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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#691

Post by edgarvaldes »

Roark66 wrote: post #352
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…

>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…

>Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I

I see this type of reasoning in all the AI threads. And yes, I think this time is different.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#692

Post by mhowland »

Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time."

I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't think it will be any better than the average human is at being their own control, but by no means does that mean it's not a solvable problem.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#693

Post by Eisenstein »

rjbwork wrote: post #572
techdmn wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing…

Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society. I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.

Workers are many times more efficient than they were in the 50s or 70s or 80s or 90s. Where are our extra vacation days? Why does the worker have to make up for the efficiency with more work while other people take the gains?

Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#694

Post by linsomniac »

mhowland wrote: post #692
Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time." I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't thin…

>also is a decent description of individual humans

A friend of mine was moving from software development into managing devs. He told me: "They often don't do things the way or to the quality I'd like, but 10 of them just get so much more done than I could on my own." This was him coming to terms with letting go of some control, and switching to "guiding the results" rather than direct control.

The LLMs are a lot like this.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#695

Post by illiac786 »

__loam wrote: post #684
Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

Funnily enough, bitcoin mining still uses at least about 3x more power that AI at the moment, while providing less value imo. AI power use is also dwarfed by other industries even in computing. We should still consider whether it's worth it, but most research and development on LLMs in corporate right now seems to be focused on making them more efficient, and therefore both cheaper and less power intensive, to run. T…

Do you have a nice reference for this? I could really use something like this, this topic comes up a lot in my social circle.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#696

Post by phatfish »

m463 wrote: post #663
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…

I think ... between now and the day you die... you'll get your personal AI to read things for you. It will analyze what's been written, check any arguments for fallacious reasoning, and look up related things for background and omissions that may support or negate things. It is actually happening now. I've noticed amazon reviews have an AI summary at the top, reading the reviews for you and even pointing out shortcom…

I've seen "summarise this" and "explain this code" buttons added to technical documentation. This works reasonably well for most common situations, which is probably the reason it's one of the few "production" uses for LLMs. I didn't know Amazon was using it though.

Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human".

I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off.

Rinse and repeat.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#697

Post by PeterisP »

goatlover wrote: post #571
DrillShopper wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.

They definitely try to replace part of the people this way, starting with the areas where it's the easiest, but obviously it will continue to other people as the capabilities improve. A big example is sports journalism, where lots of venues have game summaries that do not involve any human who actually saw the game, but rather software embellishing some narrative from the detailed referee scoring data. Another example is autotranslation of foreign news or rewriting press releases or summarizing company financial 'news' - most publishers will eagerly skip the labor intensive and thus expensive part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc, if they can get away with that.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#698

Post by sanj »

westoncb wrote: post #641
DanHulton wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner. You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about…

I actually do think this is a legitimate concern, but at the same time I feel like when higher-level languages were introduced people likely experienced a similar dilemma: you just let the compiler generate the code for you without actually knowing what you're running on the CPU? Definitely something to tread carefully with, but it's also likely an inevitable aspect of progressing software development capabilities.

A compiler is deterministic. An LLM is not.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#699

Post by rexpop »

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…

> draw, write, compose

The primacy of these artforms is subjective, and there's no accounting for taste.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#700

Post by mark_l_watson »

Nice thoughts. Since 1982 half my work has been in one of the fields loosely called AI and the other half more straight up software development. After mostly been doing deep learning and now LLM for almost ten years, I miss conventional software development.

When I was swimming this morning I thought of writing a RDF data store with partial SPARQL support in Racket or Common Lisp - basically trade a year of my time to do straight up design and coding, for something very few people would use.

I get very excited by shiny new things like advance voice interface for ChatGPT and NoteBookLM, both fine product ideas and implementations, but I also feel some general fatigue.

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