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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alarming trend should be how even a slightly contrarian point of view is downvoted to oblivion, and that newer members of the community expect it to work that way.

I don't think it's the contrarian part that I have a problem with.

HN is a place for intellectual curiosity. For over a decade I have seen great minds respectfully debate their point of view on this forum. In this particular case, I would have been genuinely interested to learn why exactly the original comment is advocating for a "race to the bottom" - in fact, there is a sibling comment to yours which makes a cogent argument without personally attacking the original commenter.

Instead, you devoted 2/3 of your comment toward berating the OP as being responsible for your perception of HN's decline.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#232

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…

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it).

I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence.

But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#233

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…

I totally understand your frustration. We started writing our book long before(2022) AI became mainstream, and when we finally published it on May 2024, all we hear now is people asking if it's just AI-generated content. It’s sad to see how quickly the conversation shifts away from the human touch in writing.

I can imagine how disheartening that must be

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#234
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.

The common denominator is big corporations trying to screw us over for profit, using their immense wealth as a battering ram.

So, capitalism.

It's taboo to criticize that though.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#235

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…

> but it's still depressing, to be honest.

Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#236

It's not AI you hate, it's Capitalism.

Say what you want about income and asset inequality, but capitalism has done more to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past 50 years than any other religion, aid programme or whatever else. I think it's very important and fair to be critical about how we as a society implement capitalism, but such broad generalization misses the mark immensely. Talk to anyone who grew up in a Communist count…

> but capitalism has done more to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past 50 years than any other religion, aid programme or whatever else.

Technology did what you ascribe to Capitalism. Most of the time thanks to state intervention, and the weaker the state, the weaker the growth (see how Asia overperformed everybody else now that laissez-faire policies are mainstream in the West).

> Talk to anyone who grew up in a Communist country in the 2nd half of the 20th century if you want to validate that sentiment.

The fact that one alternative to Capitalism was a failure doesn't mean Capitalism isn't bad.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Debunking bullshit inherently takes more effort than generating bullshit, so the human factor is normally your big force multiplier. Does this person seem trustworthy? What else have they done, who have they worked with, what hidden motivations or biases might they have, are their vibes /off/ to your acute social monkey senses? However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, w…

Maybe the debunking AIs can match the bullshit generating AIs, and we will have balance in the force. Everyone is focused on the generative AIs, it seems.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#238
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've even grown to enjoy spelling and grammar mistakes - at least I know a human wrote it.

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.

Making it feel like there's no reliable way to discern what's truly human

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#239

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 like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing:

Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible.

Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawsuits based on code licensing for example. Scraping websites containing source code which is distributed with specific licenses that OpenAI & co don't follow.

Unfortunately not how it works, or at least not to the extend you wish it to be. One can train a model exclusively on source code from the linux kernel (GPL) and then generate a bunch of C programs or libraries from that. And they could publish them under MIT license as long as they don't reproduce any identifiable sections from the linux kernel. It does not matter where the model learned how to program.

You're mistaken.

If I write code with a license that says that using this code for AI training is forbidden then OpenAI is directly going against this by scraping websites indiscriminately.

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