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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#551

Post by slashdave »

dotnet00 wrote: post #469
noobermin wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're writing, how are you "missing out" if you're not using chatgpt??? I don't even understand how this can be unless what you're writing is already unnecessary such that you shouldn't need to write it in the first place.

LLMs are surprisingly capable editors/brainstorming tools. So, you're missing out in that you're being less efficient in editing. Like, you can write a bunch of text, then ask an LLM to improve it with minimal changes. Then, you read through its output and pick out the improvements you like.

And I the only one who doesn't even like automatic grammar checkers, because they are contributing to a single and uniformly bland style of writing? LLMs are just going to make this worse.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#552

Post by notarobot123 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #232
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it). I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence. But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, fo…

I have my reservations about AI but it's hard not to notice that LLMs are effectively a Gutenberg level event in the history of written communication. They mark a fundamental shift in our capacity to produce persuasive text.

The ability to speak the same language or understand cultural norms are no longer barriers to publishing pretty much anything. You don't have to understand a topic or the jargon of any given domain. You don't have to learn the expected style or conventions an author might normally use in that context. You just have to know how to write a good prompt.

There's bound to be a significant increase in the quantity as well as the quality of untrustworthy published text because of these new capacities to produce it. It's not the phenomenon but the scale of production that changes the game here.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#553

Post by easterncalculus »

DrillShopper wrote: post #508
edavison1 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output. At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of…

Exactly. Also, if the past few years is any indication, at the very least tech journalists in general tend to love to use what they hate.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#554

Post by vouaobrasil »

munksbeer wrote: post #517
vouaobrasil wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree with that. People are so busy hoping things will get better, and creating little bubbles for themselves to hide away from what human beings as a whole are doing, that they don't realize things are getting worse. Technology constantly makes things worse. Cheering up is a good self-help strategy but not a good strategy if you want to contribute to making the world actually a better place.

>Technology constantly makes things worse. And it also makes things a lot better. Overall we lead better lives than people just 50 years ago, never mind centuries.

No way. Life 50 years ago was better for MANY. Maybe that would be true for 200. But 50 years ago was the 70s. There were far fewer people, and the world was not starting to suffer from climate change. Tell your statement to any climate refugee, and ask them whether they'd like to live now or back then.

AND, we had fewer computers and life was not so hectic. YES, some things have gotten better, but on average? It's arguable.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#555

Post by failbuffer »

llm_trw wrote: post #435
rich_sasha wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course…

>That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics. To quote someone about this: >>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life. A book looking legit, a paper being peer reviewed, an expert saying something, none of those things were _ever_ good heuristics. It's just that it was the done thing. Now we have to…

Heuristics don't have to be perfect to be useful so long as they improve the efficacy of our attentions. Once that breaks down society must follow because thinking about every topic is intractable.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#556

Post by visarga »

> I’m pretty sure that there are some areas where applying AI might be useful.

How polite, everyone is sure AI might be useful in other fields just not their own.

> people are scared that AI is going to take their jobs

Can't be both true - AI being not really useful, and AI taking our jobs.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#557

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

wickedsight wrote: post #312
DanHulton wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner. You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about…

You and I seem to live in very different worlds. The one I live and work in is full of over confident devs that have no actual IT education and mostly just copy and modify what they find on the internet. The average level of IT people I see daily is down right shocking and I'm quite confident that OP's workflow might be better for these people in the long run.

It's going to be very funny in the next few years when Accenture et al charge the government billions for a simple Java crud website thing that's entirely GPT-generated, and it'll still take 3 years and not be functional. Ironically, it'll be of better quality then they'd deliver otherwise.

This is probably already happening.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#558

Post by 1dom »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478
Roark66 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their pr…

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

I like this take on modern tech motivations.

The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irrefutably fast and effective at (e.g. writing tests).

I do agree with the missing substance with modern generative AI: everyone notices when it's producing things in that uncanny valley, and if no human is there to edit that, it makes people uncomfortable.

The only way I can reconcile the almost existential discomfort of AI against my actual day-to-day generally-positive experience with AI is to accept that AI in itself isn't the problem. Ultimately, it is an info tool, and human nature makes people spam garbage for clicks with it.

People will do the equivalent of spam garbage for clicks with any new modern thing, unfortunately.

Getting the most out of latest information of a society has probably always been a cat and mouse game of trying to find the areas where the spam-garbage-for-clicks people haven't outnumbered use-AI-to-facilitate-substance people, like here, hopefully.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#559

Post by throwaway123198 »

I'm bored of IT. Software is boring, AI included. None of this feels like progress. We've automated away white collar work...but we also acknowledge most white collar work is busy work that's considered a bullcr*p job. We need to get back to innovation in manufacturing, materials etc. i.e. the real world.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#560

Post by nils-m-holm »

low_tech_love wrote: post #539
nils-m-holm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a…

Amazing! Do you feel any pressure from your environment? And are you self-funded? I am also thinking about starting my first book.

What I write is pretty niche anyway (compilers, LISP, buddhism, advaita), so I do not think AI will cause much trouble. Google ranking small websites into oblivion, though, I do notice that!
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