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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#231

Post by captainbland »

spion wrote: post #226
captainbland wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you prompt directly about the subject it can be fine but it veers into BS territory more often if you try to get it to synthesise information meaning it's less good with applied examples that are given to it by the user. Not always but the error potential is definitely higher. The problem then I think is that this means that students will have to prompt "on rails" to get reliable answers. The most curious students…

I'm not sure the error potential is much higher than with average teachers, but I guess it depends on the domain. For coding the error rate is lower than a typical teacher right now. I suspect we'll soon figure out an effective way for LLMs to look-up reliable references to confirm their answers, which should improve the situation drastically. As they are now most LLMs are very barebones. An educational LLM could e.g…

I think the main issue today is its inability to just say "I don't know" when appropriate. A teacher can do that and sometimes that's a better answer than a fabrication. A teacher can also use less certain language when their confidence level is low as appropriate.

I think this is probably a technically solvable problem but doing so has potential 'optics'/marketing issues in terms of reducing the level of confidence it projects which a lot of people associate with competence.

Re: AI Crap

#232

Post by ben_w »

ArekDymalski wrote: post #104
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,…

> If you’re poor you watch shitty, AI-generated movies on Netflix for $1.50/mo. I suspect even worse scenario. If you're poor you watch shitty, ai-generated content for the current price. If you're persuaded to belive that you're middle class you cough up twice more to watch shitty, ai-generated content called premium becuase it will be "artisanely curated by humans (tm)". If you're really rich you will go to the the…

> If you're really rich you will go to the theatre or opera.

Mm, Shakespeare.

'tis easy mimic'd in style and verse; and the many devices used, familiar. When anachronism strikes, few yet notice, and fewer yet call out, for the Bard is older to us than he to Chaucer.

What folly, that the rich dress and peacock themselves so, sitting quiet and polite; gathered at great expense to what was, in days yore, the entertainment of yeoman and serf who cheered and jeered as saint and villains pranced before?

Hark, though; I say not that Avon brought no talent, rather that the talent of The Globe was to his time as the talent of The Disk to ours, as the easy-read and prolific prose of Pratchett is the closer cousin, despite the esteem of the powerful going to those hardest to follow in modern vernacular — Ulysses, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and yea, also the Bard and King James.

'tis almost as if the difficulty is the point.

(Exits, pursued by a peacock)

Re: AI Crap

#233

Post by pjerem »

projektfu wrote: post #130
pjerem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed. But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that. For anything else, I…

This is kind of what kills me about the current crop of assistants. They all make my ADHD life harder, not easier. The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask. "Send an email to Jim." Nope. "Record my weight in Google fit." Nope. It won't look at any calendar that's not a Google calendar. It puts other people's flights on my schedule. It tells me I've got good traffic an hour before…

> The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask.

Oh my, I think you are not ready for Siri.

Re: AI Crap

#234

Post by ben_w »

nkrisc wrote: post #196
RecycledEle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yup.

I'm old enough to remember when operating systems cost money[0].

And compliers. And encyclopaedias. And maps.

I've got too much good zero-cost audio and video content to get through, even at double speed.

[0] MacOS 8, I don't remember what I spent on it (UK), but wikipedia says it cost $99 in the US when it came out in 1997. Inflation adjusted, $188.56 today.

Re: AI Crap

#235

Post by saulpw »

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…

Subsistence farming is more difficult physical labor, but at least it's more meaningful than being a spam artist or an adtech data engineer or a health insurance denier or any number of soul-sucking bullshit jobs.

Re: AI Crap

#236

Post by krapp »

raincole wrote: post #145
krapp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing the value of AI versus a human being with the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a medical degree to the value of hearing Mozart live or seeing the Mona Lisa in person to Youtube and JPEGs, as an argument in favor of AI? >but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing. Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history.

> You're comparing the value of AI versus a human being with the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a medical degree to the value of hearing Mozart live or seeing the Mona Lisa in person to Youtube and JPEGs, as an argument in favor of AI? Yes, and I think it's a pretty good analogy. > Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history. I personal…

When a human doctor prescribes the wrong medication, it's a mistake. One doesn't conclude the world would be better without human doctors because human beings are capable of thought, memory, perception, awareness, and when they don't make mistakes - and most don't most of the time - it's the result of training and talent.

