I have no idea what Matthew would do, first off. Secondly, AI powered search engines are bad and unnecessary. They always give incorrect information/results because their learning algorithms are both still too ineffective, as well as they are able to be either intentionally or unintentionally skewed by the people who use it.
Depends on what you use them for. I find AI extraordinarily powerful for matters that don't have any kind of political, philosphical, and religious implications, so your broad brush is not helpful. So, for instance, just last night I worked with AI to generate some database code that would have taken me 2-3 weeks to write from scratch on my own, but ChatGPT did it in 2-3 hours, well the two of us combined did, where I told it what to write, checked it, tested it, debugged it, made modificaitons to it, etc.
So HERE is the power behing AI vs. just "search engines". AI keeps the context of your entire SESSION, and that's where it's power comes from. When you do a Google Search and it doesn't give you what you need, you start over and keep modifying your search, but an AI session keeps the context ...
1) I need you write a script that iterates through all the user tables in any given database and writes a trigger that does these 5 things, etc.
2) I run the code, test it, play with it
3) I come back and say, "OK, I got these errors." -> several iterations til errors are gone
4) Now, I found a couple use cases that I myself missed. Amend this code to do this here, and that there instead.
You can see the FLOW of how it retains context of your Chat session. NOT a simple "search engine". I did this for about 2 hours and the result was a set of scripts that literally would have taken me 2-3 weeks to write from scratch.
On other topics, for instance ... I went in search of St. Philomena. I told ChatGPT to find anything it could about her, and got various accounts from those nuns who had private revelations about her life, and I told it to assume that these revelations were accurate, and I started asking questions. After about 2 hours, I think I found out who her father and mother werre, and a relative or two ... i.e. that she was a real person, and verified that all the information in the private revelations fit. At one point, it said that her father was a Greek King, so I dug into who might qualify as a Greek King in the context of the Roman empire, since this King also went to visit the Emperor, and were negotiating. Putting all the dots together, I found that the only candidate would be an outliser "vassal King" from the Bosporus, and then I played with timelines, etc. ... and figured out who the guy was, a real historical figure. I also saw that one version of the private revelation mentioned her meeting with Diocletian, but then I asked it to dig up the original version, which it found in Italian and translated, after having me OCR a PDF with some tool, and it turns out that it just said meeting with the Emperor, and not the name Diocletian, which was added by some later individual "interpreting". Well, under Diocletian you had the Tetrarchy, where the likely culprit was in fact one of his sub-emperors, a "Caesar", since he was closer to Bosporus, AND the guy was known for depraved morals. Diocletian, despite having his name added to the greates Christian persecution, was initially opposed to it, and he was actually known to not particularly care about various pleasures (food, wine, sex) but was more "all business" ... but he was manipulated into going along with it by this one Caesar who was a pervert and a hater of Christianity (that often goes together), and the motivation of this perv could very well have been explained by the St. Philomena episode. ... I'm going to print it up into a Substack Post, "Finding Philomena ..."
It's also an invaluable tool for educational purposes. So, for instance, I wanted to learn a new programming language / platform, so I asked it to help teach me, give me a tutorial, starting with an overview. Well, there were some terms in the overview, so I said, "OK, hold on, what does [this word] mean. Take a step back." and so forth, until I was ready to move on. Then I could ask it to provide sample exercises, and tell it to check my work. "Give me some sample requirements" so you go off and try your hand at it, and then you submit the work and it can evaluate it. OR, if you get stuck, you can ask it for help. If you are the type who wnat more theory and less practice, or more practice and less theory ... you can self-guide your own education however you want. This stuff is actually quite amazing. When learning new things, it used to be that you had to watch some video, which was NOT interactive, so if the presentation was no good or if it had too many exercises with too little explanation or vice versa, or you didn't understand something ... you're stuck.
As long as you're smart enough to not trust it for the wrong things, or like I did with St. Philomena, tell it you don't want to hear about how the private revelation was undoubtedly made up, i.e. just assume it's accurate, things like that ... AI is amazing.
