Live data from Hacker News

I Am Tired of AI

ontestautomation.com

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#211
post #42
post #14

Computers were supposed to be these amazing machines that are super precise. You tell it to do a thing, it does it. Nowadays, it seems we're happy with computers apparently going RNG mode on everything. 2+2 can now be 5, depending on the AI model in question, the day, and the temperature...

This, 100%, is the reason I feel like the sand's shifting under my feet. We went from trusting computing output to having to second-guess everything. And it's tiring.

I kind of feel like if you're using a "Random text generator based on probability" for something that you need to trust, you're kind of holding this tool wrong.

I wouldn't complain a RNG doesn't return the numbers I want, so why complain you don't get 100% trusted output from a random text generator?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#212
post #75

I am tired and hungry… The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it protects elites but not when a billion thefts are committed by LLM folks. Poor incentives for creators to create stuff if it just gets stolen and replicated by AI. I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history by these gang of thieves should be…

I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.

I just want consistent and fair rules.

I'm all for abolishing copyright, for everyone. Let the knowledge be free and widely shared.

But until that is the case and people running super useful services like libgen have to keep hiding then I also want all the LLM corpos to be subject to the same legal penalties.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#213

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. And like pointed out by others, the usual text style and vocabulary signs that could have been used to identify expertise or agenda are gone.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#214
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend. I've been alarmed by many sentiments that seemed popular on HN in the past, but seeing more and more people welcome a race to the bottom such as this is sad. When I read this, I cannot tell if it's performance art or not, that's how bad this genuinely is.

"I don't like the opinion of certain persons I read on HN, therefore HN is on a down trend"

Like I've said to someone else, the contrarian part isn't the issue. While I disagree with the race to the bottom, it reads like a Reddit shitpost, which was frowned upon once upon a time. But strawman me if you must.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#215
post #45

I am approaching AI with caution. Shiny things don't generally excite me. Just this week I installed cursor, the AI-assisted VSCode-like IDE. I am working on a side project and decided to give it a try. I am blown away. I can describe the feature I want built, and it generates changes and additions that get me 90% there, within 15 or so seconds. I take those changes, and carefully review them, as if I was doing a cod…

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner.

You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about the new generation of coders who are growing up with these tools, who NEVER had the expertise required to be able to evaluate AI-generated code, because they never had to learn it, never had to truly internalize it?

It's late, and I think if I try to write any more just now, I'm going to go well off the rails, but I've gone into depth on this topic recently, if you're interested: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...

In the article, I posit a less than glowing experience with coding tools than you've had, it sounds like, but I'm also envisioning a more complex use case, like when you need to get into the meat of some you-specific business logic it hasn't seen, not common code it's been exposed to thousands of times, because that's where it tends to fall apart the most, and in ways that are hard to detect and with serious consequences. If you haven't run into that yet, I'd be interested to know if you do some day. (And also to know if you don't, though, to be honest! Strong opinions, loosely held, and all that.)

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#216
post #84
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.

Or it will all be slop as there us no non-slop data to train on anymore

No, I don't think that's true. What will instead happen is there will be expert humans or teams of them, intentionally training AI brains rather than expecting wonders to occur just by turning the training loose on random hoovered-up data.

Brainmaker will be a valued human skill, and people will be trying to work out how to train AI to do that, in turn.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#217
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.

A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.

That's just the problem -- you can't.

Not because you can't distinguish between _one_ bad piece and _one_ good piece, but because there is so much production capacity that no human will ever be able to look at most of it.

And it's not just the AI stuff that will suffer here, all of it goes into the same pool, and humans sample from that pool (using various methodologies). At some point the pool becomes mostly urine.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#218
post #135
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can prompt/train the AI to add a couple of random minor errors. They're trained from human text after all, they can pretend to be as human as you like.

The funny thing is that the things it refuses to say are "wrong-speech" type stuff, so the only things you can be more sure of nowadays are conspiracy theories and other nasty stuff. The nastier the more likely it's human written, which is a bit ironic.

> The nastier the more likely it's human written, which is a bit ironic.

This is as everything else, machine produced has a flawlessness along some dimension that humans tend to lack.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#219
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore. While the professional looking tex…

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid. For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption h…

This. I am very picky about how I use ML still, but it is unsurpassed as a virtual editor. It can clean up grammar and rephrase things in a very light way, but it gives my prose the polish I want. The thing is, I am a very decent writer. I wrote professionally for 18 years as a part of my job delivering reports of high quality as my work product. So, it really helps that I know exactly what “good” looks like by my standards. ML can clean things up so much faster than I can and I am confident my writing is organic still, but it can fix up small issues, find mistakes, etc very quickly. A word change here or there, some punctuation, that is normal editing. It is genuinely good at light rephrasing as well, if you have some idea of what intent you want.

When it becomes obvious, though, is when people let the LLM do the writing for them. The job search bit is definitely rough. Referrals, references, and actual accomplishments may become even more important.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#220

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

I read the original comment not as a lament of not being able to trust the content, rather, they are lamenting the fact that AI/LLM generated content has no more thought or effort put into it than a cheap microwave dinner purchased from Walmart. Yes, it fills the gut with calories but it lacks taste.

On second thought, perhaps AI/LLM generated content is better illustrated with it being like eating the regurgitated sludge called cud. Nothing new, but it fills the gut.

Post reply on HN