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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

artfish.ai

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Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#451

Post by antonvs »

wcedmisten wrote: post #337
planb wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure it’s so simple. I went on a trip with friends this weekend and cut a video from all the short clips we filmed on our phones. Before AI I would have used some song from my music library as the background tune. This time I created a song with Suno that fits the clips and includes some funny anecdotes from our vacation. If I was very talented and had the time, I could have written the lyrics and recorded th…

I don't get how people can listen to and share AI generated "music" and not feel legitimately embarrassed to their core. Like the AI Charlie Kirk song, but unironically. I'm truly baffled how anyone can enjoy it. > If I was very talented and had the time, I could have written the lyrics and recorded the song myself (which undoubtedly would be even more awesome), but I can’t do this. I promise you that any art you pro…

How do you rate that against all the generic garbage that comes out of the pop music industry? Do you really think it’s meaningfully worse?

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#452

Post by antonvs »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #183
MisterTea wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI. So what if its indistinguishable - its not a product of human intellect or effort. I feel there is a large disconnect where people look at artful output such as music or writing as a thing no different than a box of paper clips. To them, "It's just there." They don't care how it got there, t…

> That's fast food thinking You're simply drawing the line where it suits you. I don't consider it pure human coding if you use anything but Notepad.

Excuse me, I use Neovim but with no automation - no completions, no language server. Pure human coding. It’s not Notepad, but I’m not a masochist.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#454

Post by antonvs »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #426
MisterTea wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're simply drawing the line where it suits you. I'm drawing the line where the human effort is no longer there. There was a similar argument against electronic music. No effort because no instrument is played. But the fact is the instrument just changed shape, drastically. Like there's an artist I am sure a few here would be familiar with: Master Boot Record, a video game heavy metal electronic blend fully compo…

> It's just a really good illusion from a well tuned stochastic parrot. The stochastic parrot claim is long gone. Someone with actual skill in their respective field can create something new and original from current AI systems. The real danger is that creative/intelligent people are giving up those abilities and letting the AI do it for them.

The stochastic parrot claim is as apt as ever. It’s just that it turned out that humans are just stochastic parrots, too.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#455

Post by rmunn »

ssl-3 wrote: post #447
rmunn wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts. Agreed; just because I "rarely" pull out the calculator doesn't mean I never use it. Sometimes my wife asks me "If this cake recipe calls for filling a 9-inch pan with batter, and makes 3 layers, but I have an 8.5-inch pan and I'm making two layers, then how much should I reduce the recipe?" The π terms cancel each other out in that math, but I still…

Sure. So to bring it all back together: I don't think I'd want to rely upon having a rental pocket calculator to use. It could become unavailable at any time, for any reason. For something as common, inexpensive, and easy to find as pocket calculators have been for decades, renting one sounds crazy. But that's the way that clown-based LLMs are: They're rented. They could disappear at any time. And sure, I do use the…

Given the power draw of the GPUs and RAM needed to run those local LLMs, I don't see them being comfortable to hold in one's pocket anytime soon. :-) Not until some not-yet-imagined breakthrough in heat dissipation is made. But a thin client that talks to the local LLM on your private network, that's already possible today. So yes, within the next 5-10 years I fully expect I'll actually want to use an AI assistant on my phone. Currently I go through the settings and turn everything related to Google Assistant off, and do that again after every Android update. But once it's talking to a model that I control, instead of a model controlled by the world's largest advertising company, I'll feel the opposite way about it.

P.S. If "clown-based LLMs" was an autocorrect-assisted typo for cloud-based, it was inspired. :-) If you typed that on purpose, it was also inspired. Have an upvote.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#456

Post by jdw64 »

redwood wrote: post #408
jdw64 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with many points. Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to. The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their iden…

Re identity, relevant post from today in case you missed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48907290

Thank you for the human algorithm. But I read the article at the link you sent, and there are points where our thoughts differ significantly. However, since the context of my criticism here on Hacker News would be high-cost criticism (I'm an East Asian man, not the mainstream white Western male here), I find it difficult to comment there. I'm basically filtering myself to some degree, even if others don't see it that way. In other words, when I write, I only do so at points where I think I can sufficiently withstand the criticism at low cost from my perspective.

What I wanted to say in this post was essentially that I only do deep 'thinking' in a very narrow set of domains. For the rest, I outsource my thinking to the identity of the community I belong to.

Thank you for your kind comment, Redwood. However, commenting on that post would require deep engagement with others, and I'm a bit hesitant to do that.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#458

Post by rmunn »

customguy wrote: post #441
rmunn wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor ... No, it doesn't. This is an absurd claim, and nobody intelligent should take it seriously. Human trafficking exists because some people choose to do evil things. There are plenty of relatively-rich people who are actively trying to stop the evil of human trafficking. Furthermore, just being wealthy has not, historically, made you immun…

> To think that slavery, ancient or modern, is caused by relative wealth differentials reveals an abysmal ignorance of both history and human nature. I claimed no such thing, you read way too much into your missing the point. > if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards Wait, I thought it was just because "some people do evil things", nothing to do with relative pow…

I'm deliberately giving an illustration that shows that relative power throughout most of history had to do with physical strength and weapons, rather than money.

And if you didn't mean that slavery is caused by relative wealth differentials, then saying "... the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today ..." was a very poor way of making your point. So what was your point that I missed, then?

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#460

Post by dspillett »

ozim wrote: post #163
dspillett wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage .

I find a lot of people are actually happy that they can offload mundane parts of job to automatons and to be really busy with the interesting parts. It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job. While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.

I'm a bit odd, it would seem, in what I find enjoyable and not.

I've happy to take the tasks like SQL optimization which other would run away from, for instance, or the bash trickery mentioned elsewhere. People don't believe me, I've had looks of surprise and derision when “if you take on this role, you can give X to others and not have to worry about it” is responded to with “I like doing X, can't you ask one of the others to take on the other role and let me stay as I am?”…

It is increasingly looking like I have the choice: change to a role (automaton farmer) that I expect to hate, or leave dev, or maybe leave tech entirely and go wait tables or something. Those tables are starting to look very attractive.

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