Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
skarlso.github.io
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
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Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#2Hello. Just wanted to share my 2¢ on this post that is entirely missing the point of the skepticism I believe. Take it with a grain of salt. Thank you.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#3I don't think the original post took issue with what people enjoyed doing, I think it took issue with people's understanding of what is even possible with the current tech.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#4> 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 true, it is indeed a serious problem.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#5I feel (hah!) that we've reached a point where instead of focusing on objective things that the LLM-based systems can do, we are wasting energy and "ink" on how they make us feel. And how others using them make us feel. And how Hollywood-style stories about "AI" make us feel. And how people commenting on these things make us feel. And so on.
IMO it's best to focus on objective things that the systems can do today, with maybe a look forward so we can prepare for things they'll be able to do "tomorrow". The rest is too noisy for me. I'm OK with some skepticism, but not outright denial. You can't take an unbiased look at what these things can do today and say "well, yes, but can they do x y z"? That's literally moving the goalposts, and I find it extremely counter productive.
In a way I see a parallel to the self driving cars discussions of 5 years ago. Lots of very smart people were focusing on silly things like "they have to solve the trolley problem in 0.0001 ms before we can allow them on our roads", instead of "let's see if they can drive from point A to point B first". We are now at the point where they can do that, somewhat reliably, with some degree of variability between solutions (waymos, teslas, mercedes, etc). All that talk 5 years ago was useless, IMO.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#6I don't think the original post took issue with what people enjoyed doing, I think it took issue with people's understanding of what is even possible with the current tech.
I agree! I see a lot of people who "have tried them and they suck". But when you dig deep, they barely tried a web interface for programming, or the OG chatgpt for writing, and that's basically it. They aren't willing to try again, and keep up to date. Things are moving incredibly fast, and the skeptics are adding noise without even being informed about current SotA capabilities.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#7Opinions here, opinions there, meanwhile Stargate goes brrr :D
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#8Solid 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 expert at all, but to me it feels like we'd need a new breakthrough to get good output from garbage input.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#9> 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 is not a critical skill, and I'm not sure much is lost if LLMs do it for us.
Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#10I agree that education needs overhaul, it's scary for new comers, AI can make mistakes that you need to be careful (so does old StackOverflow answers) but let’s be honest: Most employers aren’t paying for your art or your dopamine.