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AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

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Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#171

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

Zealotux wrote: post #4

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

It's threatening to "unwind" the entire digital sector back to 1990. Online shopping damaged, job interviews done in person, essays by hand, exams proctored. Cover letters obsolete. There could be a "cognitive waterline" effect where older people who can't tell will continue living in an AI-generated bubble. Cover letters already are generated on demand specifically because people still claim to require them, even though we know they're not real anymore.

Could be an advantage to knowing this because you can step around it.

_You_ know it's AI, so you go in person to a store. Likewise, next time you hire, you can simply refuse to accept "cover letters".

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#172

Post by dodu_ »

awongh wrote: post #148
dodu_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm off base but these things (protein folding and drug discovery) both existed before AI, no? The implication of your comment seemed to be that this was going to be so much more than replacing people. But I fail to see how any of the items you listed are anything other than that. These things have always been possible. Just slow and limited by labor. Which is the primary and novel "unlock" of AI. You c…

> Correct me if I'm off base but these things (protein folding and drug discovery) both existed before AI, no? Yes, you are off-base. Solutions to the protein folding problem existed before, but not in the way you are implying.

Fair enough. I appreciate the correction.

I do still believe the main value proposition is large scale replacement and am unconvinced that most people driving AI adoption have these other more noble pursuits in mind with respect to AI.

But I will absolutely stand corrected here and if our dystopian future includes some genuinely useful medicinal advancements then maybe that will make the medicine (heh) go down easier.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#173

Post by nprateem »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

I haven't been able to code without reading a sample of code for years before AI. Maybe it's just what happens when you're polyglot but I remember thinking even stupid things like how to declare a class in whatever lang I had to see. But once I saw a sample of code I'd get back into it. Then there's stuff I never committed to memory, like the nonsensical dance of reading from a file in go, or whatever.

So I don't think this is all AI tbh.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#174

Post by embedding-shape »

acedTrex wrote: post #133
marliechiller wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is this is because of shame or fear of losing your job?

Because its incredibly embarrassing to admit you can no longer do very basic programming tasks as a "professional" in that field.

I think it's a matter of what "very basic programming tasks" actually mean keeps sliding across the years. Surely in the beginning, being able to write Assembly was "very basic programming tasks" but as Algol and Fortran took over, suddenly those instead became the "very basic programming tasks".

Repeat this for decades, and "very basic programming tasks" might be creating a cross-platform browser by using LLMs via voice dictation.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#175

Post by zemo »

addandsubtract wrote: post #143
zemo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it

This whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.

that's more or less how I felt about it, but someone I know worked at Whatnot and liked working there so I tried out the app before applying and then applied because the product clicked for me. I wouldn't have joined Whatnot if I didn't like the product.

> I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.

That's fair, it's just not how people use it and it's not the concept. It's primarily a browse experience, not a search experience. You can search but that's not the core experience.

I buy vinyl records and retro games. There are sellers that I like. When I open the app I see which of my preferred sellers are live and I tune into their stream and hang out and watch them. If something I'm interested in pops up, I'll bid on it. Live shopping is not trying to be "ebay but video", it's a different experience.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#176

Post by butlike »

awongh wrote: post #86
butlike wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now the ancillary question from your example is: "Is hand-spun cotton better than industrialized polyester?"

If you're implying that hand-spun cotton is better, that's an easy question to answer- people used to spend a huge amount of their income on clothing, also spending a huge amount of time washing it. Industrialization made clothing so much cheaper that it's now completely disposable. There's plenty of reasons why that's not a bad thing. One reason people forget that "good quality" shoes existed was that you could only…

It seems to me you're advocating for waste, as I'm not seeing the "plenty of reasons why completely disposable cheap clothing isn't a bad thing" argument.

Replacing shoes wasn't necessary because there were cobblers. For clothing; tailors. I'd much prefer to get a set of clothing, then work with it over the course of its lifetime, over sending it to the landfill after one tear.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#177

Post by xantronix »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #137
coldpie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the stree…

For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait. Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)

The thing with LLMs is that it is very, very easy to adjust the weights across the entire model to sway responses one way or another. Previously, in the hypothetical case one wanted to rewrite history, it would be a much more involved endeavour of curation; fabrication of original sources would be difficult to do at scale. But now it's trivial for a provider to inject a preamble to the prompt to not only hide results that do not fit the narrative of those legislating in the model providers' favour, but to distort the results.

Obviously none of that is happening in the current moment, and I grant that cake recipes would be low stakes, but I would rather take the tradeoff of trawling through a little bit of slop to get that same information than acclimate myself to a workflow that could be abused by providers in more high-stakes situations down the line.

But that's just me, and I realise this is not a particularly popular take, but it should nonetheless be illustrative for why "just ask the LLM" might not be the best of ideas long term.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#178

Post by butlike »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
butlike wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now the ancillary question from your example is: "Is hand-spun cotton better than industrialized polyester?"

Define better. Fast fashion sucks, but hand-spun cotton won't give you Kevlar or modern wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials for your furniture or... . It's always win some, lose some with the economy, but technology itself opens previously impossible capabilities.

Better is 'longer lasting and less disposable.'

Your comment got me thinking about if technology is actually better, but that's a whole new discussion. We wouldn't need the fireproof furniture if we all used the local sweat lodge for bathing or the mess hall yurt for cooking. We wouldn't need wind-resistant clothing if we didn't make personal rockets that go 200mph to travel long distances to arrive at the same amenities (just in a different city).

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#179

Post by mlcruz »

packetlost wrote: post #164
isodev wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI pessimism is hard to understand Well, it really isn’t. First, this entire post makes two assumptions: 1) that AI adds more value to the process than it removes and 2) that it’s sustainable. It’s not pessimism to want to validate these first. Are AI “gains” really transformative or simply random opportunities for automation which we can achieve by other means anyway? Can the world continue to afford “AI as a serv…

> Are AI “gains” really transformative They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context. Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but…

> we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context

Trust me, this is a work in progress. Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space.

Imo, What most of the people that are not directly working in this space get wrong is assuming swes are going to be hit the hardest: There are some efficiency gains to be won here, but a full replace is not viable outside of AGI scenarios. I would actually bet on a demand increase (even if the job might change fundamentally). Custom domain made software is cheaper as it has ever been and there is a gigantic untapped market here.

Low complexity to medium complexity white colar jobs are done for in the next decade through. This is what is happening right now in finance: if models stopped improving now, the technology at this point is already good enough to lower operational costs to the point where some part of the workforce is redundant.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#180

Post by coldpie »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #137
coldpie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the stree…

For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait. Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)

No way in hell I'm trusting AI for something that could lose me a finger.
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