Another comic strip wonderfully rendered by Nadine Scholtes!
I mean, who knows? Maybe years from now, A.I. really will be all that. But for now, it feels like a bunch of very wealthy people have made a strategic decision to spend incomprehensible amounts of money pushing A.I. at us – at a considerable cost to the environment. Computer scientists Shaolei Ren and Adam Wierman wrote:
Even putting aside the environmental toll of chip manufacturing and supply chains, the training process for a single AI model, such as a large language model, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon. This is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of hundreds of households in America. Furthermore, AI model training can lead to the evaporation of an astonishing amount of fresh water into the atmosphere for data center heat rejection, potentially exacerbating stress on our already limited freshwater resources.
All these environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, with the global AI energy demand projected to exponentially increase to at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by 2026.
It would be one thing if A.I. was actually miraculously improving our lives. But although A.I. does have some genuine uses, most ordinary people’s encounters with A.I. are not just useless, but intrusive and sometimes actively harmful, in ways large, small, and stupid.
A.I. has created a great deal of work for teachers and professors trying to keep their students from having A.I. write their papers. The prestige science fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to stop accepting submissions because they were being flooded with terrible A.I.-generated stories.
I had to stop using Google to search, because Google insists on showing A.I. generated summaries above search results. But A.I. doesn’t reliably get even facts right, and the only way I have to tell if the information is accurate or not is… more searching. (I now use the Duck Duck Go.search engine, which is comparitively minimalistic and provides better results. )
(But apparently even Duck Duck Go occasionally offers A.I. summaries of search results, aaargh! I didn’t know that, I found that out searching as I was writing this Patreon post. Although, to be fair, they apparently come up infrequently and unobtrusively enough that I’ve never noticed, and that function can be shut off if you go to settings).
The annoyance I experienced with Google search’s intrusive A.I. is, obviously, an incredibly minor issue – but billions of people search with google (which has over 90% of the search market), and that adds up to a lot of minor annoyance. And a lot of energy usage. And virtually no one asked for this!
I’ve gotten distracted. The point of this cartoon – remember this cartoon? This is an essay about a cartoon – is that I just find the plethoric claims of A.I.’s hyperbolic pushers to make a funny contrast with the dull and annoying reality.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, each showing a difference scene.
PANEL 1
A large caption at the top of the panel says “PITCH.”
The image shows a woman speed-walking while walking her dog. In the background, a homeless man sits against a wall reading a newspaper. The woman is wearing headphones, and a speech balloon points to the headphones.
HEADPHONES: Artificial Intelligence is almost here – and it’s gonna rock your world!
PANEL 2
A woman sits at a table scattered with board game pieces and reads a manual. In the background, a TV is on, and a slick-looking blonde man wearing a suit and tie is grinning and lifting his arms high in excitement.
MAN ON TV: Get ready! Your personal A.I. will do everything for you! Tax returns! Therapy! Pet care! Foot massages!
PANEL 3
Inside someone’s apartment. There’s no human in sight, but there is a dog and a cat. On the sofa is an open laptop, and on the laptop’s screen a blonde pitchwoman is grinning. The dog sits watching the laptop, tail wagging.
PITCHWOMAN: With Artificial Intelligence, no one will ever be sad or lonely again! A.I. is life!
PANEL 4
A large caption at the top of this panel says “REALITY.”
A young guy sits with his feet up on the sofa and his cat beside him. He’s reading his smartphone. A caption shows us what’s on his smartphone.
SMARTPHONE: A.I. powered toenail clippers $179.00
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is cartoonist slang for unnecessary (but hopefully amusing) details slipped into the cartoon. (You can stop reading now if you’re not interested.)
PANEL 1
The homeless man also has a dog, a cute little dog with a big white mustache – probably a schnauzer? The dog has a weary expression as it watches the bigger dog walking past.
The big dog walking past looks kind of snooty, and is wearing sunglasses.
There’s graffiti on the wall behind the homeless man. The graffiti says, respectively: “Steve.” “Sondheim.” “Lovett + Todd 4ever.” “Nice is different than good.” and “Withers wither with her.” Those are all references to the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. There’s also “BG,” which stands for “background.”
The homeless man’s newspaper is called “Background Tribune.” The headline says “Capybara to Rule World.” The sub headline says “‘It’s time for the grown-ups to take charge’ says adorable rodent.”
PANEL 2
The thick book the woman is reading is entitled “The Overly Complex Board Game Directions (vol 3 of 12)”. Parts scattered on the table include tokens, chips, six-sided dice, a twenty-sided die, a rook (the chess piece), an hourglass timer, playing cards, and a Rubik’s cube.
