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I Am Tired of AI

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501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#501

AI is a tool, and like any tool, it's only as good as how we choose to use it.

No, that is wrong. We can't "choose" because too many people have instincts. And people always have the instinct to use new technology to gain incremental advantages over others, and that in turn puts pressure on everyone to use it. That prisoner's dilemma situation means that without a firm and larger guiding moral philosophy, we really can't choose because instinct takes over choice. In other words, the way technol…

More people need to read this / think this point through. In a post Excel world, could any accountant get a job not knowing Excel? No matter how good they were "on paper". Choice becomes a self aggrandizing illusion, reality eventually asserts itself.

With attention spans shrinking, publishers who prioritize quantity over quality get clicks, which generates ad revenue, which keeps their lights on while their competitors doing quality in depth, nuanced writing go out of business.

It feels like a game of chess closing in on you no matter how much you physically want to fight your way out and flip the board over.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#502

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. You're out.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#503

I'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…

I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelin…

The problem I have with this is that when you give therapy to people with certain personality disorders, they just become better manipulators. Knowledge and understanding of ethics and empathy can make you a better person if you already have those instincts, but if you don’t, those are just systems to be exploited.

My biggest worry is that we end up with a dangerous superintelligence that everybody loves, because it knows exactly how to make every despotic and divisive choice it makes sympathetic.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their pr…

Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course…

The mushroom thing is almost certainly true. There's tons of trash AI generated foraging books being published to Amazon. Atomic Shrimp has a video on it.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, I see, I definitely missed your point. Yeah, that's a very good thought. I can even picture this becoming another cultural crevasse, like climate change did, much to the detriment of nuanced discussion.

Ah, well. If only killing god was so easy!

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#506

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…

Funny thing is that people will also ask AI to __read__ stuff for them and summarize it.

So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#507

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…

Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#508

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. You're out. A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output.

At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#509

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…

> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. Why do you say people have to do it? People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is no…

> Why do you say people have to do it?

Gotta eat, yo

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#510

I'm tired of technology. I don't think there has ever been a single tech news that brought me joy in all my life. First I learned how to use computers, and then it has been downhill ever since. Right now my greatest joy is in finding things that STILL exist rather than new things, because the things that still exist are generally better than anything new.

Reminds me of the way the way the author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" takes care of his leather gloves and they stay with him on the order of decades.
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