Meanwhile, AIs don't possess anything akin to thought, memory, perception or awareness. They simply link text tokens stochastically. When an AI makes a mistake, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, because AIs have no concept of "reality" or "truth." Tell an AI to prescribe medication, it has no idea what "medication" is, or what a human is. When an AI doesn't make a mistake, it's entirely by coincidence. Yet humans are so hardwired with paredolia and gaslit by years of science fiction that such a simple hat trick leads people to want to trust their entire lives to these things.

>The fact is simple. Professional diagnosing is such a scarce resource that people buy over-the-counter drugs all the time. It's not AI vs doctors; it's AI vs no doctor.

That's not a fact, it's your opinion, and I'm assuming you've got some interest in a startup along these lines or something, because I honestly cannot fathom your rationale otherwise. You're either shockingly naive or else you have a financial stake in putting poor people's lives in the hands of machines that can't even be trusted to count the number of fingers on a human hand.

I have no doubt the future you want is going to happen, and I have no doubt we're all going to regret it. At least I'm old enough that I'll probably be dead before the last real human doctor is put out to pasture.

Re: AI Crap

#237

Post by krapp »

dagw wrote: post #149
krapp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing the value of AI versus a human being with the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a medical degree to the value of hearing Mozart live or seeing the Mona Lisa in person to Youtube and JPEGs, as an argument in favor of AI? >but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing. Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history.

AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history. The big question is will that happen more or less often than it does with human doctor? Human doctors 'hallucinate' stuff all the time, due to lack of sleep, lack of time, lack of education and/or just not caring enough to pay proper attention to what they are doing.

>Human doctors 'hallucinate' stuff all the time, due to lack of sleep, lack of time, lack of education and/or just not caring enough to pay proper attention to what they are doing.

No, they don't. If that happened anywhere near all the time, we would never have given up alchemy and bloodletting, because there would be no reason to trust medicine at all, and yet it works overwhelmingly well most of the time for most people. Meanwhile, AIs hallucinate by design.

Re: AI Crap

#238

Post by 6ak74rfy »

nkrisc wrote: post #63
danpalmer wrote: post #7

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 I’m imagining world where companies like Netflix and Spotify introduce dirt-cheap subscription tiers that are populate with AI generated content,…

Who’s to say that the AI-generated content will be worse than human-generated? Just because that’s the case today doesn’t mean it’ll be so forever.

Re: AI Crap

#239

Post by andai »

mort96 wrote: post #107
andai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bias towards speaking to a human on the phone Hatred of phone calls aside, I heard an interesting take from Alex Hormozi (paraphrased): "You're on the phone and you say, are you human? No? Oh thank God, because you know the AI has a thousand times more experience than all the humans combined."

Is that supposed to be a serious opinion about contemporary AI..? Because that's crazy to me. Humans can be reasoned with. AI can't. My experience with the likes of ChatGPT tells me that if the AI is wrong about something (which it very very often is), there's no point trying to explain to it that it's wrong or how it's wrong, it will say something like "You are right, sorry for the confusion." and follow up with the…

> Is that supposed to be a serious opinion about contemporary AI..?

No. We're talking about the future. ChatGPT doesn't have millions of hours of customer service experience. It has zero!

(Well, unless you count the RLHF stuff, but my point is it isn't actually learning from human feedback, although we don't actually know what they're doing with those thumbs up / down buttons...)

> losing the option to speak with a human

Already the case at many companies, sadly. (In those cases, if not elsewhere, it's going to be a significant improvement.)

Re: AI Crap

#240

Post by andai »

nottorp wrote: post #183
mort96 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about a customer arguing that they deserve warranty. I mean if the human CS agent misunderstands the problem, the customer can explain the problem better and try to make the human CS agent understand. If the "AI" CS agent misunderstands the problem, there is no recourse.

Not to mention when you have a problem the AI hasn't been trained for. With humans you have a chance to escalate. With a chatbot, you might as well take your business somewhere else.

These things already exist (primitive form) and most of them already have the option to escalate.

It's usually well hidden though, to save money.

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