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The AI Hate Progression

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31–40 of 201 posts

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#31
> At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this, this is the next big thing, and that we must pull out the stops to ensure the prophecy is fulfilled of generative AI/LLMs becoming the next big thing.

This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman.

> I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models.

This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were.

> All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly.

Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying.

> You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.

Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works.

> Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers!

Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets.

I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#32
post #3

A sentiment a lot of people can get behind, but at this point if AI is getting a do-over, society is getting a do-over, because the economic entanglements are not really fixable without a revolution of current capitalism. The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of th…

I think some backlash is inevitable but I really hope we don't end up in Orange Catholic territory. ML & AI is a useful tool and was used long before ChatGPT for really critical things. Additionally ChatGPT and the like do have their uses - they're just massively overhyped.

I am hoping for a more regular kind of reckoning where the market realizes the bubble was silly and we get more rational consumer offerings that are actually priced near to cost - then the utility of these tools will be seen as helpful but in a more limited scope.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#33
>Consent needs to be a core concept of it. If people don't want to use it, respect that opinion.

this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye.

"maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc.

there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#34
I mean, the issue with this is:

"If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it."

That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#35

The lack of consent is real. As one of those viral commencement speakers who got booed said: "Find a way to say yes." My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponen…

>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.

Nobody has ever claimed that the available options before LLMs were 100% accurate. But they were more accurate than the LLM.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#36
post #3

A sentiment a lot of people can get behind, but at this point if AI is getting a do-over, society is getting a do-over, because the economic entanglements are not really fixable without a revolution of current capitalism. The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of th…

Yea, AI just feels like the last straw in an ever increasing set of violations of the social contract.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#37
I, and everyone in my social circle, go out of our way to not touch anything that was had AI significantly involved in the creation process. Hypocritically, I use AI a lot at work. I see it as using it a lot more than I am paying for, to actively sink OpenAI/Claud's bottom line.

I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#38
post #19

This is a nonsensical piece. >You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave. This is ... not how consent works. At all.

It isn't how consent is supposed to work - but it's how rights currently operate. Maybe in the US (where a lot of these businesses are based) there will be a strong rebound during the next election? Right now as an artist (unless you've got disney lawyers behind you) you have no right to protect your art.

Exactly! I hate that people can't upload their blog posts, stories, drawings, videos, music, etc. without them being slurped up by AI models. Same for open source software. When exactly did we collectively decide that copyright does not exist anymore?

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#39
> It was this brazen disregard for any kind of consent from the get go that did most of the work in turning me against anything AI had to offer.

It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI...

Re: The AI Hate Progression

#40
post #5

Good write up, and I think it accurately sums up many people's feelings about AI. One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.

"The idea of AI is fundamentally tainted" What does this even mean? You don't like machine learning? You don't like the letters AI? There's no coming back to what? Do you work in the tech industry?

you okay? why do u need to be so patronizing? did you read tfa? they're obviously talking about the public's perception of LLM's, especially outside of the tech industry. "the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted" is not a confusing statement in reference to that.
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