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I don't want anything your AI generates

coryd.dev

141–150 of 345 posts

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#141

Anytime someone sends me something generated by ChatGPT, I think about how AI expert Hilary Mason puts it: "By design, ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine." https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/03/chatgpt-explained-hilary-m...

This resonates with my experience using Copilot. It generates lowest-common-denominator code, and displays a stunning unawareness of language and library features. Some understandable due to training cutoff (but still very frustrating), but it also refused to use Pillow functions that seem to have been around for a decade, instead crufting together some shitty pipeline by hand.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#142
I get it. It's doesn't seem about AI vs non-AI. I think it's a more telling statement about how useless a lot of the applications are right now. They solve marginal problems in marginal environments, problems that are portrayed by their stakeholders as being of utmost importance. All so people can go around patting themselves on the back for having used AI to solve a non-problem in the first place.

We conflate a job's duty with a job's problem.

Want to make AI useful? Solve big, real problems with it. Combine it with the learnings of the last 20 years on how to build grassroots movements.

Maybe make a change in society, rather than solving yet another imagined-email problem.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#143

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

I wonder what he feeds the AI. Maybe some nice concise bullet points, which are what you’d probably want. Maybe we’ll end up with dual layers of AI: one to expand out top-down requests, another to compress them to something efficient to read. We can also have engineers prompt the AI: write me a weekly status report on what I did. Here are my git commit logs and jira points. Emphasize (some topic). Then the owners can…

I read an article about this sometime last year.

Basically AI is the exact opposite of compression.

We take what should be a few bullet points, turn it into some overly wordy bullshit with AI, then the recipient uses AI to turn that wordy bullshit back into a few bullet points.

And it costs a ton of compute to do this.

Kind of insane. I hope society evolves to work smarter.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#144

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

There's a part of me that thinks that this is actually what's great about tools like ChatGPT. Such a huge percentage of typical intra-office communication is neither worth writing nor worth reading. It only happens because someone who will neither write nor read it has mandated that it must happen, and it's easier not to argue. Farming that work out to GPT, though, is excellent damage control. It minimizes the cost t…

But with these tools you can do much more of those things. Instead of damage control, it might move it to a whole new level.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#145
I have zero problem with people using AI to write or create. I think that's great.

But I don't like it when people start a sentence "Well, I asked ChatGPT what it thought, and . . ." If I wanted to know that, I'd ask ChatGPT. Just give me your human views (and if they are partially informed by ChatGPT, that's fine).

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#146

> I don't want music recommendations from something that can't appreciate or understand music. Human recommendations will always be better. I find Spotify's "discover weekly" list to be generally pretty good. Sure, there are some songs I dont like, but there are often 3-4 great songs each week that get added to my regularly playlist. Its all good an well to say that human recommendations are better, but I'm not payin…

Spotify (and most other services) actually have a mix of human and algorithimic recommendations in things like discover weekly: https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-...

Honestly, I believe Spotify would offer me more accurate recommendations if they relied solely on AI, without human input. Their current DJ features, although supposedly based on my previous listening habits, often suggest popular songs I don't listen to, tracks supposedly reminiscent of my school days that I've never heard before, and genres that I'm not interested in.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#147

If you don’t want to have what an AI generates then don’t use it. I do agree with the sentiment that the addition of “AI” which goes from a rebrand of what was already there to integration of LLMs is at the moment only somewhat helpful and obtuse. But, really your new systems shouldn’t be thin front ends to gpt4 and instead something far more tangible. Output dashboards or reports or aggregate data. I have my own pro…

> If you don’t want to have what an AI generates then don’t use it.

The author is writing about sort of AI outputs that other people and organizations are passing to him: chatbots, generated emails, phony presence at a meeting, and so on. Those use cases are a bit more like relatives who send their DNA to untrustworthy companies for analysis: you personally saying no for your own use doesn't actually mitigate or even affect the negative externalities imposed upon you by widespread general use.

I do agree that, for many use cases, personally opting out of junk generative AI is sufficient. But I'm not looking forward to the world flooded by low quality AI outputs that become impossible to avoid sifting through in all areas of life.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#148

Is it fair to say: complain if you can pass a double blind experiment on the arts you enjoy?

Your argument being that if you enjoy AI content, you can't criticise AI? Doesn't seem reasonable to me

I think it’s more about the author criticizing AI content being of low quality. IRL there are many cases I don’t see them distinguishable between human generated or AI generated.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. Isnt this good for a workplace policy? Wife had to do something similar and I'm happy it was overfit. I don't want some creative policy book.

I find that it is just real wordy by default. I commonly tell ChatGPT to be succinct.

[deleted]

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#150

> I really don't. AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment). From the start, you can see where the author is coming from. This person is some variety of leftist/communist/socialist, and hates AI in the same way that their ilk hates any technology that reduces the need for (some) human labor. And, to their point, technology does have winners and losers. AI certainly…

The winners will be the entities that control the best models. It's not a matter of mindset.
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