Posts by df@s.dfaria.eu
 (DIR) Post #B49FYBYjjhbb2HZGka by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn't seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.
       
 (DIR) Post #B49Gyk9lpJI5ox7Mg4 by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @abucci The investment I was referring to was not the recent venture capital trend. What I had in mind was investment in artificial intelligence research, which has been a major academic and scientific endeavor since the 1950s, with pioneers such as Alan Turing laying the groundwork.
       
 (DIR) Post #B49GykNazuLkVpaPE8 by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @abucci Current models are part of a long history of research in machine learning, computer science, and computational linguistics. Of course, there is marketing around it, but reducing the entire field to a passing marketing fad ignores decades of serious scientific work.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4Fx5jDH5vuhweWtfs by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @abucci Right, I see your point. But what solution are you proposing? Banning the use of AI? Surely there must be other ways? We could try to educate people on the ethical and responsible use of AI...
       
 (DIR) Post #B4G3qQ6mXi6U1o8l4C by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @abucci I’m not making any demands. What I’m pushing back against is the tone of this recent wave of Mastodon posts, which seem to jump very quickly to blanket prohibition as the supposed “solution” to AI.Of course AI has risks and real problems. No serious person denies that. But proposing to simply ban AI is neither realistic nor particularly helpful. AI isn’t a single product or substance that can be neatly removed from society; it’s a broad set of techniques already embedded across science, medicine, infrastructure, and everyday software. Calling to ban it is like trying to stop the wind with your hands.The asbestos analogy doesn’t hold either. Asbestos is intrinsically harmful: its normal use causes serious health damage. AI is not that kind of thing. Treating them as equivalent is a false analogy. AI is much closer to a tool. Like a knife, it can be used harmfully or constructively. The ethical question is not whether the tool exists, but how it is built, governed, and used.You’re also presenting claims about “AI” being built on stolen material and exploited labor as if they applied to the entire field. Some of those criticisms are valid in specific cases, especially regarding certain corporate practices. But generalizing them to all AI development ignores the existence of university research, open-source projects, and systems trained on licensed or public datasets.What’s striking is that your argument completely ignores the positive applications that already exist: AI assisting medical diagnosis, enabling accessibility tools for disabled users, improving translation between languages, accelerating scientific research, helping analyze complex datasets, or supporting education. You may think some of those benefits are overstated, but pretending they don’t exist at all weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.If we want a serious ethical discussion, the relevant question isn’t “should we ban AI?” but which uses should be restricted or prohibited, and under what rules the rest should operate. That’s precisely the direction policymakers are taking, for example with the European Union AI Act @EUCommission  which regulates AI according to risk levels and bans specific harmful uses rather than treating the entire technology as inherently illegitimate.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7Q3viByKPtm8GnD7Y by df@s.dfaria.eu
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       @activitypub.blog Great! Congrats!