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Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

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Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#21

Post by JimDabell »

maxbond wrote: post #11
echelon wrote: post #2

I'm on the image and video side of AI. I see the claims being levied against LLMs, but in the generative media world these models are nothing short of revolutionary. In addition to being an engineer, I'm also a filmmaker. This tech has so many orders of magnitude changes to the production cycle: - Films can be made 5,000x cheaper (a $100M Disney film will be matched by small studios on budgets of $20,000.) - Films ca…

Can you point to a film that has used this technology? Can you point to anything that substantiates those numbers? Genuinely asking, my mind is open to the possibility but I don't want to take it on faith. (I watched that Kalshi ad to be clear.)

Not those numbers, but you might be interested in Netflix using generative AI:

> Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows

> The cost of [the special effects without AI] just wouldn’t have been feasible for a show in that budget

— https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/18/netflix-uses-g...

Discussed on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44602779

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#22

Post by Topfi »

viraptor wrote: post #16
Topfi wrote: post #12

> While Apple is still a major player in the AI space, they typically lean towards a preference for traditional AI. They’re almost certainly still doing LLM research in the background, but they’ve decided against dropping everything to go full throttle on the hype train. Ironically, this has started to make their investors, who have bought into the hype, quite upset. People are starting to question “why isn’t apply d…

Apple failed to deploy LLM Siri for very old and boring organisation reasons https://au.pcmag.com/operating-systems/111073/apples-siri-st... Their problems seems unrelated to AI tech itself.

Apple Intelligence message summary, text editing, etc. have been successfully deployed and, using them right now, have problems very much connected to the technology. The internal squabbles are independent of what they released and the state the technology is in.

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#23

Post by tovej »

viraptor wrote: post #17
tovej wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment would be more useful if you actually provided those examples. I'm also a researcher and agree wholeheartedly with the article. LLMs can maybe help you sift through existing literature or help with creative writing, at most they can be used or background research in hypothesis generation by finding pairs of related terms in the literature which can be put together into a network of relationships. They can…

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04109 > we obtain the first statistically significant conclusion on current LLM capabilities for research ideation: we find LLM-generated ideas are judged as more novel (p It's a bit better than just finding related pairs. And that's with sonnet 3.5 which is basically ancient at this point.

This paper centers "novelty" but also finds that human ideas are more feasible, and that LLM-generated ideas are not diverse and that LLMs cannot reliably evaluate ideas. None of the ideas were actually evaluated by performing experiments either.

Pretty much what I would expect. The paper also seems to be doing exactly what I described, I don't understand how the technique is better than that?

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#24

Post by tovej »

JimDabell wrote: post #20
tovej wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment would be more useful if you actually provided those examples. I'm also a researcher and agree wholeheartedly with the article. LLMs can maybe help you sift through existing literature or help with creative writing, at most they can be used or background research in hypothesis generation by finding pairs of related terms in the literature which can be put together into a network of relationships. They can…

> I'm also a researcher and agree wholeheartedly with the article. The article says: > Yet, every time I tried to get LLMs to perform novel research, they fail because they don’t have access to existing literature on the topic. You say: > LLMs can maybe help you sift through existing literature > they can be used or background research in hypothesis generation by finding pairs of related terms in the literature As fa…

No, helping with chores is not the same as "performing research", it has limited utility for minor tasks, it is not essential and it does not even necessarily have a positive productivity impact. To illustrate the point, when I use vim to write LaTeX, would you say that vim is "performing research"?

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#25

Post by stego-tech »

I came into the comments to see how the discourse is shaping up in light of the author’s claims, and I’m seeing the same old boosterism trying to dismiss it wholesale without providing conclusive evidence.

So without further ado:

* If LLMs can indeed produce wholly novel research independently without any external sources, then prove it. Cite sources, unlike the chatbot that told you it can do that thing. Show us actual results from said research or products that were made from it. We keep hearing these things exponentially increase the speed of research and development but nobody seemingly has said proof of this that’s uniquely specific to LLMs and didn’t rely on older, proven ML techniques or concepts.

* If generative AI really can output Disney quality at a fraction of the cost, prove it with clips. Show me AI output that can animate on 2s, 4s, and 1s in a single video and knows when to use any of the above for specific effects. Show me output that’s as immaculate as old Disney animation, or heck, even modern ToonBoom-like animation. Show me the tweens.

* Prove your arguments. Stop regurgitating hypeslop from CEBros, actually cite sources, share examples, demonstrate its value relative to humanity.

