Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 430 posts

Re: This is not the future

#231

Post by polshaw »

jjice wrote: post #55
tolerance wrote: post #16

This is high quality blog post! I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism. > Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice. Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how t…

I really don't like the "everything is political" sentiment. Sure, lots of things are or can be, but whenever I see this idea, it usually comes from people who have a very specific mindset that's leaning further in one direction on a political spectrum and is pushing their ideology. To clarify, I don't think pushing an ideology you believe in by posting a blog post is a bad thing. That's your right! I just think I ha…

Your introductory paragraph comes across very much like "people who want to change the status quo are political and people who want to maintain it are not"; which is clearly nonsense. "how things are is how they should be" is as much of an ideology, just a less conspicuous one given the existing norms.

>Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political?

I am much closer to agreeing with your take here, but as you recognise, there are lots of political aspects to your actions, even if they are not conscious. Not intentionally being political doesn't mean you are not making political choices; there are many more that your AI choice touches upon; privacy issues, wealth distribution, centralisation, etc etc. Of course these choices become limited by practicalities but they still exist.

Re: This is not the future

#232

Post by imperio59 »

rng-concern wrote: post #176
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

So are photos that are edited via Photoshop not art? Are they not art if they were taken on a digital camera? What about electronic music?

You could argue all these things are not art because they used technology, just like AI music or images... no? Where does the spectrum of "true art" begin and end?

Re: This is not the future

#233

Post by mat_b »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #218

Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't. Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food too…

Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of water and complaining that the water particles are moving in a direction that the levees pushed them. The levees are actually the bigger problem.

Re: This is not the future

#234

Post by throwmeaway820 »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter?

To me, it matters because most serious art requires time and effort to study, ponder, and analyze.

The more stuff that exists in the world that superficially looks like art but is actually meaningless slop, the more likely it is that your time and effort is wasted on such empty nonsense.

Re: This is not the future

#235

Post by shayway »

acedTrex wrote: post #137
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.

I see what you're getting at, but I think a better framing would be: there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating. If someone put in the effort to write something, it's because they believed it worth reading. It's part of the social contract that makes it seem worth reading a book or listening to a lecture even if you don't receive any value from the first word.

LLMs and AI art flip this around because potentially very little effort went into making things that potentially take lots of effort to experience and digest. That doesn't inherently mean they're not valuable, but it does mean there's no guarantee that at least one other person out there found it valuable. Even pre-AI it wasn't an iron-clad guarantee of course -- copy-writing, blogspam, and astroturfing existed long before LLMs. But everyone hates those because they prey on the same social contract that LLMs do, except in a smaller scale, and with a lower effort-in:effort-out ratio.

IMO though, while AI enables malicious / selfish / otherwise anti-social behavior at an unprecedented scale, it also enables some pretty cool stuff and new creative potential. Focusing on the tech rather than those using it to harm others is barking up the wrong tree. It's looking for a technical solution to a social problem.

Re: This is not the future

#236

Post by throwaway20174 »

nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

When they coined the term "influencer" it was a perfect definition for what that is.

It's not a question about the one who cannot influence the 7.9B. The question is disparity, which is like income disparity.

What happens when fewer and fewer people influence greater and greater numbers. Understanding the risk in that.

Re: This is not the future

#237

Post by mghackerlady »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #200
rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

>Art is an expression of human emotion Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it? If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman. And even in a fully autonomo…

With a kinetic structure, someone went through the effort to design it to do that. With AI art, sure you ask it to do something but a human isn't involved in the creative process in any capacity beyond that

Re: This is not the future

#238

Post by javier123454321 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #168
acedTrex wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.

I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.

> low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art.

Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.

Re: This is not the future

#239

Post by aljgz »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Big tech senior software engineer working on a major AI product speaking:

I totally agree with the message in the original post. Yes, AI is going to be everywhere, and it's going to create amazing value and serious challenges, but it's essential to make it optional.

This is not only for the sake of users' freedom. This is essential for companies creating products.

This is minority report, until it is not.

AI has many modes of failure, exploitability, and unpredictability. Some are known and many are not. We have fixes for some, and band aids for some other, but many are not even known yet.

It is essential to make AI optional, to have a "dumb" alternative to everything delegated to a Gen AI.

These options should be given to users, but also, and maybe even more importantly, be baked into the product as an actively maintained and tested plan-b.

The general trend of cost cutting will not be aligned with this. Many products will remove, intentionally or not, the non-ai paths, and when the AI fails (not if), they regret this decision.

This is not a criticisms of AI or a shift in trends toward it, it's a warning for anyone who does not take seriously, the fundamental unpredictability of generative AI

Re: This is not the future

#240

Post by opminion »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #218

Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't. Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food too…

For any pleasurable activity, there's always somebody taking it too far.
Post reply on HN