The Guideline of Two Things Not to Discuss Is Now Three
The rough guideline for what not to discuss in polite company are (well were) two things: Politics and Religion. This is to avoid arguments and rabbit hole to hell conversations.
It seems there now is a third on this list, AI. I’ve seen a good gathering utterly devolve after AI start coming up. Much of the conversation isn’t well informed (or even partially informed), but there is a lot to know and a lot of different sides / dimensions. Even being well informed on all sides one can still be deeply conflicting for an individual.
AI, as a whole has been around a long time. I started into AI/ML (along with NLP) in 2008 and found it helpful, but found it resource intensive and you had to know quite a bit to use it. In 2008 I figured I was behind. Today it is easier to use, but you still have to know a decent amount around what it is you are doing in what you are wanting to do and know know AI well, to get something decent out.
The current efforts aren’t all they are cracked up to be, vastly over-hyped, and the “creative” outputs are tilting toward meh at best and often best skipped. Many people think the intelligence portion is smart in domains they themself don’t understand well, but not so great in areas they do understand well.
Quite a few times I’ve started to have, what I hope to be a good discussion about all the dimensions of AI (it is vastly more than GenAI) and learned those discussion I need to keep to a few people whom know well, all the sides or many of them.