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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#191

Post by ben_w »

Mawr wrote: post #165
ben_w wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How is that bias weird?

The people can see a random number that they know is random, and yet be influenced by it when attempting facts.

> LLM output has not discernible pattern to it, you cannot tell at all whether what it's saying is true or not.

LLMs are the pattern. This is a separate axis to "is it true?"

Re: AI Crap

#192

Post by tharne »

dagw wrote: post #83
krapp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.

The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs. A world that produces enough skilled human doctors to meet everyones needs is even more science fiction than a world with skilled AI doctors.

> The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs.

They can easily produce enough doctors, they just don't. A couple of reasons for this: schools inflate the amount of education required so they they can make more money and doctors go along with it (and a crazy amount of licensing requirements) to prop wages up by keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.

You could be an ICU nurse with 20+ years of experiences. Want to make a jumpt to becoming a doctor? You have to start ALL the way from the beginning of med school as if you an 23 year-old humanities major who decided to go to med school. Your 2 decades of hands-on medical experience counts for exactly nothing in the eyes of medical schools and certification boards. Does anyone really believe this is a good way to run things?

Re: AI Crap

#193

Post by read_if_gay_ »

lijok wrote: post #162
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>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.

>If something is not perfectly moral/ethical, it doesn't mean you should never do it.

i think that when emissions are brought up in an argument, it's not usually this more nuanced take (that I also take some issue with, by the way, as it's impossible to do anything not en masse at 8b population)

instead, they are brought up to imply in sort of a smug way that the other party is somehow unethical, and that oneself, having morals as pure as they are, would never do such an unethical thing. hence the other party, and whatever they advocate, is wrong and bad. and the op blog post is a good example of this.

Re: AI Crap

#194

Post by danielbln »

ben_w wrote: post #188
danielbln wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you use fine tuning and RAG you can cut the cost by an order of magnitude. Also, how much did it cost 2 years ago?

Was it[0] available at any price 2 years ago? (Assuming you mean literally an order of magnitude: 0.64¢ is, judging by Amazon.com, less than the bulk price of a single sheet of unused printer paper, or two thirds of a paperclip). [0] 3 or anything equivalent to it, given 4 obviously wasn't

I was making the point that this is new tech, not available to us at all a few mere years ago, so assuming a constant cost when making predictions is difficult. Assume inference prices will go down, not up.

Re: AI Crap

#195

Post by nottorp »

dools wrote: post #21

> Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you When I read things like this it makes me think the author hasn't used ChatGPT in their job yet. Here is a really simple example of how I used ChatGPT this afternoon that saved me, I would estimate, about 2 hou…

The problem is, you may be the last generation who knows enough to verify the output of said "AI".

Re: AI Crap

#196

Post by nkrisc »

RecycledEle wrote: post #70
nkrisc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Why would the poor not be able to afford human generated content? Copying human generated context costs basically nothing, so the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.

> the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.

That’s why all kinds of products today with nearly zero marginal cost are free?

Re: AI Crap

#197

Post by JeremyNT »

RecycledEle wrote: post #77
sph wrote: 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…

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…

> It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible.

I mean this is exactly what Drew is disputing.

The capital class will remove the jobs, capture the value of whatever labor is saved, and the workers who lose their jobs will be left with fewer resources and no realistic path to replace their lost income. They won't glide towards some utopian vision where everybody ends up working one day a week on their passion projects.

In some kind of abstract way these ML techniques provide potentially useful tools, but workers will not be the ones to see the benefits of more "productivity" that these tools enable.

The US can't even agree that, despite its vast wealth, health care is something everybody should receive regardless of employment. This country lacks the imagination to handle this situation in a way that improves lives for workers.

Re: AI Crap

#198

Post by zirgs »

jhbadger wrote: post #120
lucideer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "to compete with Hollywood" you either mean one of two things: on quality or on box office. The latter is nothing to do with CGI or production budget: it's about marketing budget, in which AI has less to offer. The former, in my view, will not be aided by AI. The "glorified stage plays" are (not always but on aggregate) of significantly higher quality than quite a lot of Hollywood output. AI won't change…

Say you want to create a historical drama that doesn't look like crap. You have two options. Either create massive physical sets or (as is increasingly popular in Hollywood) CGI ones. Both cost an enormous amount of money. It isn't just tedious popcorn movies about superheroes or aliens that require massive budgets for effects.

Tbh I would like to see a movie about superheroes or aliens from a non-Hollywood director as well. They could put their own unique spin to it.

Re: AI Crap

#199

Post by raincole »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #158
raincole wrote: post #54

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?

For English writing I remember a lot of words and phrases that ChatGPT taught me.

For scripting, of course I don't remember the details it provided. I don't remember the details I wrote yesterday either. But at least I roughly remember things like "There is a simple way to visualize any f(x) with about 10~20 lines of numpy and matplotlib. It's not a daunting task at all". I believe these pieces of information improve my decision making a little bit.

I don't think ChatGPT improved the deeper programming skill of mine, like data struct/algorithm/architecture. But I see no reason why it would make me worse in this aspect either.

Re: AI Crap

#200

Post by HWR_14 »

incrudible wrote: post #173
HWR_14 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a different (and real, but modern) problem compared to "we never would have left subsistence farming without a massive unemployment period (painful job loss) brought about by new technology" the the OP suggested.
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