Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Am Tired of AI

ontestautomation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#611

Post by danielmarkbruce »

elnasca2 wrote: post #51
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

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?

The following appears to be true:

If one spends a lot of years reading a lot of stuff, they come to this conclusion, that most of it cannot be trusted. But it takes lots of years and lots of material to see it.

If they don't, they don't.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#612

Post by 9dev »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #586
9dev wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that robots displace workers has been around for more than half a century, but nothing has ever come out of it. As it turns out, the problems a robot faces when, say laying bricks, are prohibitively complex to solve. A human bricklayer is better in every single dimension. And even if you manage to build an extremely sophisticated robot bricklayer, it will consume vast amounts of energy, is not repairable by…

Factories are highly automated. Especially in the US, where the main factories are semiconductors, which are nearly fully robotic. A lot of those manual labor jobs that were automated away were offset by demand for knowledge work. Hmm. > the problems a robot faces when, say laying bricks, are prohibitively complex to solve. That's what we thought about Go, and all the other things. I'm not saying bricklayers will all…

This highlights the problem very well. Robots, and AI, to an extent, are highly efficient in a single problem domain, but fail rapidly when confronted with a combination of them. An encapsulated factory is one thing, laying bricks, outdoor, while it’s raining, at low temperatures, with a hungover human coworker operating next to you—that’s not remotely comparable.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#613

Post by danielmarkbruce »

a99c43f2d565504 wrote: post #213
elnasca2 wrote: post #51

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?

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 ag…

Those signs are largely bs. It's a textual version of charisma.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#614

Post by skydhash »

1dom wrote: post #558
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

I like this take on modern tech motivations. The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irr…

Just one nitpick. The thing about test is that it’s repetitive enough to be automated (in a deterministic way) or abstracted into a framework. You don’t need an AI to generate it.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#615

Post by deephoneybear »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478
Roark66 wrote: post #352

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…

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

Echoing other comments in gratitude for this very clear articulation of feelings I share, but have not manifested so well. Just wanted to add two connected opinions that round out this view.

1) This consuming of the host is only possible on the one hand because the host has grown so strong, that is the modern global industrial economy is so efficient. The doing stuff side of the equation is truly amazing and getting better (some real work gets done either by accident or those who have not-succumbed to PR and ad culture), and even this drop of "real work" produces enough material wealth to support (at least a lot of) humanity. We really do live in a post scarcity world from a production perspective, we just have profound distribution and allocation problems.

2) Radical wealth inequality profoundly exacerbates the problem of PR and ad culture. If everyone has some wealth doing things that help many people live more comfortably is a great way to become wealthy. But if very few people have wealth, then doing a venture capital FOMO hustle on the wealthy is anyone's best ROI. Radical wealth inequality eventually breaks all the good aspects of capitalist/market economies.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#616

Post by [deleted] »

low_tech_love wrote: post #27

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…

[deleted]

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#617

Post by coryfklein »

StrLght wrote: post #357
cubefox wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because we have seen massive improvements in AI over the last years, and all the evidence points to this progress continuing at a fast pace.

Extrapolation of past progress isn't evidence.

Do you expect the hockeystick graph of technological development since the industrial evolution to slow? Or that it will proceed, only without significant advances in AI?

Seems like the base case here is for the exponential growth to continue, and you'd need a convincing argument to say otherwise.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#618

Post by kloop »

akudha wrote: post #384
elnasca2 wrote: post #51

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?

There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general. Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI? Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff…

There are lots of organizations with $1M and a desire to influence the population

This can only be done with a sentiment that was, at least partially, already there. And may very well happen naturally eventually

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#619

Post by CuriouslyC »

drstewart wrote: post #454
littlestymaar wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Funny how it's technology that outmaneuvered capitalism to lift people out of poverty, but technology is being outmaneuvered by capitalism to endanger the future with AI. Methinks capitalism is just a bogeyman you ascribe anything you don't like to.

The problem is that capitalism is a very large tent. There is no such thing as a free market, and every market where people can trade goods and services is "capitalist" by definition regardless of its rules. Some markets are good and some markets are bad, but we're having conversations about market vs no market when we should be talking about how we design markets that improve society rather than degrade it.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#620

Post by vundercind »

Gigachad wrote: post #109
gizmo wrote: post #33

AI 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.

AI is really good at automating away shit we didn’t need to do to begin with, but for some stupid reason were doing anyway.

Ghost writing rich people’s vanity/self-marketing trash business or self-help books (you would not believe how many of these are written every year). Images (and prose) for internal company department newsletters that almost nobody reads.

Great at that crap—because it doesn’t matter anyway.

Whether making it far cheaper to produce things with no or negative value (spam, astroturf, scams) is a good idea… well no, it’s obviously terrible. It’d (kinda) be good if demand for such things remained the same, but it won’t, so it’s really, really bad.

Post reply on HN