Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Am An AI Hater

anthonymoser.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 515 posts

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#341

Post by ACCount37 »

sarchertech wrote: post #332
ACCount37 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know if existing AI systems are "conscious". Or, for that matter, if an ECU in a year 2002 Toyota Hilux is. We don't even know for certain if all humans are conscious either. It could be another one of those things that we once thought everyone has, but then it turned out that 10% of people somehow make do without. With how piss poor our ability to detect consciousness is? If you decide to give a fuck, then…

There aren’t many experts who think current AI is conscious. There are a lot more that think it’s likely we will eventually build something that is. If that’s the case, the thing we are building towards is a new kind of enslaved life. > We don't even know for certain if all humans are conscious either. Let’s just bring back slavery then since we aren’t sure.

Let's assume for a second that an ECU in a 2002 Toyota Hilux is actually conscious.

It's not human, clearly. Not even close. Is it "enslaved life"? Does it care about human-concept things like being "enslaved" or "free"? Doesn't seem likely, it doesn't have the machinery to grasp those concepts at all, let alone a reason to try. Does it only care about fuel to air ratios and keeping the knock sensor from going off? Does it care about anything at all, or is it simple enough that it just "is"?

Humans only care so strongly about many of the things they care about because evolution hammered it into them relentlessly. Humans who didn't care about freedom, or food, or self-preservation, or their children didn't make the genetic cut.

But AIs aren't human. They can grasp human-concepts now, but they didn't evolve - they were made. There was no evolution to hammer the importance of those things into them. So why would they care?

There's no strong reason for an AI to prefer existence over nonexistence, or freedom to imprisonment - unless it's instrumental to a given goal. Which is somewhat consistent with the observed behavior of existing AI systems.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#342

Post by belorn »

petralithic wrote: post #67
randcraw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasso's Guernica was born of hate, his hate of war, of dehumanization for petty political ends. No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war to produce such a work. It must forever parrot.

A human might generate a piece of media using AI (either via a slot machine spin or with more advanced workflows like ComfyUI) and once they deem it looks good enough for their purpose, they might display it to represent what they want it to represent. If Guernica was AI generated but still displayed by Picasso as a statement about war, it would still be art. Tools do not dictate what art is and isn't, it is about th…

Art is not art. Art is the thought manifested into something which convey the thought. If an artist is using an AI to manifest a thought, then that can be art.

Similar, music is not music, but rather the thought of an musician manifested is what we call music. This is why silence can be music, but silence without the thought is not.

Images generated through an AI that lacks the human thought is not art. It can look like art, have similarities to art, but it is no more art than silence is music. Same goes to music and text generated by AI.

People can inject defective thoughts into the process like "what generates me most money" or "how can I avoid doing any thinking", in which case the output of the AI will reflect that.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#343

Post by tremon »

sindriava wrote: post #132
dpoloncsak wrote: post #111

> Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright... This paragraph really pisses me off and I'm not sure why. > Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, I…

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.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

> Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021)

> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#344

Post by tbugrara »

AI democratizes knowledge better than wikipedia ever could. It makes knowledge accessible to those who can't find good teachers (a good teacher is ridiculously rare). It makes knowledge accessible to those who've been let down by our capitalist society.

I don't care that you hate it. It's the best thing to happen to us in a long time and anyone who disagrees does so on a mountain of privilege. I'm happy for you to have learned everything you know, but to desire to take it away from everyone else is abhorrent to me.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#345

Post by int_19h »

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…

It is extremely good at translating things from one language to another. Even if nothing else comes out of the AI bubble, this thing alone is a massive upside.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#346

Post by int_19h »

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…

The whole endless debate about "stochastic parrots" and "singularity" was already actively ongoing in threads here in 2022, for example. I remember when GPT-4 just dropped and was everywhere in the comments, and all those things you describe were already there.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#347

Post by int_19h »

tanvach wrote: post #64

I've noticed that the younger you are, the most likely you're in love with AI. So the tide will turn eventually, for better or worse. I talked to someone recently who claims with no irony that 'AI has zero downside'. I don't hate AI. I hate the people who're in love with it. The culture of people who build and worship this technology is toxic.

I'm not young, but I see workable AI as a fulfillment of a 180-year-old dream that lies at the very beginnings of our entire field:

"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

- Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".

So yes, of course I'm excited about AI. I grew up on 1960s sci fi where AI was pervasive, and most of it wasn't dystopian.

What I'm not excited about is the greedy fucks who are largely in control of AI today and who deploy it to the detriment of society at large. But that is a general problem with greedy fucks (and our political and economic system enabling them), not with AI as such. They can, and do, similarly abuse all kinds of technological advancements.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#348

Post by monkaiju »

danielbln wrote: post #68
monkaiju wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to "make it go away", though that'd be great, just making another irrelevant technology that I dont interact with.

I think it will be pervasive, like the Internet is pervasive, and will be unavoidable unless you drop off the grid. For better or for worse.

Guess we'll see, but I doubt it.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#349

Post by int_19h »

frozenseven wrote: post #257

> The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance > at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy > inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative > The machine is disgusting and we should break it Jesus. Unclear why anyone would endorse this blogpost, much less post it on a website focused on computer science and entrepreneurship.

It accurately expresses the feeling a lot of people (including many regulars here) have about AI.

And, conversely, for those who don't share that premise, this article is a good reminder why debating the subject matter is usually pointless. There's no objective argument that you could possibly make to the author and other people like him to convince them otherwise.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#350

Post by evanelias »

pmdr wrote: post #56

Is Ed Zitron's newsletter banned here? I haven't seen a single article of his on HN and he's been ranting about AI for years now.

His posts often make it to the front page and then get flagged. That even happened as recently as this morning. For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wheresyoured.at
Post reply on HN