On the TV, a chyron at the bottom of the screen says “Man loses sight from reading tiny print.”
PANEL 3
Apparently the pets have wrecked this apartment – the wallpaper is torn, the cat has done serious damage to the leg of the sofa, and there’s a urine puddle near the dog. The cat is sitting on the windowsill staring at a small bird on the other side of the window, who is sticking its tongue out at the cat and doing the thumbs-on-ears gesture that accompanies the tongue, as well as it can manage since it has wings.
PANEL 4
The cat is sitting like a human on its butt, back leaning against a cushion, with a bowl of food lying on its tummy. (I love this cat! 100% made up by Nadine.)
A magazine on the coffee table is entitled “Rich Pretty People.” The magazine shows a beautiful woman in a fancy gown with dollar bills falling down around her. The caption at the bottom of the cover says “They’re just like you but much better!”
The newspaper on the coffee table is entitled “End of Comic,” and the headline says “Goodbye!”
What continually puzzles me about AI is that it seems like a solution in search of a problem – it’s not making anyone’s life easier except for the unprincipled or dishonest (the story about the sci fi mag closing submissions was depressing as all get out) or those looking to replace human beings no matter how poor the replacement is just to replace human beings (which is in some circles considered prima facie a good thing not needing any additional explanation.)
Since you put cats and dogs in the comic, I have to share my conspiracy theory about them. At CES 2024, some scam company was promoting “AI Dog bowls.” What’s AI doing in a dog food bowl? Who knows! The key point of interest is that they were not announcing AI cat bowls. Why not?
Obviously* the reason is that cats can smell AI and will refuse to eat out of a bowl with AI in it! Dogs can also smell AI but they don’t care.
*Okay, not really obvious.
Great comic, I love the background graffiti!
So instead I’m going to argue about the blog post under the comic.
I’ve heard this claim before and I don’t get it at all. Yeah, the AI summary isn’t helpful, but underneath it are all the actual search results. What’s stopping you from clicking on those like you’ve been doing for decades? The AI summaries haven’t actually replaced search results. If you use Firefox, uBlock Origin can even hide the AI “summaries.”
The bigger concern IMO is that there are websites which have been generated by AI, and they can appear in search results. That’s going to be a problem regardless of which search engine you use.
I think I should point out, as many people are shocked to hear, that Duck Duck Go does not provide any search results, good or bad: it just feeds your search query into Microsoft Bing, and returns the results provided by Bing.
If you think Bing (and hence DDG) is giving you better search results than Google, don’t be afraid to keep using it: they aren’t any more evil than Google.
However, I do think it’s important to point this out, because a lot of people who report their reasons for using DDG seem to be mislead about what it is. Duck Duck Go tries to market themselves as a scrappy underdog fighting the tyranny of Google, and anecdotally a lot of people seem to believe that using DDG means they are “escaping Big Tech.” Many people are disappointed to learn that using DDG supports the single largest tech company. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse than using Google, but it does mean that if you are choosing to use DDG, you should have a reason other than “it’s not Big Tech” or “not supporting AI companies.”
Speaking of companies that pretend to be scrappy underdogs, “OpenAI,” the brand-name behind ChatGPT, also likes to market themselves as standing up to the tyranny of Google. But “OpenAI” is also majority-owned by Microsoft.
We’ve had a use for it for decades: it helps you type a little bit faster by predicting the next word you are going to type. Until a couple years ago, this was called “autocomplete.” It doesn’t always correctly predict the next word you are going to type, but it doesn’t have to: it just has to predict correctly some of the type to save you a bit of time typing. It’s not world-changing or revolutionary. It’s also not new. It’s been around since at least the 1960s.
In 1964, Ray Solomonoff proved mathematically that a model for predicting (i.e. an autocomplete model) is equivalent to a model for lossless data compression. So, we have another use for what’s now called AI: storing our files in slightly smaller disks. Barry used an “AI” to compress the comic’s image into a PNG (which incorporates a lossless compression algorithm into the format), likely without realizing it.
It’s also not revolutionary or world-changing, nor is it new. We’ve had autocomplete and lossless data compression for 60 years!
Imagine if tomorrow, all the news media pundits started talking about this brand-new, never before seen technology: television. This totally new invention was just invented five minutes ago and will change everything! That’s what the AI hype sounds like to people who were studying compression before. The hype is over technology that we’ve all been using since the 1960s.
Here’s an XKCD from 2012 about using Microsoft Swiftkey (an iOS/Android keyboard app) to generate your “typical” sentence.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1068:_Swiftkey
That’s what’s now being marketed as AI. It’s not in any sense new.
