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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

201–210 of 260 posts

Re: AI Crap

#201
post #28

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

> 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 Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.

AI that is better at gaslighting?

Re: AI Crap

#202
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, in that case we're on the same page. I'm expecting at least a factor of 1000 to be possible given the apparent higher efficiency of the human brain vs current computers, which is of course terrifying given how good and cheap the various creative AI already are, while also seeming like a prerequisite for robotic/car AI to be all three of "good enough", "fast enough", and "within the limited power budget".

Re: AI Crap

#203
post #126

The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome. Why write this article other than to to smugly say "told you so" in the cases where you turn out right. It is a zero risk take. Looking at the advances in AI (Chess, Go, Protein Folding, MidJourney, ChatGPT) and your takeaway being "Humans will use this in bad ways" shows a ferocious lack of imagination. I notice a desperate, but failing, attempt to lump the advance…

Yeah it's like crypto created this weird crop of "debunkers" who think that being permacynical is good just because it was smart to be cynical about crypto. So now "everything I don't like is just like crypto currency"

Re: AI Crap

#204
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds a bit like District 9 (albeit having Peter Jackson as producer might exclude it) - the director then "graduated" to Hollywood, resulting in a decline in critical reception (though I've heard Gran Turismo is pretty good by video game movie standards).

Re: AI Crap

#205
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then I'm sure you also believe the logical consequence that all graphical user interfaces are unethical as well due to frivolously wasted compute. out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware?…

Morality is a spectrum, not binary. Yes, all of the things you listed make me and you a less moral person, than say some random dude living in the woods with no access to a computer (all other things being equal).

I mean that's an awfully convenient argument to say "morality for thee but not for me". Yes it's a spectrum, but it still matters to be consistent.

Re: AI Crap

#206
post #138
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accelerate education at unprecedented levels (if we can figure out how to integrate LLMs into the education system). To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time. How great is it that…

I don’t know, but anyone who has the motivation to “interrogate it to no end until it clicks for [them]” already didn’t have trouble to become well-educated before. AI can speed things up for those people, but I can imagine much less impact on general education.

>already didn’t have trouble to become well-educated before

I agree that I didn't have trouble interrogating a subject until it clicked before if I was sufficiently motivated. However ChatGPT reduced the time needed a lot, and thus motivated me to take on more learning than otherwise.

Of course, I take "facts" it outputs with a pinch of salt until I double check things with my own research, but it's great at uncovering unknown unknowns and is like an infinitely patient tutor that will let me throw analogies at it to test if my understanding is correct or needs adjustment.

Re: AI Crap

#207

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. Due to the economics of information, this is unlikely for contents. The cost to watch Avatar is often quite close to a local film with I also s…

This is a fair point, a different way of looking at things. The way I was thinking about it was, for example, newspapers going online behind paywalls, YouTubers/Podcasters creating paid content on Patreon in order to fund their activities. On the other side you get Buzzfeed creating AI generated quizzes (rather than news), and YouTube/TikTok content farms with AI generated scripts. Both of these are ad supported, so…

Articles from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are better and also more expensive to produce than those from Buzzfeed, which justify their subscription fees. What if editors of such caliber could leverage AI-assisted tools to scale their efforts and create high-quality content at a lower cost?

While it's true that, even with advancements in AI, top-tier content uniquely shaped by the individuals or teams behind it will still be more costly to produce, these are likely to get cheaper over time as AI improves. As a result, high-quality content will probably become more accessible.

Re: AI Crap

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.

Who is we? The model creator or the user? Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?

>Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?

Yes, you put in a person + knowledge and get out an educated person. Is it reasonable to expect to put in GPU + text and get somehow a competent actor, however narrowly we define competence (maybe if we define actor narrowly enough)?

Re: AI Crap

#209
post #68
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…

Accelerate education at unprecedented levels (if we can figure out how to integrate LLMs into the education system). To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time. How great is it that…

On "accelerate education" - it's often a bad teacher especially on higher level subjects . I've asked it to summarise research for me using the Bing GPT4 model and it would frequently come to conclusions that couldn't be corroborated in the source material, that were even contradictory across different chat sessions and even generate citation links that were totally irrelevant and incorrect, and then try to tell me that it was of a totally different subject to what it had actually pointed to.

Regular chatGPT is even more dangerous because you have no idea what it's referencing most of the time. Yet it lowers the bar to this poor information to such a degree that people will be incentivised to use it regardless.

Re: AI Crap

#210
post #18

I have to disagree. Some things will get crappier, and some things will improve. Yes there's hype, but whether it's the same as crypto hype depends on whether there's actually anything useful behind the hype, and unlike crypto, I think it's pretty guaranteed there's something useful here (purely by getting value out of ChatGPT, infinitely more value than I ever got from anything crypto related). > Finding and setting…

Things might change but I think all author was saying is that right now it’s not advisable to try to get help for suicidal ideation (and probably not very useful and maybe harmful in general). I don’t really see that changing until Her, level AI that is “actually” self aware and possesses the capacity to understand nuanced micro expressions and so on and so forth.

Suicidal ideation shouldn’t exist but it does and you have a better chance with a therapist than without. It’s probably irresponsible right now to recommend an AI for treatment. That might change but I bet it’s further away than you’re thinking.

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