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LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#161

Post by muwtyhg »

ACCount37 wrote: post #109
mossTechnician wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you rather it not exist? In a vacuum, I agree with you that there's probably no harm in AI-generated nudes of fictional women per se; it's the rampant use to sexually harass real women and children[0], while "causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy" in Tennessee[1], that bothers me. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f... [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/…

Because it's just a vessel for the puritans and the usual "cares more about feeling righteous than about being right" political activists. I have no love for either. The whole thing with "AI polluting the neighborhoods" falls apart on a closer examination. Because, as it turns out, xAI put its cluster in an industrial area that already has: a defunct coal power plant, an operational steel plant, and an operational 1…

> Because it's just a vessel for the puritans and the usual "cares more about feeling righteous than about being right" political activists. I have no love for either.

People are (or were, as of a couple of weeks ago) having nude images generated from pictures of them, and were posted publicly, by a company worth billions. You think the outage around that is just puritan hand-wringing? Not that real people are actively being harassed?

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#162

Post by immibis »

krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

Have you seen the 2025 METR report on AI coding productivity?

TLDR: everyone thought AI made people faster, including those who did the task, both before and after doing it. However, AI made people slower at doing the task.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#163

Post by immibis »

ACCount37 wrote: post #38
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

LLMs of today advance in incremental improvements. There is a finite amount of incremental improvements left between the performance of today's LLMs and the limits of human performance. This alone should give you second thoughts on "AI doomerism".

You can't get to the moon by learning to climb taller and taller trees.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#164

Post by lyu07282 »

Chance-Device wrote: post #101
lyu07282 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because voting with your wallet is nonsense, we can decide what society we want to live in we don't have to accept one in which human artists can't make a living. Capitalism isn't a force of nature we discovered like gravity, it's deliberate choices we made.

Which I assume is why you pay someone to hand-paint scenes from your holidays instead of taking photographs? And why you employ someone to wash your clothes on a scrubbing board instead of using a machine? Or would you prefer these things be outlawed to increase employment?

You have to always devolve to individual responsibility and freedom to make your case. But games are a 250+ billion dollar industry employing hundreds of thousands of artists who's jobs are all threatened by generative ai in the future, that's systemic, structural. We can all look at that future and decide to make a different choice, that is actual freedom, what you describe is collective helplessness.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#165

Post by bandrami »

JacoboJacobi wrote: post #157
bandrami wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes a lot of intuitive sense: people feel more productive because they're twiddling switches but they're spending so much time on tooling it doesn't actually increase output (this is more or less what the MIT study found: 20% perception of productivity, 20% lower actual output).

Sure but increased output would mean code. I don't think generating a lot of code is itself developer productivity. Some people could be using it to stop themselves from creating bad code which is developer productivity. While I find it a bit unlikely people are using it in this way (in terms of the average) I would most certainly have made this argument if code quantity was up from LLMs so I can't claim to know a qu…

The model that does make sense to me is (and the only actual success stories I've seen) is people saying "it let me quickly produce a piece of software that otherwise wouldn't have been worth the time to create". That is definitely an increase in productivity, but "software people aren't actually willing to pay for can now be made much more cheaply" is a much different claim than the marketing is making (which I read to be TFA's point).

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#166

Post by pousada »

latexr wrote: post #139
pousada wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coca-Cola advertises itself as a “happiness machine” as something that brings people together, builds communities, creates love and friendship. The latest slogan i can remember is “open happiness”. I like fizzy sugar drinks as much as the next guy but Coca-Cola is not liquid happiness. Edit: Dropbox marketing slogan is “for all things worth saving”

Slogans are not promises, they are vague feelings. In the case of Coca-Cola, I know someone who might literally agree with the happiness part of it (though I certainly wouldn’t). The promises of Theranos and LLMs are concrete measurable things we can evaluate and report where they succeed, fall short, or are lies.

Sure but equating Theranos and LLMs seems a bit disingenuous.