What’s new is an autocomplete program that requires a giant supercomputer and an entire country’s worth of energy to run. And that is, as you say, a solution in search of a problem. I can run gzip or another compression program or autocomplete locally on my laptop, and it runs really fast. What do I gain by using an energy-hogging supercomputer to do the exact same thing?
A totally unimportant, low-stakes disagreement that I can test myself! This is my idea of fun. Thank you. :-p
A test search shows that 1) Bing and DDG don’t produce identical results, 2) the presentation is significantly different, and 3) Bing gives me more ads, some formatted to look like search results.
I searched for “krazy kat george herriman” (I wanted something I was familiar enough with so I might notice a bad result).
The first three results are identical – but Bing put all but the first result below a bunch of Wikipedia headings and pull quotes and a video, making me scroll down more to see the other results. Not letting me see more than one result without scrolling seems like a bad presentation. The right sidebar info is similar on both pages (both quote and link to Wikipedia). But the Bing sidebar says that Krazy Kat was “Originally published January 1, 1975,” which is wrong by 62 years, and also includes at least one ad link (to Amazon.)
Scrolling further down, after the third result (Britannica), the search results become different. And Bing is making me scroll more by putting more stuff in the column. Both search engines are producing good search results, but Bing’s presentation is less clean and mixes up more other stuff with the search results.
Scrolling still further down, looks like the two search engines are finally both doing no-nonsense presentations, ignoring the pull quotes at the top from Bing (which might even be useful). Except the bottom three results on Bing seem to be paid ads formatted to look like the other results.
So with respect, you’re mistaken to imply I’d get the same results from Bing and DDG. (FWIW, DDG claims it compiles results from a lot of sources including Bing.)
Also, I never said I liked DDG because of big tech vs small tech. But since you brought it up, DDG is a relatively small privately-owned company, and that they use Bing and other search engines to generate some of their results doesn’t change that, or the fact that they are probably 1000s of times smaller than Microsoft. And I don’t think they have to pay Bing or any other company to use their search results as a source.
Since I wrote the post mentioning DDG, by the way, I switched to searching with “search for a cause,” which is a fundraising for charity thing that just returns Yahoo’s search results. I’ve also added “Tab for a cause” extension to Chrome, which raises money for charity when I open new tabs. The good done is extremely marginal, of course, but so is my effort. :-p
(The “for a cause” company doesn’t give 100% of the funds raised to charity – most of it goes to their operations and paying their employees – but I think they have a fairly plausible explanation for why doing this allows them to raise more money than giving 100% would).
My take on this:
Google is the best at searching, deliberately bad at keeping trash out of sight, and evil for retaining way too much of your data, as well as cross-referencing it with what it gathers from all the tentacles it’s got in many, many, MANY websites.
Bing is quite a bit worse at searching, but its parent company does not have the ability to gather as much data about what else you are doing. They try, though.
Duck Duck Go uses other people’s search engines (not just Google’s) but compiles its own databases, and does sometimes a pretty bang up job. It also claims not to collect so much information. It certainly does not exhibit the tendency to taint your search depending on what it thinks your previous searches were about.
Personally, I use my own interface, and query Goggle, then list only the search results, barely formatted, but easy to read. I also try to avoid any mechanism through which Google can taint the search by letting past history influence it. I know of at least two ways in which I am failing, but I’ll survive.
When I cannot go through my own little interface, I use Duck Duck Go. The problem is that it sometimes has real blind spots. It aggregates so much information about a particular meaning that it becomes hard to get to the other meanings. And its search operators are not only much more limited than its competitors’, but also, much less aggressive in obeying the letter of what you want (Looking at you, “-“)
So… Google is evil if you use it without care, but has yet to crack on people taking the good and dropping the bad on the floor. Duck Duck Go is trying to be nicer, but it nowhere near as competent. Bing is useless middle ground.
99% of all issues are avoided just by using Google in privacy mode, without an active or recent Facebook/gmail/Spotify/yada/yada connection on the same IP, and, not or, from an IP that regularly changes. Not something that is realistically possible to achieve on a phone that you use for most of your online tasks, but much easier from a home PC set up for privacy.
That’s if you are worried just about corporations. Those who can issue court orders to providers will always have a chance to track you down, even if you use onion links on Tor through a VPN.
Much as I like the idea of a rubric’s cube, it’s spelled Rubik’s cube. (Now what would a rubric’s cube be?)
Thanks for the catch! And, I have no idea whatsoever what a rubric’s cube would be or would do. But I’d guess that you’d want to do it in the established way every time.