151–160 of 345 posts
It's very strange how many Luddites inhabit the tech world. I would expect to find this diatribe in many places but not on a developers blog.
I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct m…
> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. You, personally, likely are not (apart from electricity use but that's iffy.) But the technology you want to use could not exist, and cannot continue to be improved, without those two things. That's not unclear in the slightest, that's just fact. > I'm open to that conversation and…
- As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples. It is possible to create outputs that are very similar to existing works, just as a human painter could copy a famous painting. The issue there lies in the output, not the human/model.
- Provide comfortable office jobs for people in economically underdeveloped countries, categorizing data to minimize harm for content moderators worldwide. One piece of training data for a model to filter harmful content can prevent hundreds/thousands of people from being exposed to similar harmful content in the future.
- Reduces or eliminates unpleasant low-skill jobs in call centers, data entry, etc.
- Creates new creative opportunities in music, video games, writing, and multimedia art by lowering the barriers to entry for creative works. For example, an indie video game developer on a shoestring budget could create their own assets, voice actors, etc.
- Reduces carbon emissions by replacing hours of human labor with seconds of load on a GPU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. > If nothing online can be trusted I think we're already pretty much there, except that it isn't just online. This is an all-media problem now. (I work in ML as well)
We were ever in a position to "trust" media? To me the advantage of having the internet was to allow a range of people without prior permission, a large sum of money, or more free time than sense to start publishing. It was all seemingly meant to expand the number of voices in the "media" and reduce the requirement to put your trust into any one outlet. We took a wrong turn somewhere.
Quality doesn't matter -- money matters. And with AI you can save a lot of money without sacrificing a lot of quality.
>I can't trust the answers it provides or the text it generates. It's not a replacement for search, it simply makes search worse. Why is an AI noob upvoted? When the author makes low tech skill claims, I wonder why this made it to the front page. The person missed the AI train, they decided instead of adapting, they would just Boo it.
I find this kind of dismissal extremely tiring. It's very lazy to wave away criticism of a tool as a skill issue. On the tin the claims are both true: LLMs do not replace search (it does not link me to any resources), at best it augments it (with services like Phind or Bing combining the two). Also, search is made worse by SEO spam, which can be churned out more easily with AI, leading to crap like the following: htt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument being that if you enjoy AI content, you can't criticise AI? Doesn't seem reasonable to me
I think it’s more about the author criticizing AI content being of low quality. IRL there are many cases I don’t see them distinguishable between human generated or AI generated.
It turns out there is an entire line of research that parallels the “technology adoption” ethos we all know called, appropriately enough, “Technology Rejection.”
> A fundamental question is whether the field of technology rejection requires investigation at all, considering the wealth of research available in technology adoption. Are they distinct phenomena? Or is knowledge on technology rejection merely a by-product and subset of knowledge on technology adoption?
> “Rejection of technology” may be expressed as a phenomenon wherein a society, ranging from individual users, community groups, through states (nations), capable of availing the service of a particular technology, deliberately chooses to refrain from its use, in full or part. Consequently, some technologies get increasingly used while the use of others tends to ebb. Conventionally, the debate surrounding the divide between technological “haves” and “have nots” has simply quarantined the latter as individual deficits (Selwyn, 2003), typically of a financial nature. However, a consensus is recently emerging within the arena of sociology of technology that conceptualizing nonusers of technology as purely technology “have nots” is too crude an analysis (Selwyn, 2003). As Bauer (1995) highlights, nonuse or resistance to technology has largely been treated with a negative connotation, placing the nonusers at fault. Bruland (1995) states that such resistance to technology is by no means irrational or conservative. Rejecters must thus be dealt with as deliberate rational nonusers.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244013485248?ic...
The field of research that is technological rejection is fascinating. That paper lays out rejection at the individual, group and national level as the basis for study, with the original poster’s article being a prime example of individual technology rejection, including the reasons for doing so, and it’s posting to the Internet and hacker news actually an interesting attempt to “find the community” of people who feel similarly.
We’ve seen this before with radio, television and especially the Internet. There were so many people who out-and-out rejected the need for the Internet when it was coming of age in the 90s, and many who still do even as the world has moved on. The joke about the boss who printed every email wasn’t a joke: I knew several of them and still know one who does this very thing.
So what causes rejection of technology and is this a distinct field of research we should be looking at?
Aside: further reading and an example worth looking at.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_some_people_reject_new...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/19/life-w...
> I don't like the idea of it being trained on anything I've written or created[1]. I'm more curious about this part - because I'm the opposite. I'm ecstatic that having open source code on github over the last ~12 years means that you have contributed to machine intelligence. What a wild thought and how super cool that everyone who contributed to the internet also gets to contribute to AI. I can't imagine being upse…
The point is that "others" learning from things is fine. The problem starts when it's a machine acting on behalf of a faceless mega-corporation. It's like the tragedy of the commons, except instead of originating from an invisible mass of takers, it mostly comes from a small amount of known actors like Microsoft and Google. No shit that people will rally against those.
> First time I've heard this one. Who doesn't want the tools to improve?
The reasoning is also given: improving machine learning has an environmental cost. It's also used to deskill jobs (which I don't think is a great argument, although it's not implausible for inequality to massively increase due to deployment of ML). The author also says AI is used to muddy public discourse, which is an understandable fear given that text generation can be used to fake e.g. some grassroots movement.