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Tech companies have become less and less concerned about the negative impact of their products, more flagrant when it comes to anti-competitive behaviour, and are now thoroughly a political project that are pose to be in close collaboration with some of the worst political elements of the west. That's in addition to their long history of collaboration with authoritarians around the world in order to gain access to their markets.

What little optimism the first edition had about the future potential of generative models turned out to be completely unwarranted. Even though the new edition integrates quite a bit of the research I did after the first edition, the biggest reason for the revision was to make it clear that I don't think LLMs or diffusion models can ever be "good for business" and that using them in your organisation risks pushing even a moderately well-run company into a Boeing-style death spiral

That's even without getting into the political issues. Generative models are by their nature highly political and authoritarian systems and their generative nature makes them a unique threat. That these vendors might collaborate with authoritarian governments on its own is reason enough to avoid any use of any of these systems.

And the environmental impact is, again, on its own a big enough issue to avoid these systems. The first edition had a faint hope that these systems might be put to good use in the future and in the meantime we had to take care in how we approach them. But two years later it's clear that optimism was unwarranted. These systems are just dangerous, politically, economically, and environmentally

And that's the biggest qualitative difference between the first edition of The Intelligence Illusion and the second. The first edition was a hopeful and optimistic tool to guide businesses to safe harbour. The second edition is a defensive tool to help people talk managers out of littering their own businesses with ticking time bombs.

https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

Since I don’t have the energy to reply to everybody going “WTF do you mean? Everybody uses AI”, what I mean is already in the thread:

- That the original book had some optimism about the tech implies that the biggest problem isn’t the tech.
- Mentioning anti-competitive behaviour and negative impacts would imply that a big source of risk are the vendors
- Boeing-style implies that the danger is not a question of individual productivity but instead a dysfunctional system created by management

@alcinnz it's so remarkably useless. I have tried to use it some times and it has never been more helpful than a rubber duck.

the only productive thin I use the current batch of machine-learning-tools for in day-to-day use is up-scaling, de-noising and grammar checking.

Other than this, they just made my life more difficult due to all the additional garbage on the internet and due to the amount of artists that have taken their work offline.