I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.
HN generally hated (and rightly so, IMO) strict copyright IP protection laws. Then LLMs came along and broke everybody's brain and turned this place into hardline copyright extremists.
Or you know, maybe we're pissed about the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose nature of the current copyright regime.
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…
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.
Yes it’s true today, depending on what is your writing is the foundation of.
It doesn’t matter that my writing is more considered, more accurate and of a higher quality when my coworkers are all openly using AI to perform five times the work I am and producing outcomes that are “good enough” because good enough is quite enough for a larger majority than many likely realise.
At any given moment we see these kinds comments on here. They all read like a burgeoning form of messianism: something is to come, and it will be terrible/glorious. Behind either the fear or the hope, is necessarily some utter faith that a certain kind of future will happen. And I think thats the most interesting thing. Because here is the thing, in this particular case you are afraid something inhuman will take cont…
It's not hard to find a religious analogy to anything , so that also shouldn't be seen as a particularly powerful argument. (Expressed at length here): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I am aware of and like that essay some, but I am not trying to be rhetorical here, and certainly not trying to flatten the situation to just be some Dawkins-esque asshole and tell everyone they are wrong.
I am not saying "this is religion, you should be an atheist," I respect the force of this whole thing in people's minds too much. Rather, we should consider seriously how to navigate a future where this is all at play, even if its only in our heads and slide decks. I am not saying "lol, you believe in a god," I am genuinely saying, "kill your god without mercy, it is the only way you and all of us will find some happiness, inspiration, and love."
I feel like I’m being gaslit about these AI code tools. I’ve got the paid copilot through work and I’ve just about never had it do anything useful ever. I’m working on a reasonably large rails app and it can’t seem to answer any questions about anything, or even auto fill the names of methods defined in the app. Instead it just makes up names that seem plausible. It’s literally worse than the built in auto suggestion…
I'm in the same boat. I've tried a few of these tools and the output's generally been terrible to useless big and small. It's made up plausible-sounding but non-existent methods on the popular framework we use, something which it should have plenty of context and examples on. Dealing with the output is about the same as dealing with a code review for an extremely junior employee... who didn't even run and verify thei…
The biggest lie in all of LLMs is that they’ll work out of the box and you don’t need to take time to learn them.
I find Copilot autocomplete invaluable as a productivity boost, but that’s because I’ve now spent over two years learning how to best use it!
“And it's much more difficult for me to explain the solution in English than in code--I basically already have the code in my head, now I'm going through a translation step to turn it into English.”
If that’s the case, don’t prompt them in English. Prompt them in code (or pseudo-code) and get them to turn that into code that’s more likely to be finished and working.
I do that all the time: many of my LLM prompts are the signature of a function or a half-written piece of code where I add “finish this” at the end.
I'm tired of 3d TV - Someone in 2013 (3D TV, after a big push by the industry in 2010, peaked in 2013, going into a rapid decline with the last hardware being produced in 2016). Sometimes, the hyped thing doesn't catch on, even when the industry really, really wants it to.
That's an interesting example. I would argue that 3D TV as a "solution" didn't work, but 3D as a "problem" is still going strong, and with new approaches coming out all the time (most recently Meta's announcement of the Orion AR glasses), we'll gradually see extensive adoption of 3D experiences, which I expect will eventually loop back to some version of 3D films. EDIT: To clarify my analogy, GenAI is definitely a "p…
> To clarify my analogy, GenAI is definitely a "problem" rather than a particular solution, and as such I expect it to have longevity.
Hrm, I'm not sure that's true. "An 'AI' that can answer questions" is a problem, but IMO it's not at all clear that LLMs, with their inherent tendency to make shit up, are an appropriate solution to that problem.
Like, there have been previous non-LLM chatbots (there was a small bubble based on them a while back, in which, for a few months, everyone was claiming to be adding chat to their things; it kind of came to a shuddering halt with Microsoft Tay). It seems slightly peculiar to assume that LLMs are the ultimate answer to the problem, especially as they are not actually very good at it (in some ways, they're worse than the old-gen).
I love AI, I use it every single day and wouldn't consider myself a luddite, but... oh, boy... I hate the people that is too bullish on it. Not the people that is working to make the AI happen (although I have my __suspicious people radar__ pointing to __run__ every single time I see Sam Altman face anywhere), but the people that hypes it to ground, the "e/acc" people.
I feel like the crypto-bros just moved from the "all-might decentralized coin god" hype to the "all might tech-god that for sure will be available soon". Looks like a cult or religion is forming around the singularity, and, if I hype it now, it will be generous to me when it takes the control. Oh, and if you don't hype then you're a neo-luddite/doomer and I will look up on you with disdain, as you are a mere peasant.
Also, the get-rich-quick schemes forming around the idea that anyone can have a "1-person-1-billion-dollar" company with just AI, not realizing when anyone can replicate your product then it won't have any value anymore: "ChatGPT just made me this website to help classify if an image is a hot-dog or not! I'll be rich selling it to Nathan's - Oh, what's that? Nathan's just asked ChatGPT to create a hot-dog classifier for them?!"
Not that the other vocal side is not as bad: "AI is useless", "It's not true intelligence", "AI will kill us all", "AI will make everyone unemployed in 6 months!"... But the AI tech-bros side can be more annoying in my personal experience (I'm sure the opposite is true for others too).
All those people are tiring, and making AI tiring for some too... But the tech is fun and will keep evolving and present, rather we are tired of it or not.
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 sounds to me like a straw man argument. Obviously 2+2 will always give you 4, in any modern LLM, and even just in the Chrome address bar. Can you offer a real situation where we should expect the LLM to return a deterministic answer and should rightly be concerned that we're getting a stochastic one?
Y'all are hyper focusing on this example. How about something more vague like FOO obviously being BAR, except sometimes it's BAZ now?
The layman doesn't know the distinction, so they accept this as fact.
One thing that I hate about the post-ChatGPT world is that people's genuine words or hand-drawn art can be classified as AI-generated and thrown away instantly. What if I wanted to talk at a conference and used somebody's AI trigger word so they instantly rejected me even if I never touched AI at all? This has already happened in academia where certain professors just dump(ed) their student's essays into ChatGPT and…
This is silly, intonation and the connection of the words used and the person presenting tell you whether what they're reading is genuine.
AI is not just GenAI, ML sits underneath it (supervised, unsupervised) and that has genuinely delivered value for the clients we service (financial tech) and in my normal life (e.g. photo search, screen grab to text, book recommendations). As for GenAI I keep going back to expectation management, its very unlikley to give you the exact answer you need (and if it does then well you job longetivity is questionable) but…
> ... its very unlikley to give you the exact answer you need (and if it does then well you job longetivity is questionable) Experimenting with o1-preview, it quite often gives me the exact answer I need on the first try, and I'm 100% certain that my job longevity is questionable.
It has been more hit and miss for me, when it works it can be amazing then I try to show someone, same prompt, different less so amazing answer.
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…
Same here hungry neigh thirsty for prompt-2-film
"output a 90 minute harry potter sequel to the final film starring the original actors plus Tom Hanks"