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 Am Tired of AI
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#272I'm not. I think it's awesome and I can't wait to see what comes out next. And I'm completely OK with all of my work being used to train models. Bunch of luddites and sour grapes around here on HN these days.
You're getting downvoted, but I agree with your last sentence — and not just about AI. The amount of negativity here regarding almost everything is appalling. Maybe it's rose-tinted nostalgia but I don't remember it being like this a few years ago.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#273I'm not tired, I'm afraid. First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment. In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. But superhuman AI seems now only few years away. It will be our last invention, it will mean total automation. There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. Many countries will likely move away from a job-based market…
Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#274Earlier 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.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#275AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when something becomes 100x or 10000x cheaper. Things that are 10x worse but 100x cheaper are still extremely valuable. It's the relentless drive to making things cheaper, even at the expense of quality, that has made our high quality of life possible. You can make houses…
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.
On the contrary. Slop makes the good stuff stand out.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#276The underlying technology is good. But what the fuck. LLMs, these weird, surrealistic art-generating programs like DALL-E, they're remarkable. Don't tell me they're not, we created machines that are able to tap directly into the collective unconscious. That is a serious advance in our productive capabilities. Or at least, it could be. It could be if it was unleashed , if these crummy corporations didn't force it to b…
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.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#277The internet is choke full of incorrect, fake, or misleading information, and has been ever since people figured out they can churn out low quality content in-between google ads.
There's a whole industry of "content writers" who write seemingly meaningful stuff that doesn't bear close scrutiny.
Nobody has trusted product review sites for years, with people coping by adding "site:reddit" as if a random redditor can't engage in some astroturfing.
These days, it's really hard to figure out whom (in the media / on the net) who to trust. AI has just made that long-overdue fact into the spotlight.
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#278I 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.…
From Wikipedia:
> Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.
> The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors.
(Open source models exist.)
Re: I Am Tired of AI
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#280I 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.
Pirate Bay: largely facilitating the theft of material from large corporations by normal people, for generally personal use.
LLM training: theft of material from literally _everyone_, for the purposes of corporate profit (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever).