can clone someone’s voice and inflections almost correctly to get it to say anything you want is both fun and dangerous, mostly the latter. The tech itself is impressive, but… We’ve had this for ages, no AI was needed for this sort of thing, like with AI Chatbots.

Rating: Dangerous. Scammers will try to scam you a lot with it.

AI “Something here”

And then the rest of everything with AI on it. It’s usually a variant of the chatbot, maybe with some sort ‘exclusive’ AI enhancing feature. But again, these two have existed before, and nothing has changed. I believe they just renamed some things to have AI on it just because it is similar enough to the things they already have.

And it goes on and on. Some stuff might be genuinely useful, like Samsung’s Galaxy AI live call transcription tool. Actually pretty good… Until you realize that if you’re doing an international call, you are most certainly speaking the other person’s language or they are speaking yours, making the feature pointless.

I could go on with some other image enhancement features in Gemini, but those already existed long before Gemini was a thing (and it was exclusive to Pixel Phones for a while) but for most part, most stuff that was called AI because… Something something Venture Capitalists please give me money?

Rating: Atrocious.

A Zombie Industry

The so called AI Industry has been dead the moment it started, similar to cryptocurrencies and NFTs. They have tried over and over to prove they can turn a profit but simply can’t. The key difference between NFTs and AI is that NFTs were never even alive, just vaporware, while AI is somewhat tangible. You can generate text, images and audio and those will be real files. That’s something that NFTs could never accomplish. Even then I’d dare to call it a zombie, because it exists and it’s burning money like an alcohol-only brazilian car from the early 90’s: faster than you imagine, and it smells. The smell is nice but you know that something was being burned here.

I use NovelAI though

I’d like to end this by saying that I’m very much the concept of hypocrisy or something like that, because I use NovelAI. I personally think that AI is all bad (see above) but NovelAI has helped me create concepts that I’ve either drawn it myself later or commissioned people to do it for me. So I view it as a very (unethical) tool that I won’t miss if it’s gone tomorrow. It would be better to train things myself, yes, but unfortunately, I’m not made out of money, and until I am, this is how I’d do things.

Additionally, I’ll never ever ask money for it, nor will I deceive people by using it. If it was made by AI, I’ll say it as much, letting people know and judge it.