Comment by toasty228
4 hours ago
It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world?
One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).
I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular.
I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.
I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.
I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.