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Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

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Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#71

Post by WA »

In my circle, the non-techies use it as well for various writing tasks. Thing is: the non-techies seem to be even more impressed by the hype and don't realize when ChatGPT makes stuff up.

I talked to a blue-collar worker (has his own business) the other day and he was in some Telegram group that "leveraged AI for marketing". You ever wondered who the target audience for these thin bullshit AI marketer wrappers on top of ChatGPT are? Or the courses and "mastermind" groups on how to write marketing prompts? Apparently, blue collar workers with a small business who want to save on actual marketing and don't have the expertise to realize the downsides.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#72

Post by willvarfar »

My manager is going on and on about how ChatGPT is the fastest growing product ever in history! And its true, ChatGPT claims to have 100M active users.

But how active are they? Have they had 100M users briefly dally with it and ask a few banal questions to pick apart the answers, or have they got 100M dedicated repeat users who are heavily using it and keeping on it?

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#73

Post by KaiserPro »

p-e-w wrote: post #37

No. Quite the opposite. Everyone else is in an echo chamber telling them that AI is a cool fad, a toy that will never fully replace people, etc., when in reality AI is the most disruptive technology since the Internet, and the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb. I can't stop shaking my head whenever I read any article on AI written by non-tech journalists (and even many by tech journalists). AI is vastly…

AGI isn't going to kill us.

But enough unemployment caused by the next wave of automation is sure going to cause civil unrest.

Look at the chartists, luddite and the saboteurs. Some of them were weavers who up until that point had been in high society, running parts of countries through the guilds system. Then over a couple of years, the bottom fell out and they were cast into the mills like the unlanded labours.

That, was not a smooth transition.

The people that claim "oh there will be new jobs" I mean sure, there probably will be, but they forget to mention the important qualifier: "eventually"

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#74

Post by Yizahi »

All professions who need to write a lot of bullshit text are adopting NNs. So basically any advertisements, corporate news and emails etc. And parsing and responses to such ads or corpoletters, if they are required. Another area to be taken over - translations and language learning. Half a year ago my teacher had been suggesting different resources for different issues, like this online translator for this task, that translator for a different one, and yet another site to check suffixes. Last week her recommendation to checking grammar etc. was simply - ChatGPT.

In my work I've yet to find a use for NNs, but maybe for the writing of a lot of templates in one go it could be useful.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#75

Post by benjaminwootton »

I think we are in all kinds of echo chambers, but "gen AI" seemed to hit escape velocity faster than anything I've ever seen. I've heard of students using it to write essays, marketing folks writing content, creatives using midjourney and lawyers/doctors thinking about how to integrate it into their workflows.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#77

Post by samuellevy »

adrianN wrote: post #36
samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

AlphaGo is not aware that it’s playing a game either, but it’s better than humans at it. Awareness is not necessary to make people lose their jobs.

I don't really know anything about AlphaGo. There's more types of "AI" than LLMs, but that's not really the point. You don't need AI for people to lose their jobs... but nobody is losing their jobs to AlphaGo, and in the grand scheme of things it's unlikely that people are going to lose their jobs to GPT, too.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#78

Post by [deleted] »

samuellevy wrote: post #65
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? I don't claim or believe that any LLM is actually intelligent. It just seems that we (at least on an individual basis) can also meet the criteria outlined above. I know plenty of people who are confidently incorrect and appear unwilling to learn or accept their own limitations, myself included. In my opinion, even if…

So humans have a level of knowledge, understanding, and reasoning ability that LLMs simply don't have. I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. That knowledge has limits, and I can expand it, I can forget it, all sorts of things... "Hallucination" is a term that works well for actual intelligence - when you "know" something that isn't true, and has no path…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#79

Post by detaro »

KaiserPro wrote: post #69
kortilla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think subways still have human operators? They don’t always. This sucked the wind out of your whole argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...

Driverless trains doesn't mean no drivers. It means remote drivers. The DLR for example still has drivers, its just they are located somewhere other than the train.

No, it doesn't mean "remote drivers". Yes, an automated network is going to have people monitoring it and the ability of remote control for emergencies or failures, but that's not the same as "remote drivers" for normal operations.

(in the case of DLR, the staff on the train can take control if needed, but other networks don't have staff on every train)

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#80

Post by pjc50 »

WA wrote: post #71

In my circle, the non-techies use it as well for various writing tasks. Thing is: the non-techies seem to be even more impressed by the hype and don't realize when ChatGPT makes stuff up. I talked to a blue-collar worker (has his own business) the other day and he was in some Telegram group that "leveraged AI for marketing". You ever wondered who the target audience for these thin bullshit AI marketer wrappers on top…

> Apparently, blue collar workers with a small business who want to save on actual marketing and don't have the expertise to realize the downsides.

This might not be a bad market; if you're not experienced with writing things yourself and just need some text and don't want to find/pay a writer, it will do an acceptable job. It's like upgrading from a badly handpainted sign to a nicely printed one.

Whether this is going to generate enough revenue for OpenAI is a different question.

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