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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#701

Post by PeterisP »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #152
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…

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that. Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?

I think that novel writing and reviews are types of writing where potentially AI should eventually surpass human writers, because they have the potential to replace content skillfully tailored to be liked by many people with content that's tailored (perhaps less skillfully) explicitly for a specific very, very, very narrow niche of exactly you and all the things that happen to work for your particular biases.

There seems to be an upcoming wave of adult content products (once again, being on the bleeding edge users of new abilities) based on this principle, as hitting very specific niches/kinks/fetishes can be quite effective in that business, but it should then move on to romance novels and pulp fiction and then, over time, most other genres.

Similarly, good pedagogy, curriculum design and educational content development is all about accurately modeling which exact bits of the content the target audience will/won't know, and explaining the gaps with analogies and context that will work for them (for example, when adapting a textbook for a different country, translation is not sufficient; you'd also need to adapt the content). In that regard, if AI models can make personalized technical writing, then that can be more effective than the best technical writing the most skilled person can make addressed to a broader audience.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#702

Post by msikora »

bitexploder wrote: post #219
ookdatnog wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid. For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption h…

This. I am very picky about how I use ML still, but it is unsurpassed as a virtual editor. It can clean up grammar and rephrase things in a very light way, but it gives my prose the polish I want. The thing is, I am a very decent writer. I wrote professionally for 18 years as a part of my job delivering reports of high quality as my work product. So, it really helps that I know exactly what “good” looks like by my st…

This is my go-to process whenever I write anything now:

1. I use dictation software to get my thoughts out as a stream of consciousness. 2. Then, I have ChatGPT or Claude refine it into something coherent based on a prompt of what I'm aiming for. 3. Finally, I review the result and make edits where needed to ensure it matches what I want.

This method has easily boosted my output by 10x, and I'd argue the quality is even better than before. As a non-native English speaker, this approach helps a lot with clarity and fluency. I'm not a great writer to begin with, so the improvement is noticeable. At the end of the day, I’m just a developer—what can I say?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#703

Post by DowagerDave »

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…

AI seems really good at producing middling content, and if you make your living writing mediocre training courses, or marketing collateral, or code, or tests you're in big trouble. I question how valuable this work is though, so are we increasing productivity by utilizing AI, or just getting efficient at a suboptimal game? I for one just refuse to play.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#704

Post by cutemonster »

AI_beffr wrote: post #442
tessierashpool9 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genocides and murder are very human ...

this is so annoying. i think if you took a random person and gave them the option to commit a genocide, here a machine gun, a large trench and a body of women, children, etc... they would literally be incapable of doing it. even the foot soldiers who carry out genocides can only do it once they "dehumanize" their victims. genocide is very UN-human because its an idea that exists in offices and places separated from t…

You've partly misunderstood evolution and this animal species. But you seem like a kind person, having such positive beliefs.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#705

Post by msikora »

rasulkireev wrote: post #596
ookdatnog wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid. For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption h…

Great opportunity to get ahead of all the lazy people who use AI for a cover letter. Do a video! Sure, AI will be able to do that soon, but then we (not lazy people, who care) will come up with something even more personal!

Great idea! I'll get an LLM to write the script for the video and then I'll just read it! I can crank out 20 of these in an hour!

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#706

Post by Animats »

bloppe wrote: post #687
spencerchubb wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential

They have been improving a lot, but that improvement is already plateauing and all the fundamental problems have not disappeared. AI needs another architectural breakthrough to keep up the pace of advancement.

Yes. Anything on the horizon?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#707

Post by amelius »

bloppe wrote: post #687
spencerchubb wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential

They have been improving a lot, but that improvement is already plateauing and all the fundamental problems have not disappeared. AI needs another architectural breakthrough to keep up the pace of advancement.

If they were plateauing it would mean OpenAI would have lost its headstart wrt the competition, which is not the case I believe.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#708

Post by DowagerDave »

honzabe wrote: post #531
matwood wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet". I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a…

> I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a majority of the kids trust what the computer says by default. Not just LLMs, but generally what they read. That's such a huge shift from my generation. I think that previous generations were not any different. For most people, trusting is the default mode and you need to le…

Not sure of the context here is for "previous generation" but I've been around since early in the transition from university/military network to public network, and the reality was the internet just wasn't that big, and it was primarily made up of people who looked, acted and valued the same things.

Now it's not even the website of undetermined providence that is believed; positions are established based on just the headline, shared 2nd or 3rd hand!

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#709

Post by Terr_ »

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…

> You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.

Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."

Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.

In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#710

Post by TuringNYC »

nicce wrote: post #91
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?

In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore. While the professional looking tex…

>> While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

...or...the likelihood of text being really wrong pre-LLMs was worse because you needed to be a well-capitalized player to pay your thoughts into public discourse. Just look at our global conflicts and you see how much they are driven by well-planned lobbying, PR, and...money. That is not new.

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