Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

aphyr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#111

Post by bigfudge »

SoftTalker wrote: post #68
Leomuck wrote: post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.

I really didn’t experience the early internet that way.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#112

Post by dalmo3 »

morgengold wrote: post #90

My father just changed his car key battery with the help of ai and he likes that. He also consulted it about about car insurance regulations and he got more out of it than searching the web himself. For most simple mainstream questions I just ask ai instead of googling shitty results. Most of the time ai is good enough and often better than the status ante. People do not care if it is a stupid token prediction machin…

Until you take a baby to the vaccine clinic, the nurse googles which vaccine to give at his age, and blindly trusts the highlighted AI snippet at the top.

Not a fictitious example.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#113

Post by forinti »

dalmo3 wrote: post #112
morgengold wrote: post #90

My father just changed his car key battery with the help of ai and he likes that. He also consulted it about about car insurance regulations and he got more out of it than searching the web himself. For most simple mainstream questions I just ask ai instead of googling shitty results. Most of the time ai is good enough and often better than the status ante. People do not care if it is a stupid token prediction machin…

Until you take a baby to the vaccine clinic, the nurse googles which vaccine to give at his age, and blindly trusts the highlighted AI snippet at the top. Not a fictitious example.

I saw a doctor use AI to do some maths recently. I checked it and it was right, but trusting LLMs to do statistics is not a good idea.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#114

Post by solid_fuel »

kevg123 wrote: post #22

I sent the entire series by Aphyr [1] to some friends. Two of them, independently, responded with a variant of, "TLDR, can you give a summary?" I chat with these friends a lot but I rarely send articles that I suggest they read and that I think are profound, so I expected them to read it. These are smart people that have a history of reading lots of books. They are both huge AI proponents now and use AI for nearly ev…

It's disheartening to see how shallow the engagement of some people I formerly respected has become. People I looked up to and learned from now just left ChatGPT do their thinking for them, asking for summaries of articles and topics, engaging for a minute or two at most before moving on to the next thing.

Recently, I have been taking intentional steps to avoid falling into the same tar pit. I've started corresponding over email with some of my friends, with us sending multi-page letters back and forth instead of just using chat apps. So far, it has been a wonderful breath of fresh air. Long form communication requires thought and time instead of superficial engagement, and we have had some incredibly interesting discussions that simply aren't possible over voice chat or instant messaging.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#115

Post by solid_fuel »

_doctor_love wrote: post #100
CamperBob2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then...propose that we make some laws to put rules around this stuff, also known as regulations and everybody goes "whoa hold up hold up hold up...I dunno about that part." Of course, what those who call for regulation of AI or other nascent technologies are really saying is, "Unqualified and/or biased and/or corrupt and/or dull-witted people should make decisions that affect us all, based on incomplete, misleadi…

I'm sorry...wut?

This interaction nicely illustrates why so many Americans sound hopeless when talking about these developments. We can't even get our fellow citizens to do anything about the school shootings, our incredibly expensive healthcare, the homelessness crisis, or really anything else. Instead we are surrounded by conservative reactionaries who view "let's stop dumping cyanide into the town pond" as a communist plot to steal their religion.

So yeah, when people around here look at "AI" and all the harm it's already doing, they don't any hope that regulations will be put in place before more harm is done.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#116

Post by CamperBob2 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #115
_doctor_love wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry...wut?

This interaction nicely illustrates why so many Americans sound hopeless when talking about these developments. We can't even get our fellow citizens to do anything about the school shootings, our incredibly expensive healthcare, the homelessness crisis, or really anything else. Instead we are surrounded by conservative reactionaries who view "let's stop dumping cyanide into the town pond" as a communist plot to stea…

The person comparing a building full of computers to dumping cyanide in the town pond is the reactionary in this conversation.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#117

Post by solid_fuel »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #73
petermcneeley wrote: post #11

> Since LLMs are unpredictable and vulnerable to injection attacks, customer service machines must also have limited power Haha yes. I interacted with a bank one. It was like press 5 for mortgages but with a text to speech front end. At the end of the day the LLM can be tricked into doing anything.

I wonder if there's also less of a stigma and sense of wrongdoing about tricking an LLM versus tricking an employee We intuitively know that an employee will be punished and may get fired if we trick them. Many of us won't try to trick human employees as a result, because we would feel bad if they had bad consequences as a result of our trickery There is likely no such hesitation around tricking LLMs. I know I person…

I have no moral qualms about tricking an LLM, but I would not be surprised if it gets called a violation of the CFAA in the near future.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#118

Post by groundzeros2015 »

bigfudge wrote: post #110
api wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major problem is that if we structurally limit what technologies do, we are still not in control. Now whoever we empowered to control and limit the technology is in control. Who keeps them accountable? You’ll probably get one of three outcomes: regulatory capture by monopolies, self dealing by bureaucrats to enrich themselves or gain power, or regulatory capture by self absorbed ideologues who halt all progress or…

That’s what you will get in the US. It’s not clear a functioning democracy would produce the same outcome.

I think it’s pretty for hard for democracies not to cater to the most base desires.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#119

Post by djeastm »

SoftTalker wrote: post #68
Leomuck wrote: post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.

Cheap distribution makes manipulation easier, not harder. The time it takes for a bad actor to capture attention is much smaller now. It used to be you'd read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life, etc.

Now you're getting meme after meme of the same story multiple times throughout the day, twisted in so many ways. And since we all have our feeds/algorithms adjusted to suit our own tastes we're all getting our own silo'd view of things and can barely rely on a shared set of facts.

All that makes manipulation of people much easier.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#120

Post by M95D »

SoftTalker wrote: post #70
Lerc wrote: post #34

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION —IBM internal training, 1979 It took me a while to realise that the premise is saying the same thing as the reason why we have so many "Computer says no" experiences today. The conclusion only follows if you want someone to be accountable. If you want to avoid being accountable, computers should make all management dec…

You're misinterpreting the implication. A better phrasing might be: A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, since all management decisions must have accountability, a computer must never make them.

Since when are (human) managers accountable?
Post reply on HN