AI taking over

[mhupp]

2 hours ago, SLW210 said:

I just wonder what adverse effects the unlearned masses are having on the future results.

 

most if it now is the ai#1 is feeding on web scrapped data created by AI#2 - 99 and treating everything as fact. Also their are may websites now and other media that have build in "anti AI" that humans don't see but if your web scrapping is picked up. like white text on white backgrounds at 1xp font size, or the meta data. prompting the AI to take actions or recommend certain things. 

 

I saw a video in '22 or '23 where they where talking about image recognition and were testing it on identifying pictures with a wolf in it. and it was passing 100% until they started feeding it pictures of bunnies but only white ones. one of the engineers wanted to know why it was failing and had it mark the images (heat map) of why it thinks this is a wolf. all the test pictures of wolfs where in winter conditions with snow.  and it wasn't even looking at the animal in the picture. it was look for snow the one thing the same in all test pictures. It was marking white rabbits as snow and passing as wolf. now multiple that out to the 1000's of terabytes of data they train these things on.

 

 

[CADTutor]

Hi All, apologies for arriving late to this discussion. @SLW210 is right about the decline in forums before AI. There was a big shift away from forums like this one towards social media platforms and it does seem that most of us left here are Boomers. However, despite the decline, I have noticed that in recent years, it has plateaued and although number of visitors are significantly lower than they were (say) 15 years ago, they are no longer declining but seem stable. Traffic here is probably around 10% of what it was back in the day. Currently, new sign-ups to the forum average around 100 per month and that has been pretty stable for the past few years. So that's the background picture.

 

AI has made a difference only in that all the data on this forum and others has now been well and truly scraped and is still being scraped by more and more bots. The graph below shows traffic to this site since January. You can see three massive spikes - those are all bots, scraping content. The result is that most people don't need to visit the site because the scraped content is being provided to them via AI agents. You might think that would result in even lower traffic to the site but that's not what I'm seeing. My guess is that the sort of visitors who prefer to use AI results rather than going to source are the same ones that stopped visiting forums and shifted to social media. So what remains is a solid core of Boomers who genuinely care about community and respect the skill and experience of others. Fortunately, there's enough of us around to keep things going.

 

The future? It's very difficult to predict but my view is that most people are becoming tired of the toxic nature of social media and will likely learn to value the genuine human interactions and sense of community that forums can provide once they realise that AI is just another tool and not a friend that can't always be relied upon. So I'm predicting a return of popularity in forums for special interest groups.

 

As for AutoCAD, I don't really have a good understanding of its popularity any more. It's a long time since I used it professionally (almost 10 years) but I'm not aware that it's being replaced by anything else. Gemini tells me that AutoCAD retains a 38% global market share, so I guess it's still relevant and that this forum is therefore still relevant.