Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

It appears you are only capable of seeing things from a personal perspective. Let me educate you on WHY adding computers was and continues to be such a huge 'positive' impact:

The computer guys figured out 'DRM'. This feature allows the manufacturer to more fully control the entire car. What I mean by that is that there are not really ANY aftermarket stereos anymore. Additionally there are more and more parts that can only be provided by the manufacturer. Many of those parts are designed to have a short lifetime. Taken together, what all of this means is that the manufacturer now has a steady income in relation to repairing vehicles. Or, in other words, it is wildly profitable to abuse your customers with locked in parts replacement... but, there is an additional benefit, the cost to build the car is cheaper than with purely mechanical components but they can charge more because it is "more complicated".

In other words, it is profitable. The reason you can't see that is because you see it from your own perspective: Why would you want to fuck over anyone? You would be an honest merchant; therefore, you do not see how being sneaky and slimy will increase your profits.

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

The issue is that with the proper set of prompts, the entire copyrighted work can be coaxed from the AI, which is distribution. Even more problematic is that numerous prompts can evince portions of the copyrighted work, portions large enough to qualify as copyright infringement.

If the AI kept it to themselves, they could train on as much copyrighted work as they want... but then, they would not be commercially available.

You can train the AI that you use on anything you want, copyrighted or not. An AI that is to be used commercially can not be trained on copyrighted works because the AI regurgitates portions, or all, of that copyrighted material.

Facial recognition is really neat technology, and we are all slightly better off thanks to its development. It's also imperfect, and nearly-guaranteed to be a net negative if you fully trust it, without human verification.

If you want to come out ahead by using cool technology, you're going to have to think about how to use it. There just isn't any shortcut around thinking.

If you have something which is only 99.9% reliable, that can be useful but it's going to be wrong sometimes. How are you preventing that wrongness from breaking your system? Insulting (much less turning-away) regular, recurring, paying customers is usually considered a really bad move, generally resulting in lower profits.

Free money falls out of the sky. Should we take it? Today we'll be interviewing Republicans, and learning that the answer is No because asceticism is a fundamental ideal that we should all strive toward. Burn a sacrifice instead!

Guess what? If I happen to use a particular sequence of words, I get called out for using AI when I don't even know what the trigger words are! (I mention this because this type of thing happens to me a lot where I say a particular sequence of words and it triggers people in a way unknown to me previously)

In general, there are a lot of good and bad things.

(lol, CAPTCHA was 'flawed', same as your reasoning)

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

Trying to burn the country to the ground so we can rebuild a better one?

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

It's much worse than that; you would end up preventing anyone else from doing it for 20 years, until the patent expired. Of course that would make Slashdot!

As I just said to someone else using this line of logic: Explain SystemD...

Then explain SystemD...

The only thing that matters is that they were able to exfiltrate your data again.