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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

171–180 of 260 posts

Re: AI Crap

#171
post #151
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…

I have no idea what the thought process is for downvoting a post which is answering to someone asking optimists to contribute their thoughts.

Re: AI Crap

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

Well, if that doctor is fully programmable by the big companies it could just diagnose more diseases and write more prescriptions.

Why the "if"? Doctors are systematically bribed by gigantic medical corporations to write prescriptions for their addictive and lethal medication. Pain killer addiction (opioid addiction) kills thousands.

Re: AI Crap

#173
post #144

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…

When was the widespread unemployment in the US due to technological innovations

The problem is not unemployment, it is raising the bar for valuable labor. Arguably the standard of living has already declined for the average human individual. A factory job used to afford a single worker with modest education a house and a family. That said, generative AI will have far less impact here than, say, a robot arm.

Re: AI Crap

#174
I agree with the message completely. The facade is new, but it can be very similar to the industrial revolution, and how that upset the order of the then-current times. If we want happier, more well-adjusted people, a better functioning world, we will need a better functioning system, of which AI can be a part as much as any other machine already is. No technology will bring us there however. If it's going to happen, it will happen because people will bring it to life.

Until that, things are just going to be as-is. Sometimes up, sometimes down, overall upwards hopefully, and sometimes advances will upset the status quo. And hopefully no tech will solidify the absurd rich-poor divide permanently.

Re: AI Crap

#175
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that supposed to be a serious opinion about contemporary AI..? Because that's crazy to me. Humans can be reasoned with. AI can't. My experience with the likes of ChatGPT tells me that if the AI is wrong about something (which it very very often is), there's no point trying to explain to it that it's wrong or how it's wrong, it will say something like "You are right, sorry for the confusion." and follow up with the…

Having worked in customer service before, the only time customers tried to reason with me was when they were wrong. For at least a large portion of customer service calls, the ability to reason is a negative. Customer calls to say the product is faulty, and with a simple question they admit they didn’t connect the ground wire. They then try to reason with me that they deserve a warranty replacement because their mum…

I'm not talking about a customer arguing that they deserve warranty. I mean if the human CS agent misunderstands the problem, the customer can explain the problem better and try to make the human CS agent understand. If the "AI" CS agent misunderstands the problem, there is no recourse.

Re: AI Crap

#176
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is plenty of middle ground between capeshit and a stage play.

Re: AI Crap

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:...

Nuclear apocalypse risk is not a linear function of warheads. There is still more than enough warheads to cause near total annihilation and politically, we are closer to it than at any point in the 80s.

Re: AI Crap

#178
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think you need a caveat... Right now.

There was a time where computers took up the space of whole rooms and had much much MUCH less processing power than the phone I am currently writing this comment on...

The same thing will happen with ai.

Re: AI Crap

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm reminded of the whole story behind

* https://coconuts.co/bangkok/features/primitive-technology-an...

* https://coconuts.co/bangkok/features/primitive-technology-yo...

People just make content that get views and optimize what gets eyeballs. Take people out of the equation and add gradient descent and who knows what insanity will be unleashed.

Re: AI Crap

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not OP, but for me the higher level decisions stick, but not the bitty gritty detail. And I'm ok with that, I care less about the implementation detail and more about the higher level problem solving, and using these LLMs I feel make me better at that.
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