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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#401

Post by Trasmatta »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Very much yes, how can I opt into that timeline?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#402

Post by Findecanor »

blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

I've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either.

Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.

I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code. If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there. Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#403

Post by ai_is_the_best »

indigoabstract wrote: post #391

Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine. Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.

[flagged]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#404

Post by ottah »

gyanchawdhary wrote: post #278

strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..

Most people do not hold strongly consistent or well introspective political ideas. We're too busy living our lives to examine everything and often what we feel matters more than what we know, and that cements our position on a subject.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#405

Post by DetectDefect »

xorgun wrote: post #393

I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme. The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly purit…

What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#406

Post by Epa095 »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #314

Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...…

Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.

Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#407

Post by antirez »

You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.

About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#408

Post by cons0le »

Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.

One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.

Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.

I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.

If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.

The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.

Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#409

Post by wolvesechoes »

sph wrote: post #54

Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike. Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds o…

> Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#410

Post by CamperBob2 »

delichon wrote: post #336

When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop. I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls wit…

I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.

An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.

Then, ask what's different this time.

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