I think this article makes sense when analyzing the current technology of AI. But it doesn’t make sense if AI continues to improve. I honestly believe AI will lead to a singularity in the sense that the future of AI cannot be defined and is currently unknowable
AI Crap
121–130 of 260 posts
Re: AI Crap
#122[deleted]
Re: AI Crap
#123It’s pretty astonishing how rapidly everyone in the world went from ‘sky net’ to laughable garbage in a matter of a few months.
I’ve been on laughable garbage from day 1. Drew is spot on here.
It all depends on the parameters and constraints. If you spend a lot of time defining, providing sufficient context, and clarifications, they work quite well. I think the reality is people's expectations were unreasonably optimistic and now they are unjustifiably pessimistic. The general public seems to oscillate between extremes quite rapidly while not appreciating the nuances.
Re: AI Crap
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on I’m imagining world where companies like Netflix and Spotify introduce dirt-cheap subscription tiers that are populate with AI generated content,…
Why would the poor not be able to afford human generated content? Copying human generated context costs basically nothing, so the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.
Creating human-generated content will cost a lot more, so it will be paywalled. This pattern already exists, limitless machine crap will just make the differential greater.
Re: AI Crap
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The fallacy you are falling victim to, which is common in these debates, is comparing an LLM teacher to a human teacher as a 1-1 replacement, when really you need to be comparing an LLM teacher to what a child has today outside of access to a human teacher: static books and today's internet + search engines.
It's very easy for me to see how an "LLM teacher" developed and trained specifically for that purpose could be of HUGE value over that status quo. That doesn't mean that the child's human teacher goes away, only that they now have access to a new amazing tool at home as well.
Re: AI Crap
#126The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome.
Why write this article other than to to smugly say "told you so" in the cases where you turn out right. It is a zero risk take.
Looking at the advances in AI (Chess, Go, Protein Folding, MidJourney, ChatGPT) and your takeaway being "Humans will use this in bad ways" shows a ferocious lack of imagination.
I notice a desperate, but failing, attempt to lump the advances in AI to the same pool as Crypto greed because that was the smug naysayers nirvana.
Re: AI Crap
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a point a lot of people are missing. If AI can already talk about certain topics better than most humans, imagine in the future. There may be a time when talking to humans may become really underwhelming compared to all-knowing AIs.
Why have all-knowing customer-support AIs waste their time and resources talking with underwhelming human customers such as myself? It would be much more efficient for customer support calls to be made by all-knowing personal assistant AIs, which can surely explain the nature of the problem much better than me, as well as being better able to infallibly put in practice whatever the all-knowing customer-support AI sug…
Even better, they may be able to prompt-inject the support AI to actually escalate the support case.
Re: AI Crap
#128As 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…
AI is the only way for small countries to compete with Hollywood. I'm sick and tired of all those glorified stage plays that my country produces simply because we have no access to Hollywood money. Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.
My question to you is: why do people spend money on those glorified stage plays and not just spend all their money on Hollywood movies? It's likely that Hollywood movies just don't align perfectly with the local culture due to limits/costs on localization. Now imagine if Hollywood movies had perfect dubbing (including changing scenes and lip movements), local references and jokes, removed cultural mismatches, etc. Would that make people less or more likely to spend their money on them?
Re: AI Crap
#129As 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…
>> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on.
Due to the economics of information, this is unlikely for contents. The cost to watch Avatar is often quite close to a local film with I also suspect the best contents in the future will be co-created by humans and AI.
Re: AI Crap
#130I 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…
This is kind of what kills me about the current crop of assistants. They all make my ADHD life harder, not easier. The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask. "Send an email to Jim." Nope. "Record my weight in Google fit." Nope. It won't look at any calendar that's not a Google calendar. It puts other people's flights on my schedule. It tells me I've got good traffic an hour before rush hour, but doesn't give me an update as it gets worse. I've probably wasted more time trying to get it to work than it's ever saved me. And it's twice as good as Siri was.
I'm always getting reminders about bills I've auto-paid, that Google has dug up from the bowels of my email, and yet I still find myself scrambling on things I forgot about.
I'm highly unimpressed by anything other than the incredible confidence with which these systems will lie. Online and phone support is bad enough, AI will not make it better, not because they can't make an AI that could figure out that you need a technician to come, but because corporate won't trust the AI to not deliver a pony along with them. And who could blame them? As soon as they give AI any power it will become the tool of the stainless steel rat. Instead, it will continue to be used to fend off support calls and fudge internal metrics, just like the last round of automated support.