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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#61

Post by krapp »

raincole wrote: post #43
krapp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies? And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free? That's not ho…

No? It's exactly how everything worked so far. Live performance (orchestra and operas) were for rich only. Beautiful paintings were for the noble and churches. Porcelain was something needed to be imported from another continent. Tropical fruits were so expensive that people rented them. Now we have the affordable versions of them for everyone in developed countries, and the middle class in developing ones. Yes, ofte…

You're comparing the value of AI versus a human being with the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a medical degree to the value of hearing Mozart live or seeing the Mona Lisa in person to Youtube and JPEGs, as an argument in favor of AI?

>but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing.

Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history.

Re: AI Crap

#62

Post by krapp »

dagw wrote: post #51
evrimoztamur wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.

Re: AI Crap

#63

Post by nkrisc »

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…

> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on

I’m imagining world where companies like Netflix and Spotify introduce dirt-cheap subscription tiers that are populate with AI generated content, while they raise the prices on their existing offerings that have stuff made by humans.

If you’re poor you watch shitty, AI-generated movies on Netflix for $1.50/mo.

Re: AI Crap

#64

Post by supriyo-biswas »

fineline wrote: post #57
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?

Not everyone has the grit to hold up to the customer retention tactics that companies use once they learn you’re leaving. Offering a short term discount or a last-ditch attempt to look into the customer’s otherwise long neglected issue costs much less and retains most customers out there.

Re: AI Crap

#65

Post by mnd999 »

digitcatphd wrote: post #15

It’s pretty astonishing how rapidly everyone in the world went from ‘sky net’ to laughable garbage in a matter of a few months.

I’ve been on laughable garbage from day 1. Drew is spot on here.

Re: AI Crap

#66

Post by myrmidon »

squarefoot wrote: post #26
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 for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

I understood the "for free" as "with very low marginal cost"-- and no matter how you socialize healthcare/education, that's not something that humans can match.

Re: AI Crap

#67

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

I don’t fully get this meme. AI isn’t dangerous because (litany of terrible effects goes here). This is the tech equivalent of “ignore global warming; bad weather is dangerous now”. Every problem in scope now was science fiction three years ago. To say confidently that an intelligent computer virus is off the table is already presumptuous but to offer a litany of other AI dangers as your evidence is just weird.

Re: AI Crap

#68

Post by lijok »

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…

Accelerate education at unprecedented levels (if we can figure out how to integrate LLMs into the education system).

To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time.

How great is it that if I want to learn about, say, hexagonal architecture pattern, I can ask this thing to produce 500 LOC in a language I happen to be familiar with, and then interrogate it to no end until it clicks for me?

Re: AI Crap

#69

Post by bArray »

I think that much of what is addressed here will not entirely be from AI, but may in the future be misattributed to it because the curves appear to line up. Don't forget that wage increases have been stagnant for a long time, and that inflation is always growing - we never see deflation in the so-called 'good times' [+].

The climate change movement for example is ultimately a movement to reduce the resource usage of the working class. Reduced resource usage should in theory lead to a reduction in economic growth - but it hasn't. This is because they simply attained their growth through other means - reduced salary (adjusted for inflation), larger tax, shrink-flation (selling something smaller at the same price), etc. They will always post record profits to appease investors, and that growth will directly come from your pockets.

AI is probably the only thing slowing this down, and it likely is a bubble. When it bursts, do you think these companies will go back to employing humans for customer services? Like hell they will, you just won't get any customer support at all. You may say "fine, I'll take my money elsewhere", but you'll find yourself picking the lesser of evils [++]. Anybody who tries to offer human interaction will simply not be competitive on price, and people are relatively poorer than they were - so they have no choice. It's not as if you can go without water, gas, electric, phone, phone provider, ISP, etc.

[+] The coming economic recession will also not be enough to reset this trend, and there is no political will to address it.

[++] The government may mandate that these companies have human operators, but it won't work, they'll just maliciously comply. One human operator, a call queue of thousands of people, "our lines are unusually busy at the moment", outsource the humans to the current poorest Country and give them zero power to deal with customer queries, etc. It would be exceptionally difficult to prove they are not providing a good service, and at worst they fine them - which might still work out cheaper than dealing with customer queries.

Re: AI Crap

#70

Post by RecycledEle »

nkrisc wrote: post #63
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…

> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on I’m imagining world where companies like Netflix and Spotify introduce dirt-cheap subscription tiers that are populate with AI generated content,…

Why would the poor not be able to afford human generated content? Copying human generated context costs basically nothing, so the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.
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