Is AI friend or foe in the Clone Wars?

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Hello,
I wanted to share a surprising experience I recently had using AI to spot clones and fake knives, and see if anyone else has tried this.

A month ago, I would have thought this was a bad idea. However, I recently bought a vintage Spyderco on eBay. Out of curiosity, I fed the listing's images and description into Gemini. It concluded the knife was likely authentic and priced fairly. What impressed me wasn't just the conclusion, but the detailed case it built with evidence to support it. I verified all the points it made, and now that I have the knife in hand, I can confidently say it is authentic.

Since then, I have tested Gemini on a few more knives some from eBay, some from authorized dealers, and one known clone. So far, the accuracy has been impressive. It even acknowledges when there isn't enough information to make a determination and suggests specific details to look for.

While super clones exist that can fool both humans and AI, it seems like AI is a much better tool for this than I initially guessed.

If anyone is interested in testing this out and reporting back, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I would strongly encourage people not to blindly follow AI in any regard. I think we have a few years left until we are in the Matrix. Or are we already.😁
 
Just my three cents but :
The way AI is taking over property values (noise and hogging water for cooling).
Creating lots more heat on a planet that is already boarder line .
And making people believe they don't have to actually LEARN AND THINK . I've seen it at work .
all I can say is :
👎
They can keep AI and it can go to the devil .
 

Is AI friend or foe in the Clone Wars​

IMO ,probably both . There is no universal AI ...yet .

All depends on how they are programmed , guided and "corrected " ;when they give answers their owners dislike .
 
I went to the Dr. for routine visit. He asked if it was ok to use AI to take notes. In my chart it pretty consistently says I weight 200 lbs. During the exam I mentioned I put on a little weight and weighed 215 lbs. I noticed in my after visit notes that AI thought I said 250 lbs. No one ever noticed it. If I had actually gained 50 lbs in 6 months that would be a big deal.

I guess in hindsight it wasn’t AI at all. Just voice to text. No thinking.😁

I agree, good tool. Not a good coworker.
 
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I find AI to be wrong more than its right. If you are looking for information it will just regurgitate what it finds on the web. If there are definitive descriptions of a fake vs real knife it will provide that information. If it does not understand the question or does not find information specifically related to a question, it will tell you that you that these are not the droids you are looking for, and proceed to provide information on a totally different subject that may have a similar spelling. It will make things up also, google AI hallucinations....scary stuff....If you try to correct it, AI will back pedal, hem and haw, make excuses and sometimes outright lie about the wrong answers. Never trust AI, always check its answers...
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Just my three cents but :
The way AI is taking over property values (noise and hogging water for cooling).
Creating lots more heat on a planet that is already boarder line .
And making people believe they don't have to actually LEARN AND THINK . I've seen it at work .
all I can say is :
👎
They can keep AI and it can go to the devil .
There is a huge downside to this stage of development. It's madness !

It's been hyped up to the moon and stars . Being used for speculative financial gain, in a bubble to rival the Tulip Bulb Mania .

I'm not a tech savvy computer guy , but I know a bit about the human brain and talents . They do not work anything the same .

AI is not yet , and probably never will be, comparable to human intelligence . A computer is a basically a calculator on steroids . There's nobody home in there !

The big danger, I foresee, is that folks will mistake brute force /mass data processing with thinking . With knowing and wisdom . With goodness even .

And , eventually accept anything that, the very few big future winner AI's say , as the ultimate inarguable truth .

Used correctly, the same tech could serve mankind as a great boon , instead of our doom . Probably a bit of both will happen , and be painful to sort out .
 
Dynamite, machine guns, nukes, computers - the angel that goes up and the angel that goes down lives in humanity.
Knife content: I asked googs AI if it is friend or foe in spotting fakes. And it said............................................................................
 
No way I'm trusting an AI agent to tell me for sure if a knife is a clone. I have no way of knowing for sure it's pulling the right data to look for the right key bits of info to give me real assurance in a purchase. I find it far easier to just examine some pics from reputable sites and read some history on the knife. And I say this having recently made a knee jerk purchase and finding out I bought a clone. Had I done five minutes of searching it would have been obvious.
 
Believing AI is a lot like believing the news. IF you've ever been close to a news story and know the real details, you notice just how wrong the news gets it. AI is similar in that the more you know about a topic, the dumber AI seems. If you know nothing on a topic, then AI seems really smart.

So when it comes to knives, I'd trust the people on here to come up with the correct conclusion long before AI even got in the ballpark.
 
I see AI usage almost daily in my work. No, I don't use it, but students certainly do, and it always produces junk. Always. Without fail.

Oh but what does that mean? (Aside from serving as an attractive nuisance for students who don't want to think their way through research papers that require assiduous attention to detail, analysis, nuance, originality...)

That means that some AI-plagiarized information is correct, some information is partly correct, and some of it is wrong: two out of three of those things are bad. Information cobbled together by AI often comes from non-authoritative sources (often partly correct and often simply wrong), and citations (when provided) are almost always fabricated (no, not hallucinated, which is a term of deliberately anthropomorphizing deceit), and the produced text is utterly devoid of authorial voice. Such texts are so not worth reading those papers receive an instant zero.

Now, what does that have to do with spotting clones?

AI has limited application in very narrow domains because of it doesn't even mimic cognition. Matching like and unalike things is probably a decent application of the technology, yet even that relies upon first having a set of validated propers in its database, which won't reliably come from public domain sources that have not themselves been validated (which really isn't the jam of most of what's in the public domain, after all).

Thus I agree with this most wholeheartedly: I would strongly encourage people not to blindly follow AI in any regard.
 
There are legitimate, ethical use-cases for AI, but generative AI is built on theft, and most of the results you get from using AI as a search engine or fact checking tool are garbage, not to mention the negative impacts AI data center expansion is having on the environment, housing, and utility costs. Overall, AI is bad.
 
Believing AI is a lot like believing the news. IF you've ever been close to a news story and know the real details, you notice just how wrong the news gets it. AI is similar in that the more you know about a topic, the dumber AI seems. If you know nothing on a topic, then AI seems really smart.

So when it comes to knives, I'd trust the people on here to come up with the correct conclusion long before AI even got in the ballpark.

Remember this story? 😂

 
AI is just a tool &, like any tool it can do some things better than others &, in the wrong hands, can be misused

I have used AI as a search supplement which I have found very useful for asking open ended questions on a wide range of topics that cannot be answered well using a narrow word search.

I have also used it to assess the history, value & authenticity of certain knives & was satisfied with the results I got.

So, I consider AI more friend than foe for my purposes
 
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