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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

161–170 of 260 posts

Re: AI Crap

#161
post #135

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,…

By centralisation I don't necessarily mean of the models. It might be the training, training your own model requires expensive hardware (even just a high end graphics card is out of reach for most of the world).

But also, a model running on your phone generating AI content is likely to be cheaper and not as good as human curated content in whatever form that is.

I think compute can be decentralised, while the power is still centralised, or at least those at the low end lose out on quality.

Re: AI Crap

#162
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morality is a spectrum, not binary. Yes, all of the things you listed make me and you a less moral person, than say some random dude living in the woods with no access to a computer (all other things being equal).

even the dude living in the woods is still having an impact on the ecosystem, which is defined as negative by this eco-extremist moral framework. if you take it to the logical conclusion, it just means that all forms of human life are immoral, by nature, and the least immoral human is basically a feral animal, and the most immoral ones are the opposite of that. so to be moral, just stop being human. it's just so obvi…

You seem to be bothered by the idea that you may not be perfectly moral/ethical. You're a good person, therefore everything you do is by definition moral/ethical?

It seems as if you're attaching the same connotations to morality/ethics as you would to legality. If something is not perfectly moral/ethical, it doesn't mean you should never do it.

We over indulge, we waste electricity and water, we drive unnecessarily big cars because it's enjoyable. It's not moral or ethical, but it doesn't make you a bad person. When it's done en-masse, is encouraged, and corporations monetize it, is when it starts becoming a problem.

Re: AI Crap

#163
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation…

> which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. Why do you assume that? > What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement. I know the assumption is always that Big Greedy Co™ is hiring the worst possibl…

What does AI do if it doesn't have a good answer? How do you know it gave you a good answer? There are no qualities like 'that person sounded a bit useless' or 'sounds like they're reading from a script' or any of those other wonderful interactions we have with poor customer service was can judge with sentiment/intuition. You just get 'the AI answer.'

Big greed co will hire the cheapest employees, and will do exactly the minimum amount of customer service they can get away with, so long as their profits are sustained.

Re: AI Crap

#164

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…

>> 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 s…

This is a fair point, a different way of looking at things.

The way I was thinking about it was, for example, newspapers going online behind paywalls, YouTubers/Podcasters creating paid content on Patreon in order to fund their activities.

On the other side you get Buzzfeed creating AI generated quizzes (rather than news), and YouTube/TikTok content farms with AI generated scripts. Both of these are ad supported, so free to the end consumer, and therefore more accessible than a Patreon/NYT/etc subscription.

Re: AI Crap

#165
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. I'd like a little more background on that claim. As far as I've been able to tell from my understanding of LLMs, everything they create is a hallucination. It's just a case of "text that could plausibly come next based on the patterns of language they were trained on". When an LLM gets stuff correct, that doesn't make it not a hallucination, it's just tha…

I agree it's more than a simple engineering challenge, but I do so because it is not entirely clear if even humans avoid this issue, or even if we merely minimise it. We're full of seemingly weird cognitive biases: Roll a roulette wheel in front of people before asking them the percentage of African counties are in the UN, their answers correlate with the number on the wheel. Most of us judge logical strengths of arg…

How is that bias weird? It has a straightforward explanation - the visual system has an effect on reasoning. This, as well as other human biases, can be analyzed to understand their underlying causes, and consequently mitigated. LLM output has not discernible pattern to it, you cannot tell at all whether what it's saying is true or not.

Re: AI Crap

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good AI can do for humanity is increasing our productivity. It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible. Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work. Humanity gain the productivity of that other work. If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we wer…

Not every worker is so good that they will just get free from the job and they would instantly turn into mega entrepreneur god creating 12 companies in a month. Most of them will struggle to put food on the table, resorting to crimes and eventually ending up in worse jobs

Most of us have had to adapt, with nothing guaranteed. Look at the population under 50, very few in that group have ever had any kind of job security, except for the highly paid specialists. That's been the reality for decades. Thousands of people have lost their jobs because of the hackers on here making effective software solutions. Where was the solidarity then? It's only now when the hackers themselves are threatened that we suddenly have to think about the poor human.

With that said, we should do all to eliminate jobs, but not eliminate workers. Technology can also be used to produce more services for more people, not just producing the same more effectively.

Re: AI Crap

#167
post #63

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…

> 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,…

Diamond Age ractors, then.

Re: AI Crap

#168
post #126

The 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 advance…

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Re: AI Crap

#169
post #138
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.

I agree on your first statement, and raise a challenge on the second.

We're smart, lets figure out how to create the same impact on general education.

Could we wire up ChatGPT so it asks us questions and leads the conversation instead of us? Could we also make it present the questions in ways that make educational youtube channels like Kurzgesagt so easy to engage with?

We could start with private tutoring. LLMs tailored to educate kids of rich parents. Easy market fit as they're already looking for private tutoring. We prove out the need then quickly move onto schools.

Imagine if we could show that engaging with an LLM for an hour produces as much learning as sitting in class for 4. Could we cut school days in half, set LLM interaction as homework for an hour (teachers would get reports from the LLM on how the child is doing)?

Re: AI Crap

#170
post #126

The 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 advance…

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