Theranos was an outright scam that never produced any results, whereas LMMs might not have (yet?) lived up to all the marketing promises (you might call them slogans?) they made, but they definitely provided some real measurable value.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#167

Post by JacoboJacobi »

bandrami wrote: post #165
JacoboJacobi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but increased output would mean code. I don't think generating a lot of code is itself developer productivity. Some people could be using it to stop themselves from creating bad code which is developer productivity. While I find it a bit unlikely people are using it in this way (in terms of the average) I would most certainly have made this argument if code quantity was up from LLMs so I can't claim to know a qu…

The model that does make sense to me is (and the only actual success stories I've seen) is people saying "it let me quickly produce a piece of software that otherwise wouldn't have been worth the time to create". That is definitely an increase in productivity, but "software people aren't actually willing to pay for can now be made much more cheaply" is a much different claim than the marketing is making (which I read…

I don't really see the influence of things like LLMs (or StackOverflow or improved search engines) as simple productivity. People do what they can with very complex value estimates and comfort levels. If they are less productive in a careful measure it may mean they are doing a lot of high value low hanging fruit across areas they were afraid to touch.

The trouble with highly productive specialists is that they produce a ton of high quality results where the demand is not really there and has to be artificially made. Even if you find enough work for them it often means the incremental cases are things you wouldn't have bothered with. A specialist branching to work slowly in related yet further related areas is a lot more value and can work with an oracle so flawed that it barely beats chance..

With juniors it is much more complex, but they have always been a useless consideration in productivity. Not having them has always been highly productive in the short term but has long term consequences.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#168

Post by frozenseven »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

>Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art

By an extremely loud group of activists, as always. I'd wager most gamers don't care one way or the other.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#170

Post by jason_oster »

danielbln wrote: post #90
keyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine for a Django app that doesn't innovate and just follows the same patterns for the 100 solved problems that it solves. The line becomes a lot blurrier when you work on non trivial issues. A Django app is not particularly hard software, it's hardly software but a conduit from database to screens and vice-versa; which is basic software since the days of terminals. I'm not judging your job, if you get paid well…

I think the 'novelty' goalpost is being moved here. This notion that agentic LLMs can't handle novel or non-trivial problems needs to die. They don't merely derive solutions from the training data, but synthesize a solution path based on the context that is being built up in the agentic loop. You could make up some obscure DSL whole cloth, that has therefore never been in the training data, feed it the docs and it wi…

> You could make up some obscure DSL whole cloth, that has therefore never been in the training data, feed it the docs and it will happily use it to create output in said DSL.

I have two stories, which I will attempt to tie together coherently in response.

I'm making a compiler right now. ChatGPT 4 was helpful in the early phases. Even back then, its capabilities with reading and modifying the grammar and writing boilerplate for a parser was a real surprise. Today 5.2-Codex is iterating on the implementation and specification as I extend the language and fill in gaps in the compiler.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't a "10x" productivity gain. Not even close. And the model makes decisions that I would not. I spent the last few days completely rewriting the module system that it spit out in an hour. Yeah, it worked, but it's not what I wanted. The downsides are circumstantial.

25 years ago, I was involved in a group whose shared hobby was "ROM hacking". In other words, unofficial modification of classic NES and SNES games. There was a running joke in our group that went something like this: Someone would join IRC and ask for an outlandish feature in some level editor that seemed hopelessly impossible at the time. Like generating a new level with new graphics.

We would extrapolate the request to adding a button labeled "Do My Hack For Me". Good times! Now this feature request seems within reach. It may forever be a pipe dream, who knows. But it went from "unequivocally impossible" to "ya know, with the right foundation and guidance, that might just be crazy enough to work!" Almost entirely all within the last 10 years.

I think the novelty or creativity criticism of AI is missing the point. Using these tools in novel or creative ways is where I would put my money in the coming decade. It is mind boggling that today's models can even appear to make sense of my completely made up language and compiler. But the job postings for adding those "Do My Hack For Me" buttons are the ones to watch for.

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