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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#441

Post by famouswaffles »

housebear wrote: post #393
bko wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author betrays himself early with this line: > a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it. He brings up the concept of labor and applies a moral judgement about "replacing" and "exploiting" labor. And then he throws the kitchen sink at the technology. People use it sure, but it's…

How are you able to make the inference that "most people reading this got real value from an LLM. And I'm sure the author did as well." How are you so sure of that? Speaking for myself, I've never gotten any real value from an LLM and their disappearance would not affect me in the slightest. It sounds more like you were upset about his assertion because YOU derive value from an LLM, and are projecting that as some so…

Chatgpt was the 6th (and climbing) most visited site in the world in January. Cursor is the fastest growing Saas of all time.

So yeah, most people get real value from LLMs. It's pretty plain to see, for anyone actually interested in seeing it.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#442

Post by azizam »

famouswaffles wrote: post #441
housebear wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you able to make the inference that "most people reading this got real value from an LLM. And I'm sure the author did as well." How are you so sure of that? Speaking for myself, I've never gotten any real value from an LLM and their disappearance would not affect me in the slightest. It sounds more like you were upset about his assertion because YOU derive value from an LLM, and are projecting that as some so…

Chatgpt was the 6th (and climbing) most visited site in the world in January. Cursor is the fastest growing Saas of all time. So yeah, most people get real value from LLMs. It's pretty plain to see, for anyone actually interested in seeing it.

As the article mentions, the number of users is wholly irrelevant to the discussion of how much positive value a tool brings to society (also factoring in the costs and negative impacts of the tool). This is a weak argument.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#443

Post by petesergeant »

card_zero wrote: post #267
petesergeant wrote: post #139

Article is a motte-and-bailey[0] argument. Bailey (the clickbait): “Generative AI is a con!!” Motte (narrow defendable argument): OpenAI and Anthropic have not shown that building a proprietary model and selling inference is a sustainable business. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

I see, so whenever anybody states their position tersely, I can accuse them of using a motte-and-bailey argument, and force them to be so pedantic and long winded that their point get lost in the weeds. Unless I like what they're saying, of course. I'll keep it in mind!

…what?

The author has a narrow defensible point (OpenAI and Anthropic have questionable business models) and rather than stating it tersely, he’s instead tried to use that to write an unfocused article dismissing all of Generative AI as a con.

It feels like you neither read the original article very carefully, nor took the time to understand what a motte-and-bailey argument is before writing this.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#444

Post by scotty79 »

daveguy wrote: post #431
scotty79 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is this shit for? Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists. Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market. It's not as good as people at solving proble…

Subjective evaluation of "humanity" and "empathy" in responses is much less important than clinical outcome. I don't think an online chat with a nebulous entity will ever be as beneficial as interactions that can, at least occasionally, be in-person. Especially as the trust of online conversations degrade. Erosion of trust online seems like a major negative consequence of all the generative AI slop (LLM or otherwise)…

Clinical outcome of humans doing therapy would be better if for some reason doing therapy worse (less according to taught guidelines) was better. But, sure, we can wait for another research or follow up. It might be true. Therapy has dismal outcomes anyways and the outcomes are mostly independent of which theoretical framework the therapy is done according to. It might be the case that the only value in therapy is human connection that AI fails to simulate. But it seem that for some people it simulates connection pretty well.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#445

Post by famouswaffles »

azizam wrote: post #442
famouswaffles wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatgpt was the 6th (and climbing) most visited site in the world in January. Cursor is the fastest growing Saas of all time. So yeah, most people get real value from LLMs. It's pretty plain to see, for anyone actually interested in seeing it.

As the article mentions, the number of users is wholly irrelevant to the discussion of how much positive value a tool brings to society (also factoring in the costs and negative impacts of the tool). This is a weak argument.

How much value a user gets from a tool is the users prerogative to give.

The user above is talking specifically about how much value users are getting out of LLMs. The number of users who consistently return is in fact a very good argument for the plain real world value being generated by LLMs.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#446

Post by BrenBarn »

danroblew wrote: post #90
BrenBarn wrote: post #70

A huge part of our problems stems from the fact that it's possible to make "companies" whose business model is built on losing money hand over fist until they've brainwashed everyone into thinking their "product" is good. In a sane world these companies would fail and AI would continue develop through small failures and small successes over a period of years or decades. Instead we get a firehose of nonsense just beca…

On the plus side, if all the AI companies collapse there will be a lot of spare hardware. Open source projects would have a lot more compute to work with.

