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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#391

Post by nunez »

ike2792 wrote: post #337
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples yo…

Case in point: subscription costs for everything going up to justify the "additional value" that AI is bringing _whether you use it or not_.

This would have been an additional, more expensive, subscription tier in the past.

Anecdote: Literally this morning, krisp.ai (noise cancellation software that succumbed to slop-itis two years ago and added AI notetaker and meeting summarization stuff to their product that's really difficult to turn off, which is insulting seeing how most people purchased this tool JUST FOR NOISE CANCELLING, but I digress) sent an email to their customers (me) announcing that they would no longer offer a free tier and will, instead, offer 14-day trials with all features enabled.

Why?

"As AI has become central to everyday work, we’ve seen that most people preferred the unlimited workflow once they tried it."

This bait-and-switch era is tiring.

Re: This is not the future

#392

Post by underlipton »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #305
Ritewut wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech artist here so I hit a middle ground. > I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously >But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel aga…

It's not corps only though, AI at this point include many open models, and we'll have more of it as we go if needed. Just like how the original hacker culture was born, we have the open source movements, AI will follow it. When LLMs first gotten of, people were talking about how governments will control them, but anyone who knows the history of personal computing and hacker culture knew that's not the way things go i…

Free AI evangelists need to get better about teaching people how "AI compute" away from the big tech platforms. They need to show that local models are equal or better than ChatGPT et al., and show how people can set those systems up, without being ornery or obtuse.

The same actually goes for artists who want people to create and value human-made art. Everyone seems so resentful of the people who they should want to be on their side. You have to practice what you preach, man.

Re: This is not the future

#393

Post by terminalshort »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #383
terminalshort wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The off ramp to the loop was always a crisis like a recession or war. Covid could have been such an example. If the government hadn't bailed everyone out, the pandemic would have been a mass casualty event for companies and their owners. The financial crisis of 2008 also would have been such an event if not for the bailouts. The natural state of the economy is boom and bust, with wealth concentration increasing durin…

This works until it doesn't.

No argument there. And I'm worried that the point it doesn't is getting pretty close.

Re: This is not the future

#394

Post by terminalshort »

keeda wrote: post #381
munificent wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person . I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers . If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

> I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers. That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art": The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts…

But it sounds like in this case the "morality" that capitalism doesn't account for is basically just someone saying "you should be forced to pay me to do something that you could otherwise get for 10x cheaper." It's basically cartel economics.

Re: This is not the future

#395

Post by [deleted] »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #382
daveguy wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But without regulation they clearly devolve into scam and fraud vehicles. Crypto just isn't worth the time or effort for regular folks. I'm not sure what's going to happen first -- abandonment or bank run, but crypto like all unregulated banking systems, are destined to fail. I guess it could end up being regulated but at this point, with such pervasive scam/fraud use, that will probably just accelerate the bank run.…

What have I said that indicates worship? I am simply pointing out that what you claimed was objectively false, and in response you moved the goalposts.

[deleted]

Re: This is not the future

#396

Post by daveguy »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #382
daveguy wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But without regulation they clearly devolve into scam and fraud vehicles. Crypto just isn't worth the time or effort for regular folks. I'm not sure what's going to happen first -- abandonment or bank run, but crypto like all unregulated banking systems, are destined to fail. I guess it could end up being regulated but at this point, with such pervasive scam/fraud use, that will probably just accelerate the bank run.…

What have I said that indicates worship? I am simply pointing out that what you claimed was objectively false, and in response you moved the goalposts.

Your statements of faith included:

> Currency that can't be inflated... [seriously? the fact that you didn't even recognize that as a statement of faith, well...]

> Outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist

I mean, maybe you're in a repressive regime and really need a way to fight the system. But I'm guessing you just have faith in crypto ideology. Either way, have a great day!

Re: This is not the future

#397

Post by underlipton »

cons0le wrote: post #353
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I want my AI music generator to spit out stems and sheet music I can rearrange, not finished mp3 files.

Because none of these AI tech bros give a dam about music. I thought with ai we would be able to put all the "timbres" of instruments into vector database and create a truly new instrument sound. Like making a new color for the first time. But no we get none of that. We get mega shitty corporate covers. I would rather hear music that's a little bad than artificially perfect sounding.

Micronotal instruments get close to hitting that spot for me.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N19WNiy-T0M

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-IMV5OLCsU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjcQyQYhA7g

Re: This is not the future

#398

Post by keeda »

terminalshort wrote: post #394
keeda wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers. That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art": The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts…

But it sounds like in this case the "morality" that capitalism doesn't account for is basically just someone saying "you should be forced to pay me to do something that you could otherwise get for 10x cheaper." It's basically cartel economics.

In isolation that makes sense, but consider that these AIs have been trained on a vast corpus of human creative output without compensating the human creators, and are now being used to undercut those same humans. As such there is some room for moral outrage that did not exist in prior technical revolutions.

Personally, I think training is "fair use", both legally and practically -- in my mind, training LLMs is analogous to what happens when humans learn from examples -- but I can see how those whose livelihood is being threatened can feel doubly wronged.

The other reason I'm juxtaposing Capitalism and morality is the disruption AI will likely cause to society. The scale at which this will displace jobs (basically, almost all knowledge work) and replace them with much higher-skilled jobs (basically, you need to be at the forefront of your field) could be rather drastic. Capitalism, which has already led to such extreme wealth inequality, is unsuited to solve for this, and as others have surmised, we probably need to explore new ways of operating society.

Re: This is not the future

#399

Post by [deleted] »

unformedelta wrote: post #75
nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable. To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking…

[deleted]

Re: This is not the future

#400

Post by array_key_first »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #251
mat_b wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of…

We are the levees in your metaphor and we have agency. The problem is not that one founder does something before another and gains an advantage. The problem is the millions of people who buy or use the harmful thing they create - and that we all have control over. If we continue down this path we'll end up at free will vs determinism and I choose to believe the future is not inevitable.

Control is the ability to make decisions. The ability to make decisions depends on knowledge.

Without knowledge, you have no control, only the illusion of it. With fast food, we did not know the harm. With smoking, we did not know the harm. With tiktok... we did not know the harm, and still do not fully grasp it.

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