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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#31

Post by dandellion »

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…

I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half the programmers I know who pay a subscription for Copilot already know how to program perfectly well.

Re: AI Crap

#32

Post by txutxu »

Not sure about creativity. But.

Previously, I had to deal with "Junior python" or "Junior bash" crap at $work.

Finding the dangerous bugs, was measured in seconds. Helping the person to be better in the future, used to work.

Now, all the company is requesting code to ChatGPT. Hey, please, use my script.

I have to deal with "looks fine at first/quick view" code, that needs deep analysis to understand what it's trying to do, why, and where are the (100% sure) hidden "break production" kind of failures.

It's more like "were is waldo"... you know that there will be at least one or two things really really wrong, always, always one or two (or more) catastrophic details, but that they are hidden below something "apparently nice".

And what is worse, all effort to point and fix issues, is lost. Or repeated again and again.

I apologize, but as a senior sysadmin/oncall model, I cannot run your chatgpt code, until you understand how things work.

Re: AI Crap

#33

Post by asimpletune »

I think people are just going to spend less time on devices.

All in all it’ll probably end up being a net-positive, although it’s a shame that it had to happen in exactly the way. The dawn of the internet was one of hope and optimism and the potential value that it held was an ocean compared to the eventual drops that it was mortgaged in pursuit thereof.

Search is becoming useless. People are becoming inoculated to social and its viral effect will slowly wane. People after exposure to all this value-less capitalism will eventually wise up, because that’s what makes sense, and will be left for us in terms of value will be the original oldies but goodies that we started with: Wikipedia, YouTube maybe, personal blogs, and commerce.

For many people this has already started. I don’t care about going online so much, and I’m much more interested in my community and what’s happening around me. My friends and I all use social but more as a tool and it’s increasingly becoming more local. When I meet younger people it’s even more extreme. They’re so cynical about tech that I’m convinced they’re going to usher in 3rd spaces and better urban planning and the likes when they grow up.

I’m not saying we’ll abandon tech just that we’ll only engage when there’s a legitimate value proposition. Ultimately that’s why there’s so much nonsense anyways, because it is legitimately hard to create actual value. On the long view though only value survives. I didn’t even mention “AI” but that will probably just hasten this process from a content perspective. In the future it’ll be around but we’ll just endure it, but we’ll also seek out meaningful interactions whenever we can.

Re: AI Crap

#34

Post by phero_cnstrcts »

squarefoot wrote: post #26
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

Well, if that doctor is fully programmable by the big companies it could just diagnose more diseases and write more prescriptions.

Re: AI Crap

#35

Post by jprete »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people would just stop using the internet (or use it in a very limited fashion) because of the explosion of LLM generated content. On a similar note, I watch little TV because of the exact same reason, because I have little control over what I want to see and most of the interesting stuff that I may want to watch may be spread across different channels and broadcasted at nearly the same time. Perhap…

This and Substack are the last two places I still regularly read Internet content.

Re: AI Crap

#36

Post by lewhoo »

danielbln wrote: post #11
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.

But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.

Re: AI Crap

#37

Post by infecto »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #16
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't. Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical…

Unfortunately most doctors don’t have the time to be that hands on and at the end of the day are just taking your symptoms and comparing it to their flesh database of illness.

There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.

Re: AI Crap

#38

Post by 50 »

As for generative AI: "mimicry is always sinister" (Friendship's Death (1987), Peter Wollen).

Re: AI Crap

#39

Post by Jack000 »

krapp wrote: post #24
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

>A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies? And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free? That's not ho…

> what will LLMs ever do for us?

Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.

Re: AI Crap

#40

Post by agentgumshoe »

dools wrote: post #28
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 Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.

No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad.

What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.

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