AI Crap • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Crap

#51

Post by dagw » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

evrimoztamur wrote: post #16

Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't. Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical…

Doctors can touch, feel, understand...

Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing.

Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.

Re: AI Crap

#52

Post by jiggawatts » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

I just watched the latest Star Trek show and something occurred to me: the Enterprise computer acts much like an LLM. It doesn't take actions on its own, but you ask it any question about the ship, and it answers politely.

LLMs are literally science fiction come to life, something out of the movies.

It's early days still, they're a bit primitive and the compute substrate is woefully underpowered for what we would ideally like... but the promise is there.

Re: AI Crap

#53

Post by ExtremisAndy » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

agentgumshoe wrote: post #41

dandellion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half…

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

This is indeed a valid question, but I think it’s largely up to the user. For me, as a hobbyist programmer that sometimes writes code at work to automate certain tasks, I use ChatGPT to quickly create boilerplate/template type code AND to learn how to do new things. When I’m asking how to do something new, I try to actually learn what’s going on so that I won’t have to keep asking about that particular issue. But yeah, the temptation to just say “thanks, ChatGPT” and move on without learning anything is certainly there and could be quite harmful to one’s overall coding skills.

Re: AI Crap

#54

Post by raincole » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

agentgumshoe wrote: post #41

dandellion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half…

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

> Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar...

Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go)

> Same with dev. Does it actually make you better...

Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved.

Without ChatGPT I would have learned 0 about them. With ChatGPT at least I learned a bit.

Re: AI Crap

#55

Post by meheleventyone » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

zirgs wrote: post #49

danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

AI is the only way for small countries to compete with Hollywood. I'm sick and tired of all those glorified stage plays that my country produces simply because we have no access to Hollywood money. Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.

If it comes to pass that AI dramatically reduces the cost of making a movie that works for Hollywood as well as small countries and probably doesn't result in the small countries being able to compete as a result?

In the same sense that the revolution that occurred in the digital distribution of games and general improvements in the accessibility of tooling meant the market for games expanded into more niches rather than producing more AAA games from smaller developers.

Re: AI Crap

#56

Post by throwaway4233 » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:57 AM UTC

dools wrote: post #44

agentgumshoe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation…

> which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. Why do you assume that? > What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement. I know the assumption is always that Big Greedy Co™ is hiring the worst possibl…

Customer support being a bad experience has always to do with the company policies or a general lack of training.

For company policies, an AI would be rigidly trained and limited to always minimize loses to the company, since you can game the AI if it's too lax by saying the exact prompts or keywords.

For companies that do not even provide basic training except for a FAQ sheet, I do not think replacing the human with an AI is going to improve customer experience, because, a human(IC or manager) might be driven by motivation of compensation or job security, to learn more than what is provided, to do their job well.

Re: AI Crap

#57

Post by fineline » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

I just switched my banking from the largest national institution in Australia to a local credit union and another bank that has always had an online/phone only model and is good at it. I get the best combination of human customer service and good value accounts and leave behind the abysmal contempt for customer service demonstrated by the major, with all its infuriating new AI mediocrity. I can't be the only one?

Re: AI Crap

#58

Post by giancarlostoro » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

agentgumshoe wrote: post #41

dandellion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half…

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

I am not the OP you are referring to, but I am non-native and this is anecdotal but when I grew up and used the internet I learned how to spell way better because of the spell check in Firefox. I really doubt I would have been able to spell half as many words as I can correctly spell any other way. I have some random words still that I infrequently use that I always typo, but theres so many other words that I just know how to write out from muscle memory at this point. My only problem is I dont know how to pronounce all words, I sometimes find a word and get really confused, not too often, but often enough.

I think AI could help me if ChatGPT or whatever else had proper text to speech with a reasonably convincing accent, even if it sounds off, as long as the accents American I am good to go.

I am also a pessimist with AI but I still try it out and use it because I do see it being used more and more.

Re: AI Crap

#59

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:59 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

[deleted]

Re: AI Crap

#60

Post by lucideer » Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 10:59 AM UTC

zirgs wrote: post #49

danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

AI is the only way for small countries to compete with Hollywood. I'm sick and tired of all those glorified stage plays that my country produces simply because we have no access to Hollywood money. Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.

When you say "to compete with Hollywood" you either mean one of two things: on quality or on box office.

The latter is nothing to do with CGI or production budget: it's about marketing budget, in which AI has less to offer.

The former, in my view, will not be aided by AI. The "glorified stage plays" are (not always but on aggregate) of significantly higher quality than quite a lot of Hollywood output. AI won't change that in any positive way.