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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#541

Post by morsecodist »

jhbadger wrote: post #425
keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical s…

I don't agree that it is because of the "quality" of the video. The issue with AI art is that it lacks intentional content. I think people like art because it is a sort of conversation between the creator and the viewer. It is interesting because it has a consistent perspective. It is possible AI art could one day be indistinguishable but for people to care about it I feel they would need to lie and say it was made by a particular person or create some sort of persona for the AI. But there are a lot of people who want to do the work of making art. People are not the limiting factor, in fact we have way more people who want to make art than there is a market for it. What I think is more likely is that AI becomes a tool in the same way CGI is a tool.

Re: AI is different

#542

Post by danielvaughn »

keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

Another flaw is that humans won’t find other things to do. I don’t see the argument for that idea. If I had to bet, I’d say that if AI continues getting more powerful, then humans will transition to working on more ambitious things.

Re: AI is different

#543

Post by spenrose »

antirez wrote: post #465
keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI prog…

Look at your examples. Translation is a closed domain; the LLM is loaded with all the data and can traverse it. Book and music album covers _don't matter_ and have always been arbitrary reworkings of previous ideas. (Not sure what “ebook reading” means in this context.) Math, where LLMs also excel, is a domain full of internal mappings.

I found your post “Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)” very insightful. LLMs are memory extensions and cognitive aides which provide several valuable primitives: finding connections adjacent to your understanding, filling in boilerplate, and offloading your mental mapping needs. But there remains a chasm between those abilities and much work.

Re: AI is different

#544

Post by m_a_g »

legucy wrote: post #536
_jab wrote: post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

I’m skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 1980, the Web is not even in my top 3. Personal computers, spreadsheet software, and desktop publishing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has the Web. And yes, I recognize that the Web has already created profound change, in that every researcher now depends heavily on online databases, in that commerc…

This is not reddit.

Re: AI is different

#545

Post by ninetyninenine »

morsecodist wrote: post #541
jhbadger wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical s…

I don't agree that it is because of the "quality" of the video. The issue with AI art is that it lacks intentional content. I think people like art because it is a sort of conversation between the creator and the viewer. It is interesting because it has a consistent perspective. It is possible AI art could one day be indistinguishable but for people to care about it I feel they would need to lie and say it was made b…

[flagged]

Re: AI is different

#546

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

It's becoming a negative label because they aren't as good.

I'm not saying it will happen, but it's possible to imagine a future in which AI videos are generally better, and if that happens, almost by definition, people will favor them (otherwise they aren't "better").

Re: AI is different

#547

Post by Melatonic »

tomrod wrote: post #510
keiferski wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGI is a good analogy because I think AI and creators will probably go in the same direction: You can make a compelling argument that CGI operators outcompeted practical effects operators. But CGI didn’t somehow replace the need for a filmmaker, scriptwriter, cinematographers, etc. entirely – it just changed the skillset. AI will probably be the same thing. It’s not going to replace the actual job of YouTuber in a me…

I think they are evolving differently. Some very old cgi holds up because they invested a lot of money to make it so. Then they tried to make it cheaper and people started complaining because the output was worse than all prior options.

Jurassic Park is a great example - they also had excellent compositing to hide any flaws (compositing never gets mentioned in casual CGI talk but is one of the most important steps)

The dinosaurs were also animated by oldschool stop motion animators who were very, very good at their jobs. Another very underrated part of the VFX pipeline.

Doesnt matter how nice your 3D modelling and texturing are if the above two are skimped on !

Re: AI is different

#548

Post by sebmellen »

hashmush wrote: post #360
sebmellen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense, LLMs emergently figured out the deep structure of language before we did, and that’s the most remarkable thing about them.

I dunno, it seems you have figured it out too, probably before LLMs? I'd say all speakers of all languages have figured it out and your statement is quite confusing, at least to me.

Yes of course we’ve implicitly learned those rules, but we have not been able to articulate them fully ala Chomsky.

Somehow, LLMs have those rules stored within a finite set of weights.

https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-w...

Re: AI is different

#549

Post by morsecodist »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #545
morsecodist wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that it is because of the "quality" of the video. The issue with AI art is that it lacks intentional content. I think people like art because it is a sort of conversation between the creator and the viewer. It is interesting because it has a consistent perspective. It is possible AI art could one day be indistinguishable but for people to care about it I feel they would need to lie and say it was made b…

[flagged]

I honestly can't tell if you're being facetious. Maybe I suck at writing and don't properly understand sarcasm but unfortunately I'm only human.

Re: AI is different

#550

Post by techpineapple »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #546
keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

It's becoming a negative label because they aren't as good. I'm not saying it will happen, but it's possible to imagine a future in which AI videos are generally better, and if that happens, almost by definition, people will favor them (otherwise they aren't "better").

I mean, I can imagine any future, but the problem with “created by AI” is that because it’s relatively inexpensive, it seems like it will necessarily become noise rather than signal, if a person could pop out a high quality video in a day, in which case signal will revert to the celebrity that is marketing it rather than the video itself.
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