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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#151

Post by spion »

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…

I'm a cautious optimist. If we manage to improve correctness further and set up some guardrails to avoid convincing it to do the work for you, AI can be an incredible augmentation for students and learners, completely transforming education to the level of everyone having something close to a personal tutor

I don't worry too much about the lack of correctness, as long as the learner is aware of the possibility - lots of teachers are sometimes wrong too, and a lot of information on the internet is incorrect.

But there indeed is a certain threshold of correctness. Below that threshold, the tehcnology is more harmful than helpful.

The threshold is also different for different aspects of education - for example for many uses in software engineering education current LLMs are already good enough, but they are nowhere near where they would need to be for e.g. law.

Re: AI Crap

#152

Post by octacat »

fluidcruft wrote: post #124
RecycledEle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kinda interesting that facebook is switching from "real people" generated content (i.e. someone you more or less know) to "random crap" content (not even the tiktok algo). It is like shooting themself into a leg.

Re: AI Crap

#153

Post by joenot443 »

jprete wrote: post #29
dools wrote: post #21

> Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you When I read things like this it makes me think the author hasn't used ChatGPT in their job yet. Here is a really simple example of how I used ChatGPT this afternoon that saved me, I would estimate, about 2 hou…

That sounds like a five-minute job.

It's not, but if it was, I'm sure one would be happy to make it a two-minute job with ChatGPT.

Re: AI Crap

#154

Post by raincole »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people would just stop using the internet (or use it in a very limited fashion) because of the explosion of LLM generated content. On a similar note, I watch little TV because of the exact same reason, because I have little control over what I want to see and most of the interesting stuff that I may want to watch may be spread across different channels and broadcasted at nearly the same time. Perhap…

> I watch little TV because of the exact same reason

Maybe you do. But for most people the reason they watch little TV is because the internet is simply better.

So no, not many people would just stop using the internet... unless there is something better.

Re: AI Crap

#155

Post by spion »

layer8 wrote: post #138
lijok wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accelerate education at unprecedented levels (if we can figure out how to integrate LLMs into the education system). To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time. How great is it that…

I don’t know, but anyone who has the motivation to “interrogate it to no end until it clicks for [them]” already didn’t have trouble to become well-educated before. AI can speed things up for those people, but I can imagine much less impact on general education.

The speed difference is out of this world. I have very long sessions with ChatGPT on the Rust ownership and borrowing system. Its sometimes wrong (would say about 1 in 30 messages), but when it is it becomes clear quite quickly and then I search the internet armed with the new knowledge of terminology and relations within that terminology

Re: AI Crap

#156

Post by nottorp »

zirgs wrote: post #49
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…

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.

But do you really want your country to compete with Hollywood and make superhero movies that are indistinguishable from each other?

Re: AI Crap

#157

Post by raincole »

woeirua wrote: post #147
sharts wrote: post #96

Like social media ruined the world despite it's initial promises, like crypto ended up with grifters of all kinds, AI will follow. Yes, there are some narrow applications that will be GOOD. But will the good outweigh the bad? No, not at all. It never has. We'd all be happier as a society if we went back in time.

I'm only in my mid 30s. I'm _very_ convinced that the world was a better place overall before 2008. Before smartphones, and social media.

Like good old late 80s, when the world was on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#/media/File:...

Re: AI Crap

#158

Post by agentgumshoe »

raincole wrote: post #54
agentgumshoe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

> Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar... Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go) > Same with dev. Does it actually make you better... Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved. Without ChatGPT I would have learned…

Did you though? Can you remember any of those solutions that ChatGPT provided or why? Or are you now going to ChatGPT more and more because easier?

Re: AI Crap

#159

Post by octacat »

spion wrote: post #135
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…

I'm not entirely sure about the centralization part. We already have models that can run on consumer hardware and are freely available to use for anyone (e.g. code-llama 34B is actually a viable gpt 3-5 replacement, if not slightly better) Training these is still out of reach, but fine tuning is getting close (LoRA) and running them is almost easy at this point. The products we've built so far are power-centralized,…

oh, believe me, regulations would be lobbied. I.e. to run an AI model as a part of some service, you would need to get certification (a lot of money). Even now you could see a couple of talks on tech conferences from "non-profit" organisations. Also, web services are highly centralised, so there are all the chances to get highly centralised AI services too.

Re: AI Crap

#160

Post by agentgumshoe »

ExtremisAndy wrote: post #53
agentgumshoe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

This is indeed a valid question, but I think it’s largely up to the user. For me, as a hobbyist programmer that sometimes writes code at work to automate certain tasks, I use ChatGPT to quickly create boilerplate/template type code AND to learn how to do new things. When I’m asking how to do something new, I try to actually learn what’s going on so that I won’t have to keep asking about that particular issue. But yea…

I think the interesting part of that is, is there money in it? I could see it being useful for hobbyists that don't care about programming that much, but would you pay for that?
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