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Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

venturebeat.com

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Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#51

Post by whimsicalism »

TuringNYC wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…

Another test is whether kids use it w/o being forced to. My kids are obsessed with both MidJourney and ChatGPT. They have found use cases w/o any profit motive and w/o any outside pressure. No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.

Plenty of kids I know use the blockchain, for their fake ids I think it is the backing financial infrastructure (crypto knowledgeable friend purchases ids and redistributes), for drug purchases

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#52

Post by lokar »

lordkirchner wrote: post #5
version_five wrote: post #3

Not that I disagree, but as I've said before, it's easy to be a theoretical contrarian, as in claim something is BS but not stake anything on it or profit from it (other than book deals). We're in a housing bubble, at the peak of a multi-century economic mega-cycle, we're overdue for earthquakes, tsunamis, asteroids, the caldera under Yellowstone, flu pandemics, etc etc. It's super easy to say all that and demand peo…

All I ever wanted was a way to short NFTs

Never short a ponzi, even if you win your counterparty won’t pay

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#53

Post by riku_iki »

struant wrote: post #48
riku_iki wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story I think in this aspect the difference between GPT vs Google not in level of tech, but because GPT took text from copyright owners and distributes it without their consent and without showing their ads, which is being chal…

Doesn't matter. If governments blunder this and try to enforce copyrights in AI, then we are all going to be using Chinese AI in 5 years instead of Google because they don't give a damn about copyright.

CCP already created its own regulation rules for AI.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#54

Post by aperrien »

lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #10
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…

I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway edit: I'm prepared for th…

Or you can run your own open source AI, on your own hardware.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#55

Post by lelandbatey »

girvo wrote: post #40
danmur wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay for search you get some of those benefits already

Who do I pay for better search? Honest question, I'd love a recommendation.

https://kagi.com/ is the one I see recommended. The results went to focus hard on "no blogspam" which is nice, and supposedly you can completely ban whole sites from your results forever (e.g. goodbye GeeksForGeeks and your shit SEO hacking)

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#56

Post by r00fus »

Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…

Given the high-end art and luxury goods market has had a large use for money laundering, crypto targeting that market makes complete sense. That it happens to be illegal? Well that just requires some more ju$tification.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#57

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

I have stopped using the "snake oil" epithet, because I found out an interesting background on that.

Oils derived from various snakes in the desert were found to be effective treatments and remedies for various things by the Native American population, and therefore widely used by certain tribes.

Once the White Man caught wind of this, he capitalized on its reputation, and a booming business of scams bloomed anywhere there were gullible buyers. Of course, the snake oil was rarely authentic or effective for its advertised uses.

Therefore, snake oil was given a very bad and rather undeserved reputation for the rest of history, and medical science continues to flounder.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#58

Post by yeahwhatever10 »

lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #10
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…

I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway edit: I'm prepared for th…

I prefer search engines because I can look through multiple sources. LLMs just give an answer without context or what alternatives might be. They make it difficult to judge to validity of the response.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#59

Post by skhr0680 »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #57

I have stopped using the "snake oil" epithet, because I found out an interesting background on that. Oils derived from various snakes in the desert were found to be effective treatments and remedies for various things by the Native American population, and therefore widely used by certain tribes. Once the White Man caught wind of this, he capitalized on its reputation, and a booming business of scams bloomed anywhere…

“Snake oil” is a reference to Clark Stanley, whose snake oil was infamously found to contain no snake oil whatsoever.
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