With that said, it is in fact all "smoke and mirrors". There's no ACTUAL "intelligence" involved in any way, but just the "appearance" of intelligence. It keeps track of your "session" by having an ID for the session and then just re-scans it with every new question, vs. how search engines work in a "stateless" manner. This requires lots of code adn TONS OF COMPUTING RESOURCES. That's why nearly all AI is taking a loss right now and governments are trying to subsidize it. JUST the energy draw from these things is enormous, so much so that they were proposing to start back up one of the Three Mile Island reactors that got shut down due to that infamous incident in the 1970s.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-aiThis is the "magic" of AI. Oh, on a similar note, an Amazon "brick and mortar" experimental store claimed to be using AI to make it so that you could walk into the store, pick up whatever you wanted, in your pocket, purse, any bag, and just walk out, no checkout lines. Well, they got busted where it was discovered that they had a huge call center with 1,000 Indians watching video cameras and just typing in what people picked up and walked out with LOL "AI"
NOW, these are the benefits of AI, and those rolling it out are NOT interested in any benefits to mankind, but to control us. As AI gets better, which it will, quickly, and exponentially, it'll be IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference between reality and AI generated deep fakery, where you can watch something happen on "live" video and not realize that the individual wasn't αssαssιnαtҽd but that it was all AI. Currently there are still glitches that give it away, but there's going to come a time where we'll be living in a completely fictionalized society. They'll also blame AI for some of the dastardly things they're going to roll out.
FINALLY, poeple have to avoid the temptation to imaginet that there's some actual intelligence behind it, where you believe you're interracting with a sentient being. THAT is how ouija boards allow demons in, where people try to interact with and thereby open the door to demonic infiltration into their lives. Similarly, you could invite a demon in via AI if you start thinking of it as a "being" as in "oh, look, it's developing self-awareness and passing the Turing test" ... that's when you're going to have problems.
But I find AI to be tremendous boost in productivity and I'd be a fool not to use it. It gives me a huge competitive advantage at work. I just submitted these database scripts that look like 2-3 weeks worth of work but knocked it out in a couple hours. It's great for research, training, leaning new things, since it's like having your own tutor or teacher right there.
At one point, I asked my son to assemble some bedroom furniture for his younger sisters. He set about with a manual screwdiver. So I said, "no, don't ... here's my power screwdriver / drill. Use this instead. It'll save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration." Turns out that it almost literally had like 200 screws. Now imagine how long that would take with a conventional / manual screwdriver, vs. with the power driver/drill, it was "zip ... zip ... zip" (probably 5 seconds for each screw). He was thanking me and then expressing amazement at this tool. Same thing with AI. If you start using it, you'll be thinking, "man, where would I be without this, and how long would this have taken." It's like before the internet. I wonder how I figured stuff out back then ... with great difficulty, trial and error, frustration, at the cost of breaking and ruining things (whether repairs of items or cooking meals, etc.). But after the internet, you can find some jackass who's devoted his life to just about every single obscure topic ever known to man and who put up a Youtube video to guide you through it step by step. For car repairs, I'd have to go to the library (or bookstore) and find the "Haynes" manual (or the Chilton) for my particular car, and then check it out, hope that there were no mistakes, and try to figure it out form the pictures ... a far cry from typing something in the interwebs and having a youtube pop up with someone doing it. People who do repairs will tell you that sometimes the hardest stuff to figure out are HOW DO YOU EVEN OPEN THE THING ... whether a section of a car, an appliance, a computer ... without breaking the case or the enclosure, as there are always "hidden tabs", where if you don't "choose wisely" and, say, pull, instead of push ... you break it, and then have to go buy a new one. But you watch some guy do it and realize, ah, yeah, to remove the inside of the card door, there are these 5 screws, hidden here and here, and then 7 or 8 tabs that you have to slide to the right (go left and you break them) etc. Similarly, AI represents a "quantum leap" in terms of productivity and knowledge, but we also have to avoid the pitfalls.
Topic: Grok on Setting Up a Traditional Catholic AI (Read 6750 times)