https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Other things being bad doesn’t make it OK that this thing is and no one is saying that.
My argument was purposefully general, you’re the one who chose to bring it back to AI. Don’t argue in bad faith.
AI having negative externalities is not the sole deciding factor in deciding to eradicate it
then my argument: negative externalities are tolerated in many areas where we deem the topic is of enough value that the externalities are managed. there are many examples of things with negative externalities, much much larger than those of AI, that aren't being considered for eradication.
so your argument is implicitly, "AI is not worth these negative externalities"
which is a common opinion among people who dont use AI at all.
> If a company were poisoning the water to your home as a byproduct, would you be satisfied if they told you “we don’t necessarily disagree with you about polluting the water, but in our field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the water pollution—what we’re doing presents very real productivity gains”?
no but I also wouldn't declare that whatever it is that company does should have its entire industry eradicated. Poor industrial practices can be mitigated while not abandoning the product being manufactured.
By your logic, they don't particularly contribute to scientific productivity/advances: it's not like you can use stable diffusion to generate an architectural diagram.
GenIA for images and videos is only really used to copy artstyles, make fake menus and create misinformation so wouldn't you agree that eradicating this part would not only preserve your described "useful applications" but also allow providers to allocate more resources to "useful" and "scientific" AI?
I know that local models have become decent enough that this isn't really doable, but I'm only proposing this thought experiment because you seem to think people are saying this should be all or nothing. But the truth is, if you get a genie to wipe away just diffusion models, the entire internet gets much better (or at least back to regular levels of bad), no one loses anything, and a whole lot of people stop complaining/campaigning against the productivity gains in your field.