That would be nice, but I'm more worried they won't collapse because they'll succeed at shoving their snake oil down the throats of enough big players to ensure their survival.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#447

Post by advael »

famouswaffles wrote: post #383
advael wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean by the same logic the only difference between a diffusion model and a VLM is that you put the spatial transformer on the other end. Yes, one of the powerful things about every kind of neural network is that they're a very general class of function approximator. That we can use a similar toolkit of techniques to tackle a wide variety of problems is very cool and useful. Again, the analogy to statistical models…

>I mean by the same logic the only difference between a diffusion model and a VLM is that you put the spatial transformer on the other end. Maybe if that was the only different but it's not. There are diffusion models that have nothing to do with transformers or attention or anything like that and where using them for arbitrary sequence prediction is either not possible or highly non-trivial. Yes, All Neural Network…

It's clear you're missing what point it is that I'm making from these responses, but I'm unsure how to explain it better and you're not really giving me much to work with in terms of seeming to engage with the substance of it, so I think we gotta leave this an impasse for now

Re: The Generative AI Con

#448

Post by azizam »

famouswaffles wrote: post #445
azizam wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article mentions, the number of users is wholly irrelevant to the discussion of how much positive value a tool brings to society (also factoring in the costs and negative impacts of the tool). This is a weak argument.

How much value a user gets from a tool is the users prerogative to give. The user above is talking specifically about how much value users are getting out of LLMs. The number of users who consistently return is in fact a very good argument for the plain real world value being generated by LLMs.

Incorrect, I'm afraid. The "plain real world value" does not necessarily have any correlation to the number of users, so your argument again fails to hold water.

Simply consider the users that use generative AI in order to perform some unimportant work (as I hope is the case, for generative AI cannot produce anything of novelty, by design). If such work held no value to begin with, then through simple deduction you can conclude that the generative AI contributed nothing of value.

The only outcome worthy of consideration was the time reclaimed by the user not performing such mundane tasks (so that they can move on to perform... more mundane work?), in which case one must question the larger scope of process at hand.

This is just one counterexample to your underlying premise for your argument - that you know nothing of how the users use such tools, or whether their use even brings anything of value to the real world.

The point being, the number of users is a number with no meaning. It is a number used to inflate the faux excitement surrounding AI and nothing more. "Falling for the hype", if you like.

Extrapolating your faulty logic, I could say a pornography website is of extreme value to humanity. After all, literal billions of people visit such websites very frequently. This must bring real world value, no? Or cigarettes? Or TikTok?

If your definition of value is derived from self-indulgence, e.g., how much time one can spend away from work with AI, or how much one can smoke because it feels nice in the moment, i.e., the hedonistic evaluation, then by all means, spoil yourself. After all, I don't stand to revoke those liberties anyway.

But understand, that this definition of value is not the same as "plain real world value" by necessity, and as such, the "number of users" is no guarantee.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#449

Post by HDThoreaun »

gamblor956 wrote: post #420
bko wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author betrays himself early with this line: > a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it. He brings up the concept of labor and applies a moral judgement about "replacing" and "exploiting" labor. And then he throws the kitchen sink at the technology. People use it sure, but it's…

Very few people get real value from an LLM. They're useful for minor grammatical checks, and idiot-level summaries. Maybe for entry-level coding. Outside of that, they're basically just gimmicks. You can't trust the output at all; literally everything an LLM outputs must be verified before it can be used for anything important, so you end up doing all of the work you thought you would have avoided by using an LLM.

Honestly can not understand this take. I put literally everything I write for work into an LLM. 80% of the time it has good suggestions to improve it. It is by far the best grammar checker I have found. Obviously dont ask for facts but it is incredible with language. Claude is far more useful to me than google search ever was.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#450

Post by habinero »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #288
pavlov wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google search disappeared, I would still remember the names of several sites like Stack Overflow that are always at the top of the results, and I’d just go directly there. Maybe the original Yahoo! style curated list of categorized links would actually be more useful for me at this point than Google with all the SEO spam. That kind of high-quality directory combined with ChatGPT would probably replace Google for m…

Does anyone maintain a Yahoo-like directory anymore? I used to love browsing the internet that way, and I feel like it would be a really interesting way to find websites rather than content.

I've had some luck googling "awesome" "" "github" -- people make lists of projects and links and papers and such and I've found some gems on there when I'm looking for dataviz or csv cli tools or what have you.
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