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Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#741

Post by riazrizvi »

awbvious wrote: post #592

Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…

Spam and slop is to GenAI as pollution is to Industrialization. GenAI is beneficial generally but it comes at this cost.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#742

Post by ozgung »

For me it's not about the capabilities but what they can be used for. Think of all the recent drama between Anthropic and the Department of War. A real wake up call (especially if you are not a US citizen). Proves that AI is essentially a Surveillance and Warfare technology (which justifies the big valuations).

Or see this simple and fun site: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com

AI automatically analyzes all your social media posts in your life and can generate a pretty accurate profile about you in a second. We have no privacy anymore. Social media sites like Reddit already do that for moderation. Others do for more sinister reasons.

Note that Profiling is illegal in many countries. But laws can't protect us anymore.

Yes, it was always possible to that manually. But with AI it's so easy, fast and accurate to do in large scales. A hacker having access to your computer, reading your mails and messages is one thing. An AI reading and analyzing all your mails, messages and data is something different. Doing this for whole demographics (Cambridge Analytica style) is at another level.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#743

Post by MagicMoonlight »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #620
awbvious wrote: post #592

Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…

FWIW the OP passes as 100% human in Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/d33dcbcd-e82b-4ce0-bea5-e4ee... Reddit is definitely overtaken with astroturf at this point. Especially in any subreddit where there is any kind of business interest in doing so.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#744

Post by altairprime »

Cuil Theory, in 2008, was my Ocelot Six moment.

Once I realized how well AI could babble given the entire internet to date’s data, and after seeing a talk by Google about their ten-year plan in 2003, I started winding down my social media, stopped posting photos to Flickr, and removed the indexes to my blog archive so that only posts with permalinks from other sites would be discoverable. Skipped Instagram entirely in the process and have never regretted it.

Google bought Cuil, of course.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#746

Post by voidnap »

riazrizvi wrote: post #741
awbvious wrote: post #592

Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…

Spam and slop is to GenAI as pollution is to Industrialization. GenAI is beneficial generally but it comes at this cost.

No. Pollution is a byproduct. Spam and slop is quite literally the product in many cases. GenAI generated blogs or websites or youtube videos are the point for those creating them, they are not incidental outputs along the way.

And GenAI to mass produce misinformation and propoganda is a whole other thing. You see this right now with the Alberta sepratists in Canada. Comparing this to pollution like a means to an end is dismissive.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#747

Post by IanCal »

angusturner wrote: post #657

In 2017 I worked tirelessly with my colleagues to implement and replicate the first transformer paper. Yesterday I left Opus 4.8 to go do some architecture research, with GPU access. It replicated and trained a credible baseline. It implemented some ideas I'd been thinking about, and wrote custom CUDA kernels for them. It read and summarised dozens of related papers. It has since run dozens of experiments, with minim…

This is an interesting read: https://ai-2027.com/

I'm not going to say it's a perfect prediction, but I do find the trajectory of "can write something reasonable" to "oh can write snippets of code" towards larger and larger systems feels like it's played out - the common thing I see more now is that people talk of "taste" that the humans are contributing more than the raw coding part.

I get what you mean with this rather automated research, I've done it on a smaller scale with performance work because it can run/test/measure/propose changes/debug and loop. I can throw a vague idea at it, guide it or discuss with it and go and make a coffee.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#748

Post by adamkf »

I'll give you two:

The first was when I first realized that I could tell codex to use gdb to debug a core dump. This was about a year ago, so it made a bunch of incorrect theories, but it enabled me to go much further than I would have been able to go by myself. I eventually solved the problem.

The second was when I decided to ask it about my Linux Wi-Fi issue that I had been having for several years. The computer would infrequently have multi second pings and dropped packets, then go back to normal. I thought it was due to the weak signal, but after describing the problem to codex, it immediately disabled power management on the Wi-Fi interface (this is a desktop computer, so I don't care much for that anyway) and the problem has never come back. I had been dealing with this for years, and I had tried searching for a solution before, but codex just solved it directly.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#749

Post by tliltocatl »

Still haven't had one. It is impressive, it is sometimes useful, it will be insightful (once the smoke settles), it is nowhere close to become self-improving world-as-we-know-ending ultimate solution to every problem it is being sold as. And much of the progress we have seen so far relied on tons of natural data being available thru the Web. After LLM killed SO, where would we get the answers to train LLMs on?

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#750

Post by tmaly »

It was last Summer. I was at an AirBnB and the fire alarm system had a fault and kept beeping.

I took a picture of the panel and the AI was able to diagnose the issue and tell me how to temporarily disable the beeping sound.

I knew nothing about fire systems. I had the owner call a repair person the next day to resolve the issue.

Recently I was trying to find a matching stain for wood flooring in a house build in 1999. I uploaded a clear picture in bright sunlight and ChatGPT was able to search online and find a matching stain color. It presented me with ordering options and I got a quart delivered yesterday.

I have been working on my own variant of OpenClaw written in go. I got the voice mode wired up a few weeks ago and it just started having a conversation with me. My wife freaked out and was asking who was talking to me.

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