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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#11

Post by danielbln »

Jack000 wrote: post #10
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.

Re: AI Crap

#12

Post by emptysongglass »

block_dagger wrote: post #2

A one sided argument with sweeping generalities and something about minorities being killed in the process. Got it.

Seems we just can't resist hating on anything new, no matter what it is these days. Drew has some good ideas but they're often lost in his reactionary rejection of anything not his narrowly defined vision of UNIXy enough. His inexplicable dislike of containers being just one example.

There can be nuance to our view of new things. It's important we stress our ability as humans to think this way. LLMs are not all or nothing good bad polarities. They can be just another tool in your toolset. And that's fine. No hatred required.

Re: AI Crap

#13

Post by BoorishBears »

sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

When you say someone should list all the good world changing benefits to counter your suggestions, it means you're expecting world changing negativity.

That means you're envisioning a future where LLMs are so powerful that they actually cause huge societal impacts but somehow they can't detect spam, or make customer service more effective, make the general populace smarter?

You're asking a for an answer that you by definition wouldn't accept. To me LLMs are like cloud computing: cloud computing technically didn't change the world in that your average person knows what a load balance is... but there was a democratization that allowed many great things to be built at a scale that was previously not possible, and the results of that are what brought value.

Re: AI Crap

#14

Post by pjerem »

sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed.

But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that.

For anything else, I just agree with you and the author. It will just make capitalism worse.

Re: AI Crap

#16

Post by evrimoztamur »

Jack000 wrote: post #10
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't.

Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical conclusion of perfect sensors and tensors is not here, and the lacking substitutes along the way will be profit-driven, not solution-driven.

Re: AI Crap

#17

Post by mekoka »

I'm an age-of-AI optimist. Not in the sense that AI will solve all problems, but rather in the opposite. The allure in the promise of so much power, so much profit, will be irresistible to those organizations that are already too big to fail and have the means to pursue the shimmer. But like this article articulates, it'll exposes even more dysfunctions than we're accustomed to. Within the gaps though, there will be opportunities. Particularly for those who modestly want to make a difference in a given community, without necessarily the ambitions to change the word™. The world doesn't get "better" or "worse", it's an ongoing and never-ending experiment. We don't discover the "right" way to do anything. We just try stuff and when it's annoying enough, we self-correct. AI has so much potential for annoyance that we should just rejoice in the resulting opportunities.

Re: AI Crap

#18

Post by xixixao »

I have to disagree. Some things will get crappier, and some things will improve. Yes there's hype, but whether it's the same as crypto hype depends on whether there's actually anything useful behind the hype, and unlike crypto, I think it's pretty guaranteed there's something useful here (purely by getting value out of ChatGPT, infinitely more value than I ever got from anything crypto related).

> Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard.

Uff, what about crappy therapists? If an AI bot tells you to kill yourself, it's a pretty crappy AI bot. But there are a lot of crappy licensed therapists too. There's also a lot of crappy articles you can find on Google. The world is full of crappy resources. AI can and most likely will be used in all sorts of medical use cases.

Re: AI Crap

#19

Post by noobermin »

danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

You of course already have this for the most part, it's just "premier support" vs "faq that doesn't answer you question" for most people. It's just the "premier support" providers will be even more thinned out than they already were.

Re: AI Crap

#20

Post by supriyo-biswas »

pjerem wrote: post #14
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed. But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that. For anything else, I…

If the model of streaming services is anything to go by, the LLM would be offered as a paid subscription with ads.
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