He's absolutely right, and that's not just insightful, that's prescient.
AI may be making us think and write more alike
181–190 of 271 posts
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to me to be an example where the language is forced to change but the thoughts remain the same. Sure, people are using the "safe" terms, but they're using them to continue to subvert the rules, not to bow to them.
The problem is when that vernacular extends into regular life. I haven’t noticed it yet with unalive, but I’m sure there will come a day. Eventually if the censors continue suppressing the word suicide, we will end up with unalive taking suicide’s place both online and offline. Then, the censors will censor unalive, and a new word will be coined, and the cycle continues.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2024/08/...
> On Friday, a social media user tweeted an image from the Nirvana exhibit at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. A placard dedicated to the “27 Club” read, “Kurt Cobain un-alived himself at 27.”
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#183This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymme…
There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.
I am very sorry, but you are wrong. Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD) there was a period of not only standstill, but regression, devolution and forgetfulness. Compared with what came before, it can be rightly called the dark ages.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.
> Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests.
I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#185Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!
I'm dealing with the same nonsense. I get LLM-generated reviews of my work, documents, and plans which are not grounded in reality or nuance. Regularly have to explain why the AI is wrong. I was told I should run my docs through the LLM to make them read better. But they're not even being read by humans at this point.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
Why would that be bad? Why is more better?
Would you ask that your starving great-n-grandparents worried about whether they're able to feed the infant that would later become your ancestor?
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't the diversity in the training set - the problem is that the method by design picks the average.
LLM speak isn't even quite the average either. It's something more like the average, then pushed through more training to turn it into the agents we think of today (a fresh-off-the-training-set LLM really is in some sense that "fancy autocomplete" that people called it for a while), then trained by the AI companies to be generally inoffensive and do the other things they want them to do. All of the further actions pu…
Like foxes coming up with floppy ears.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.
Corporations are not humans. And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it. So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.
So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#189Take a community with AI moderation like Reddit, I've been a participant for years. With the recent push to AI autocorrect and moderation, you can see the changes in language. New words, new ways of speaking, unconsciously editing yourself because you don't want to draw the eye of the bot. It doesn't feel subtle. It feels Orwellian.
I recently had a comment removed by reddit. It wasn’t even against the rules. It was anti establishment is all. I insulted the billionaire class in that comment. Class division style comments are now banned. Wouldn’t want revolution on a for profit forum now would we?
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#190While I cringe at most LLM speak, I have learned quite a bit from it. Certain terminology and some gaps in my entirely self-learned English. I appreciate that. It helped me better express myself at work and use less words (but hopefully more substantive ones). But yeah, their general tone is very... castrated. Safe. Hugely impersonal. I have learned to quickly edit out their suggested comments when I ask for an advic…
You would have been better off reading good english literature to improve your own writing.