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

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

#71

Post by brendamn »

kromem wrote: post #44
atleastoptimal wrote: post #26

My hypothesis is that a lot of high-status intellectuals are reflexively dismissing AI out of fear that it threatens their status, as AI poses to turn intellectual labor into a cheap commodity rather than the premium bespoke product they offer it as via their professorships, speaking fees and book sales. Most criticism of AI has all the hallmarks of coping mechanisms. They seem to shift quickly between declaring it a…

Really? You think people who write for a living might be biased towards confirming that the thing already replacing many people who write for a living is a fad that's going to blow over soon? My favorite part with crap predicting doom is the sheer unawareness of the rate of change of the rate of change. If you had asked me 18 months ago how long after GPT-3 until something existed with the capabilities of GPT-4, I'd…

> already replacing many people who write for a living

Is this actually the case? Are there examples of professional writers/academics/etc who have lost their jobs to LLMs?

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

#72

Post by Turskarama »

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.

Midjourney and ChatGPT are both free to try, if someone gave me free bitcoin I might have made a wallet.

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

#73

Post by Turskarama »

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…

It depends on how important it is that I get a precisely correct answer. For a cocktail it's not a big deal if I get one that's slightly different, in other cases an incorrect answer might be catastrophic.

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

#74

Post by somenameforme »

pdntspa wrote: post #70
TuringNYC wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, but how about these: - My mom cant figure out Blockchain either - My sister (doctor) and brother (3 degrees) cant figure out Blockchain either, because they are too afraid of scanning the wrong QR code and having their balance drained My mom, sister, and brother all use ChatGPT. My brother uses it actively for work.

You can dig deeper.... what exactly are the real-world applications of an immutable transaction ledger? I can't think of very many. Let alone a bunch of kids.

Decentralized is critical to the recipe as well. 'Immutable' centralized ledgers are largely a non-starter because the scenarios you want to use block chain for are zero-trust type scenarios. With centralization, the promise of immutability holds exactly as long as it's convenient for the centralizing power.

In any case, defining public use or accessibility as the metric of relevance of something is quite illogical. You end up with countless absurdities like relativity being worthless and CocaCola being the most relevant invention ever.

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

#75

Post by blackkettle »

skepticATX wrote: post #24
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…

The authors specifically state that they do not think that GenAI is snake oil. You can’t legitimately argue that it is. On the other hand, I’m not sure that you can legitimately argue that it is not over-hyped. The only way that it isn’t is if we achieve “singularity” imminently - because that it is what a sizable number of people, including possibly some people at OpenAI, are actually expecting.

I think we’re nearing the point of the initial dotcom bust. A whole of internet startups went completely belly up when the early 2000s initial bubble burst.

That was no reflection of the actual potential it just indicated that people at all points of the value chain had not yet grasped how or what the internet was or how it would mesh with humanity.

That’s where we are now. It’ll burst but not because it’s overhyped; because we don’t collectively understand the implications.

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

#76

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

The predominate usage of NFTs are non-art based. Insurance policies and market making use NFTs very heavily, especially after a BSL license from one market maker expired this year.

And for art NFTs, much of the interest is from the collectors space or collector sentiment as these are an improvement in supply transparency and provenance in comparison to other mediums of collections.

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

#77

Post by pharmakom »

Turskarama wrote: post #72
TuringNYC wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Midjourney and ChatGPT are both free to try, if someone gave me free bitcoin I might have made a wallet.

They had this in the early days. Bitcoin Faucet

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

#78

Post by ggm »

m00x wrote: post #69
ggm wrote: post #65

Great to read this back-to-back with the takedown on the GAN image generation offering also on HN. The point of most critiques/polemics on AI Snake oil isn't on effectiveness of AI in context. It's about mis-application, belief its AGI, belief the answers are right, and belief it has no downsides. It's often mis-applied, It's absolutely not, and not even on the road to AGI, the answers are not always right, and it ha…

Crazy thing is that intelligence doesn't mean you get the right answer. Humans get the answer right fewer times than AI. It's absolutely not AGI, but it's not "not the road to AGI". Every step forward could be the road to AGI.

Could is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People have been hypothesising about the nature of mind and intelligence for a long time. There is no compelling connectionist, moar-will-work, it-can-learn-to-think model, which infers the nature of intelligence and how that relates to GAN or GPT or any of what people are doing now.

What people are doing now is amazing. I love looking at pictures of the pope in puffer jackets. I love "this person does not exist"

It could be on the road to AGI, but then, I could win lotto. and I do enter lotto, even knowing the odds. The thing is I don't plan as if I WILL win lotto and a lot of "this AI could be the road to AGI" is about planning as if it will, to secure a slice of the future.

It could? yea. But, it isn't.

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

#79

Post by shloked »

TuringNYC wrote: post #14

Everyone should read this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve... This is happening, and the reddit thread is just a single instance of a wide phenomenon. I wonder how one can square "snakeoil" theories against reality like this.

Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) had a decent analogy for what AI is doing to creative fields in the No Priors Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH95LKOILgE&t=2626s&ab_chann...:

The camera is the best metaphor. In the 19th century, being an artist was a real thing; it was really a technical field. You were a portrait painter and the best artists would study for years to be as accurate to reality as you could - look at how the light moves and all of that. All of a sudden, the camera comes out and artists fear this is the end of art because this new thing can capture reality better than anyone can.

But then very quickly, people realized that in some ways this liberates the artists. It's not a coincidence that the impressionist movement coincided with the advent of the camera. People realized it's not about capturing reality but the expression and feelings conjured. This led to an explosion about what art is and come out of the trap about painting, nobility, and grand scenes into things that really evoke and challenge us.

People are now saying AI can write pretty well. It can code pretty well. It can create movies, images pretty well. What that tells me is that it liberates the creator to move beyond that. Someone can elevate and integrate and manage these tools.

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

#80

Post by deanCommie »

viscanti wrote: post #15
TuringNYC wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If blockchain did fulfill the claims of it revolutionizing the world of finance, it's still unlikely your kids would have become obsessed and regular users of it. If room temperature and pressure superconducting or nuclear fusion became viable, your kids might also be unlikely to play around with them on their own. Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead. What kids like seems pretty or…

> Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead.

Can you define what a metaverse is in this case and how is it different from what we used to call an MMORPG?

Roblox involves no block chain and no VR, so what exactly is "metaverse-y" about it?

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