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Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#251

Post by CamperBob2 »

blibble wrote: post #148
CamperBob2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you (and the authors) call "hallucination," other people call "imagination." Also, you don't know very many people, including yourself, if you think that confabulation and self-deception aren't integral parts of our core psychological makeup. LLMs work so well because they inherit not just our logical thinking patterns, but our faults and fallacies.

what I call it is "buggy garbage" it's not a person, it doesn't hallucinate or have imagination it's simply unreliable software, riddled with bugs

(Shrug) Perhaps other sites beckon.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#252

Post by ares623 »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #248

> . Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it. What's your answer to this? How did it turn out for nuclear…

I wasn’t around at the time to argue against nuclear energy.

I wasn’t old enough to argue against the internet. Plus to be fair to the ones who were, there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.

I wasn’t old enough to argue against social media and the surveillance it brought.

Now AI comes along. And I am old enough. And I am experienced enough in a similar space. And I have seen what similar technology have done and brought. And I have taken all that and my conscience and instinct tells me that AI is not a net good.

Previous generations have failed us. But we make do with the world we find ourselves born into.

I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.

All so they can open 20 PRs per day for their employers.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#253

Post by charcircuit »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #235
charcircuit wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>losing tens of billions They are investing 10s of billions.

They are wasting tens of billions on something that has no business value currently, and may well never, just because of FOMO. That's not what I would call an investment.

Many investments may lose money, but the EV here is positive due to the extreme utility that AI can and is bringing.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#254

Post by ajkjk »

anonymars wrote: post #69
ajkjk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you make a thing and the thing is going to be inevitably used for a purpose and you could do something about that use and you do not --- then yes, it exists for that purpose, and you are responsible for it being used in that way. you don't get to say "ah well who could have seen this inevitable thing happening? it's a shame nobody could do anything about it" when it was you that could have done something about it.

> you...could have done something about it What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?

In this case we're debating whether one of the purposes of AI is to scan the elderly. Probably 'purpose' is not quite the right word, but the point would be: it is not the purpose of AI to not scam the elderly (or it would explicitly prevent that).

(note: I do not actually know if it explicitly prevents that. But because I am very cynical about corporations, I'd tend to assume it doesn't.)

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#255

Post by ajkjk »

pluralmonad wrote: post #93
jychang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands. Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

I'm super confused what harms come from stripper poles and vibrators. I am prepared to accept that the joke might have gone right over my head.

I don't get the jump either but it was certainly lateral enough to be amusing

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#256

Post by ares623 »

Froztnova wrote: post #40
porkloin wrote: post #10

I hate LLMs as much as the next guy, but this was honestly just not very funny. Humor can be a great vehicle for criticism when it's done right, but this feels like clickbait-level lazy writing. I wouldn't criticize it anywhere else, but I have enjoyed reading a bunch of actually good writing from mcsweeney's over the years in the actual literary journal and on their website.

It's that brand of humor that isn't really humor anymore because the person writing it is clearly positively seething behind the keyboard and considers the whole affair to be deadly serious. I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the jo…

You’re not the target audience then. It’s for those who can’t shake the feeling that something doesn’t feel quite right about the whole thing.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#257

Post by soulofmischief »

overgard wrote: post #134
soulofmischief wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source contributor and musician who is not rich, I am pretty stoked about the engineering, scientific and mathematical advancements being made in my lifetime. I have only become more creatively enabled when adopting these tools, and while I share the existential dread of becoming unemployable, I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation. I do not have s…

Well, if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, "creatively enabled" would be a luxury at the top of the pyramid with "self actualization". Luxuries don't matter if the things at the bottom of the pyramid aren't there -- i.e. you can't eat or put a shelter over your head. I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback. Not…

You can be poor and creative at the same time. Creativity is not a luxury. For many, including myself, it's a means of survival. Creating gives me purpose and connection to the world around me.

I grew up very poor and was homeless as a teenager and in my early 20s. I still studied and practiced engineering and machine learning then, I still made art, and I do it now. The fact that Big Tech is the new Big Oil is besides the point. Plenty of companies are using open training sets and producing open, permissively licensed models.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#258

Post by soulofmischief »

jacquesm wrote: post #138
overgard wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, "creatively enabled" would be a luxury at the top of the pyramid with "self actualization". Luxuries don't matter if the things at the bottom of the pyramid aren't there -- i.e. you can't eat or put a shelter over your head. I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback. Not…

> I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback. That's by far not the worst that could happen. There could very well be an axe attached to the pendulum when it swings back. > Not to mention it's bad business if nobody can afford to use AI because they're unemployed. In that sense this is the opposite of the Ford story: the v…

We were going to have to reckon with these problems eventually as science and technology inevitably progressed. The problem is the world is plunged in chaos at the moment and being faced with a technology that has the potential to completely and rapidly transform society really isn't helping.

Hatred of the technology itself is misplaced, and it is difficult sometimes debating these topics because anti-AI folk conflate many issues at once and expect you to have answers for all of them as if everyone working in the field is on the same agenda. We can defend and highlight the positives of the technology without condoning the negatives.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#259

Post by irishcoffee »

wizardforhire wrote: post #90
jychang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands. Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

To be fair to the magic wands, thats why “massagers” were invented in the first place. [1] [2] [3] [1] https://thefactbase.com/the-vibrator-was-invented-in-1869-to... [2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/ma... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

And I'll go out on a limb and say the first person to use a pole resembling a fire pole in the fireman vs stripper debate was probably the stripper!

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#260

Post by soulofmischief »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #87
soulofmischief wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source contributor and musician who is not rich, I am pretty stoked about the engineering, scientific and mathematical advancements being made in my lifetime. I have only become more creatively enabled when adopting these tools, and while I share the existential dread of becoming unemployable, I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation. I do not have s…

> I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation. I'm not really a fan of the "you criticize society yet you participate in it" argument. >I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies. You seem to forget the blood shed over the history that allowed that tech to benefit th…

> I'm not really a fan of the "you criticize society yet you participate in it" argument.

Me neither, and I didn't make such an argument.

> You seem to forget the blood shed over the history that allowed that tech to benefit the people over just the robber barons. Unimaginable amounts of people died just so we could get a 5 day workweek and minimum wage.

What does that have to do with my argument? What about my argument suggested ignorance of this fact? This is just another straw man.

> We don't get a benficial future by just laying down and letting the people with the most perverse incentives decide the terms. The very least you can do is not impede those trying to fight for those futures if you can't/don't want to fight yourself.

What an incredible characterization. Nothing about my argument is "laying down", perhaps it seems that way because you do not share my ideals, but I fight for my ideals, I debate them in public as I do now, and that is the furthest thing from "laying down" and "not fighting myself". You seem to be projecting several assumptions about my politics and historical knowledge. Did you have a point to make or was this just a bunch of wanking?

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