Thank was a very interesting read, thanks!
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
11–20 of 116 posts
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#12Agree with a lot said here - but it doesn’t touch on the socio-political consequences of ai. In a capitalist system, wealth concentrates in the hands of the already rich. But ultimately, the rich need everyone else. They need them to do their laundry, clean their mansions, fly their planes. That gives the not rich some small token of power over the rich. With each new job ai is capable of doing, it drains away that power.
Similarly, the state needs people to do the work of state power. People to investigate the citizenry, people to judge and prosecute and process appeals. AI takes away the human from that, allowing massive injustices to be rubber stamped. A small example - RFJ jr couldn’t get a human to write his garbage maha report, so he used AI (https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/rfk-jr-may-hav...). Small examples become bigger examples.
AI is accelerating us towards a techno-fascist oligarchy. That’s why i am skeptical of it. Not because it’s mid at writing unit tests or whatever.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#13> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…
I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem? Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence. School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing…
Pretty sure forming a logical argument is a critical skill, just add it to the list tho.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#14> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…
I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem? Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence. School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing…
Actually the world is more or less ending because of that. People lack more and more critical thinking skills because they aren't taught about that in school.
Sure multiplying 3-digit numbers is not really useful in everyday's life, but the important part is not the knowledge itself, it's the capacity to think and solve problems.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#15Just like nobody can make chips in the USA any more, software dev will be a lost art.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#16All of the discussion on the original blog post in question:
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#17Solid point. A bit tangential, but I've recently been baffled as to why is this belief held by so many: "since LLMs are trained on online data, they are re-trained with their own AI slop, further damaging them. Soon bad code will get even worse, basically." together with: "I’m sure it will get better with time, but it’s not there yet." What improvements people think will overcome the poisoning of the well? I'm not an…
Even as AI generates more writing and code, we still have a way of ranking quality: Good writing and successful projects tend to get more popular and prominent. This selection can allow LLMs to continue to improve. They get a huge flow of slop, but they generate based on the patterns correlated with better quality. The model developers can also develop better ways to curate the input data themselves and keep the slop at bay.
It's not a guaranteed or trivial mechanism, but I don't think we need a new breakthrough either.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem? Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence. School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing…
Actually the world is more or less ending because of that. People lack more and more critical thinking skills because they aren't taught about that in school. Sure multiplying 3-digit numbers is not really useful in everyday's life, but the important part is not the knowledge itself, it's the capacity to think and solve problems.
You can easily measure the capacity to think and solve problems with paper-and-pencil exams every week or two not hours of daily busywork.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#19> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…
I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem? Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence. School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing…
This is the digital divide, where students from more wealthy backgrounds can afford access to better LLM subscriptions, and are able to achieve more "academically".
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#20> So am I saying don’t use LLMs? No, I’m not. I’m saying it needs serious guardrails, documentation, oversight, usage data, research, and it should definitely be banned from schools. Because it’s doing serious damage to young people’s ability to think, figure out, read, understand, and research.
The original article didn't talk about any of these things....
> My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous.
Ah. The article's author heard a bad take on LLMs and accidentally attributed it to Ptacek's article.