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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#241

Post by Guthwine »

logicchains wrote: post #144
watwut wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore. So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy…

>Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.

I think there's a difference between 'the flow of information' and 'journalism'. The journalism/newspaper industry is indisputably smaller than it was 20 years ago and the newspapers that are left are all being consolidated into huge corporations with little to no ties to local communities.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#243

Post by virgildotcodes »

XorNot wrote: post #112
crazyfingers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> join them Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.

This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result. The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind". But…

Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.

I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.

Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.

If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.

Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#244

Post by bob1029 »

splittydev wrote: post #2

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#245

Post by hack1312 »

echelon wrote: post #63
chasd00 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating. I use AI regularly, where it works it works…

Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time. Horse carriage drivers -> Cars Print media -> Internet Drafting -> CAD Music -> Electronic music, DAWs Film photography -> Digital Traditional film special effects -> CGI Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars) In each of these cases, there was a subset of peopl…

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#246

Post by fourside »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #141

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

> it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI

I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#247

Post by bluefirebrand »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #216
bluefirebrand wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation. Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.

My intuition would be that the resistance would come from grumpy old guys like me who spent most of their lives perfecting their craft.

It should be coming from them too

My guess is a lot of those grumpy old guys, on this site at least, are sitting pretty with large bank accounts. So they don't need to worry about their jobs anymore. They could retire safely tomorrow if they wanted. So they don't care.

Just another instance of the older generation trying to loot the future from the younger.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#248

Post by KptMarchewa »

sifar wrote: post #234
dmantis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay. Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along. It is question of when.

They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#249

Post by 7tflutter7 »

bsza wrote: post #168
splittydev wrote: post #2

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

> AI is here to stay I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op. How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#250

Post by empath75 »

csande17 wrote: post #159
nba456_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.

You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.

Why do you imagine this would change _anything_?

There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.

If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.

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