All people like us (myself and the author) have been politely asking for since this hype bubble inflated was for boosters to show actual evidence of their claims. Instead, we just get carefully curated sizzle reels and dense research papers making claims instead of actual, tangible evidence that we can then attempt to recreate for ourselves to validate the claims in question.

Stop insulting us and show some f*king proof, or go back to playing with LLMs until you can make them do the things you claim they can do.

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#27

Post by benterix »

strangescript wrote: post #13

"If a machine is consuming and transforming incalculable amounts of training data produced by humans, discussed by humans, and explained by humans. Why would the output not look identical to human reasoning? If I were to photocopy this article, nobody would argue that my photocopier wrote it and therefore can think. But add enough convolutedness to the process, and it looks a lot like maybe it did and can." But its n…

> Who is to say our brains aren't just very high parameterized biological floating point machines? That is the true Occam's Razor here, as uncomfortable as that might make people.

I believe it's quite possible that what is happening during training is in certain ways similar to what is happening to a child learning the world, although there are many practical differences (and I don't even mean the difference between human neurons and the ones in a neural network).

Is there anything to feel uncomfortable about? It's been a long time since people started discussing the concept of "a self doesn't exist, we're just X" where X was the newest concept popular during that time. I'm 100% sure LLMs are not the last one.

(BTW as for LLMs themselves, there are still two big engineering problems to solve: quite small context windows and hallucinations. The first requires a lot of money to solve, the second needs special approaches and a lot of trial and error to solve, and even then the last 1% might be almost impossible to get working reliably.)

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#28

Post by strangescript »

benterix wrote: post #27
strangescript wrote: post #13

"If a machine is consuming and transforming incalculable amounts of training data produced by humans, discussed by humans, and explained by humans. Why would the output not look identical to human reasoning? If I were to photocopy this article, nobody would argue that my photocopier wrote it and therefore can think. But add enough convolutedness to the process, and it looks a lot like maybe it did and can." But its n…

> Who is to say our brains aren't just very high parameterized biological floating point machines? That is the true Occam's Razor here, as uncomfortable as that might make people. I believe it's quite possible that what is happening during training is in certain ways similar to what is happening to a child learning the world, although there are many practical differences (and I don't even mean the difference between…

I am not convinced hallucinations is a solvable problem in a single self contained model. In one hand we approach these things with the idea we are building a real intelligence modeled after our assumptions of our own brain. In the other we want them to not have any of the failings of the things they are being modeled after.

Humans mis-remember and make up things all the time, completely unintentionally. It could be a fundamental flaw in large neural networks. Impressive data compression and ability to generalize, but impossible to make "perfect".

If AI becomes cheap and fast enough, its likely a simple council of models will be enough to alleviate 99% of the problem here.

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#29

Post by benterix »

viraptor wrote: post #14
kolinko wrote: post #7

"Yet, every time I tried to get LLMs to perform novel research, they fail because they don’t have access to existing literature on the topic. Whereas, humans, on the other hand, discovered everything humanity knows." Just because the author was unable to wrangle LLM to do novel research doesn't mean that it's impossible. We already have examples of LLMs either doing or aiding significantly with novel research.

It's a really weird claim too, because we don't magically communicate the research between minds either. You need a person to find, read, process the new research and the same applies to the LLM - either rag it or provide the whole relevant thing in context.

I don't follow. SOTA models have access to tons of existing research. Basically orders of magnitude more than a human could read during a lifetime. And yet, they fail to produce anything new. Hey, even a simple "generate me an innovative list of ten marketing ideas for X, things that nobody has ever done before" gives ridiculous results.

Re: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

#30

Post by echelon »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19
echelon wrote: post #2

I'm on the image and video side of AI. I see the claims being levied against LLMs, but in the generative media world these models are nothing short of revolutionary. In addition to being an engineer, I'm also a filmmaker. This tech has so many orders of magnitude changes to the production cycle: - Films can be made 5,000x cheaper (a $100M Disney film will be matched by small studios on budgets of $20,000.) - Films ca…

While in theory you're right - AI tools can "democratize" filmmaking - what will make them unique? There was another anecdote, someone saying "this AI can generate 30.000 screenplays in a day!". Which is cool but... who is going to read them? In theory (idk it probably exists already) you can generate a script and feed it into an AI that generates a film. Novelty aside, who is going to watch it? And what if you gener…

Hollywood is nepo land.

That's not fair. Do you know how many dreamers and artists and great ideas wither away on the vine? It's tragic.

Movies are going to be like books today. And that's not a bad thing.

Distribution is always the hard part. Indie games, indie music. You've still got to market yourself and find your audience.

But the difference is that now it's possible. And you don't have to obey some large capital distributor and mind their oversight and meddling.

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