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I Am An AI Hater

anthonymoser.github.io

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Re: I Am An AI Hater

#311

Post by didibus »

sindriava wrote: post #233
didibus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take a report like this: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/ai-has-high-da... You can: 1. Dismiss it by believing the projections are very wrong and much too high 2. Think 20% of all energy consumed isn't that bad. 3. Find it concerning environmentally All takes have some weight behind them in my opinion. I don't think this is a case of "arsenic-free cauliflower", maybe unless you claim #1, but that…

I can't speak for you but I'm certainly not qualified to opine on the predictions so I won't address the 20% figure since I don't find it relevant. > data centers account for 1% to 2% of overall global energy demand So does the mining industry. Part of that data center consumption is the discussion we are having right now. I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained f…

> so I won't address the 20% figure

Ok, but that's the figure that would be alarming, AI is projected to consume 20% of the global energy production by 2030... That's not like the mining industry...

> I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained from it

Yes, you'd fall in the #2 conclusion bucket. This is a value judgement, not a factual or logical contradiction. You accept the trade off and find it worth it. That's totally fair, but in no way does it remove or mitigate the environmental impact argument, it just judges it an acceptable cost.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#312

Post by TeMPOraL »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #186
sindriava wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this response. The environmental impact is such a red herring it's not even funny. Somehow these statements never include the impact of watching Netflix shows or doing data processing manually.

Uh, we've been doing data processing for nearly 80 years, and watching netflix for nearly 20 years. Suddenly we need to tile the earth with data centers, build power plants, burn all the fuels we can, and will "need to get to fusion" (per Sam) to run AGI. He also said "if we need to burn a little more gas to get there, that's fine". We'll never get to fusion or AGI, but we will destroy the earth to put a few more dol…

You do understand what "exponential" in the "exponential growth" means?

Yes, it means that "suddenly" we need to do more of everything than we did for entirety of human history until ~few years ago. Same was true ~few years ago. And ~few years before that. And so on.

That's what exponential growth means. Correct for that, and suddenly we're not really doing things that much faster "because AI" than we'd be doing them otherwise.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#313

Post by jacquesm »

petralithic wrote: post #302
jacquesm wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The day I see AI generated art and it moves me in the same way that human generated art does I will concede the point. So far all I've seen is more, not novel. Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists. Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doub…

I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself. The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send, because they control what image they want to send, otherwise they reroll or redo their work flow. These days they can even edit the image with natural language so they can build it up just as one does in Photoshop, only using words instead of a mouse.

> I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself.

If after 33 comments in this thread and countless people trying to explain a part of it you don't get it that may be because you either don't want to get it or are unable to get it. Restating it one more time is not going to make a difference and I'm perfectly ok with you not 'getting it', so don't worry about it.

AI without real art as input is noise. It doesn't get any more concrete than that. Humans without any education at all and just mud and sticks for tools will spontaneously create art.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#314

Post by TeMPOraL »

sarchertech wrote: post #218
brabel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While some people support AGI because they yearn for "new forms of life to enslave", I think it's fair to say most people who look forward to AGI wants it because it means they may find solutions to very difficult issues we just can't with our own intelligence. It may be a pipe dream, but I can understand why people would want to believe that.

I doubt many slaveholders want slaves just to own slaves. They want the useful things the slaves can provide for them.

Right. But that's also why we invented robotics, automation, the entire field of software engineering, and - going in the other direction - specialization of labor.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#315

Post by Semiapies »

myhf wrote: post #96
danielbln wrote: post #12

Yet it is here to stay, won't go away and even if it won't get any better at the useful things it does, it is useful. The externalities are real, some can be removed, some mitigated. If you're a hater and a human, then you don't have to mitigate anything, of course. Me, I hate the externalities, but I love the thing. I want to use my own AI, hyper optimized and efficient and private. It would mitigate a lot. Maybe so…

> the useful things it does It's weird how AI-lovers are always trying to shoehorn an unsupported "it does useful things" into some kind of criticism sandwich where only the solvable problems can be acknowledged as problems. Just because some technologies have both upsides and downsides doesn't mean that every technology automatically has upsides. GenAI is good at generating these kinds of hollow statements that mimi…

And they're always desperately insisting that won't go away and you can't escape it. It stinks a lot of Big Lie techniques.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#316

Post by jacquesm »

petralithic wrote: post #303
jacquesm wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no…

Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

> Have you actually used image generators today?

Why would you ask this? It sounds like a lead-up to some kind of put down.

> It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces.

It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

> Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create

They emphatically are not. They are instructions to a tool on what relative importance to assign to all of the templates that it was trained on. But it doesn't understand the output image any more than it understood any of the input images. There is no context available to it in the purest sense of the word. It has no emotion to express because it doesn't have emotions in the first place.

> and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

That's just a different path to building up the same prompt. It doesn't suddenly cause the AI to use red for a dress because it thinks it is a nice counterpoint to a flower in a different part of the image because it does not think at all.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#317

Post by kelseyfrog »

saint_yossarian wrote: post #237
kelseyfrog wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war My computer does. What evidence would change your mind?

What evidence convinced you?

I performed an "Affective Turing Test" with null results.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#318

Post by utyop22 »

Mallowram wrote: post #97
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Words are the most indirect form of perception imaginable. Both Aristotle and Cassirer knew this What?

Aristotle: There are no contradictions. Cassirer: “Only when we put away words will be able to reach the initial conditions, only then will we have direct perception. All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous–and in this ambiguity, this “paronymia” of words is the source of all myths…this self-deception is rooted in language, which is forever making a game of the human mind, ever ensnaring it in that iridesc…

This is beautiful.

I also had a similar epiphany 3 days ago - once it hits you and you understand it, you can see clearly why LLMs are destined to crash and burn in their present form (good luck to those who will have to answer the questions regarding the money dumped into it).

What will come out of the investment will not justify what has been invested (for anyone who thinks otherwise, PLEASE GO AHEAD AND DO A DCF VALUATION!) and it will have a depressing effect on future AI investment.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#319

Post by bonoboTP »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #291
tzumaoli wrote: post #248

It's interesting to see the trend of the attitude towards GenAI in Hacker News through out the years. This is totally vibe based and I don't have numbers to back it up, but back in 2022-2023, the site was dominantly people who mostly treat GenAI as a curious technology without too much attachment, and some non-trivial amount of folks who are very skeptical of the tech. More recently I see a lot more people who see th…

I don't pay much attention to the submission themselves, but I do care what the fellow HN-ers think, and my own "vibe-based" perspective is that the voices have been predominantly negative for many years now, and only grow even more so.

HN is usually negative, cynical, skeptical, eyerolling, regardless of topic.

Just the other day someone posted the ImageNet 2012 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830), which was basically the threshold moment that kickstarted deep learning for computer vision. Commenters claimed it doesn't prove anything, it's sensational, it's just one challenge with a few teams, etc. Then there is the famous comment when Dropbox was created that it could be replaced by a few shell scripts and an ftp server.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#320

Post by jacquesm »

bonoboTP wrote: post #304
jacquesm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw to be one of the most beautiful pieces ever recorded, others can't listen to it and think it is bland and a terrible recording. You can't argue about taste.

I don't think this is just taste. The painting was made in a specific historic context and commemorates the bombing of Guernica. Without knowing that context, it may be appreciated as a disembodied visual artifact, but that's not how art really works or ever worked. An influential artpiece usually states something relevant to the historic moment and intellectual Zeitgeist of the time. You may like the music of Zombie…

Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day.

Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.

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