Live data from Hacker News

Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

mcsweeneys.net

111–120 of 331 posts

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#111
post #82
post #68

> "immoral technofascist life" Many people would rather argue about morality and conscience (of our time, of our society) instead of confronting facts and reality. What we see here is a textbook case of that.

Is there a reason you seem to view conscience and confronting facts as seemingly opposed things? Also it seems to me like morality and conscience seem important to argue about, with facts just being part of that argument.

I think that someone interested in discussing facts would not write the phrase "immoral technofascist life". If I took the discussion at face value, I might respond asking for examples of how e.g. Dario Amodei is a "technofascist", but I think we can agree that would be really obtuse of me.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#112
post #49

> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in…

The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything. And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things…

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them.

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#113

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

Sounds like you just want some of their money.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#114
post #98
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order. It is, though. We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture, and numerous case studies by companies who have tried putting them in control loops! We have about 4 years of examples of bad things happening because the trigger was given to an LLM.

> We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture, And we have tens of thousands of years of shared experience of "People Were Wrong and Fucked Shit Up". What's your point? Again, my point isn't that LLMs are infallible; it's that they only need to be better than their competition, and their competition sucks.

It's a fine line. Humans don't always fuck shit up.

But human systems that don't fuck shit up are short-lived, rare, and fragile, and they've only become a potential - not a reality - in the last century or so.

The rest of history is mostly just endless horrors, with occasional tentative moments of useful insight.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#115
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop. After you eliminate anything that requires accountability and trustworthiness from the tasks which LLMs may be responsibly used for, the most obvious remaining use-cases are those built around lying: - advertising - astroturfing - other forms…

[flagged]

Genuine question: does the agent work for you if you didn't build it, train it, or host it?

It's ostensibly doing things you asked it, but in terms dictated by its owner.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#117
post #85

> just use my evil technology Ridiculous to say the technology, by itself, is evil somehow. It is not. It is just math at the end of the day. Yes you can question the moral/societal implications of said technology (if used in a negative way) but that does not make the technology itself evil. For example, I hate vibe coding with a passion because it enables wrong usage (IMHO) of AI. I hate how easy it has become to sc…

Well, at this moment, the evil things done with technology vastly surpass the good things done with technology.

Democratisation of tech has allowed for more good to happen, centralisation the opposite. AI is probably one of the most centralisation-happy tech we've had in ages.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#118
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot... "by stealing from artists and writers at scale".

You forgot about 'open source contributors' and 'musicians'.

these two groups are used to having their stuff stolen way more than the groups GP listed, so in a way kind of appropriate to have been omitted.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#119
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source contributor and musician who is not rich, I am pretty stoked about the engineering, scientific and mathematical advancements being made in my lifetime. I have only become more creatively enabled when adopting these tools, and while I share the existential dread of becoming unemployable, I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation. I do not have s…

You can say the same thing as we invented the atomic bomb. Cool science and engineering, no doubt. Not paying any attention to societal effects is not cool. Plus, presenting things as inevitabilities is just plain confidently trying to predict the future. Anyone can san “I understand one day this era will be history and X will have happened”. Nobody knows how the future will play out. Anyone who says they do is a lia…

I dunno, I take a more McLuhan-esque view. We’re not here to save the world every single time repeatedly.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#120

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

yeah, but zero chance of that happening unfortunately.

well practiced cynicism is boring.

imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.

hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.

Post reply on HN