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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#71

Post by supriyo-biswas »

funerr wrote: post #8
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…

There are too many variables to predict the future. Yet, I believe that it will empower more 1-3 person businesses to compete with the big incumbents. Imagine you could run teams of marketing/sales/support ai-agents and focus on your core business. "The next 1B, 1 Person companies". Just 15 years ago you'd need teams of 10+ people to do basic ml tasks you could do today. Now you have an LLM or a SaaS service that out…

I expect such gradients to be temporary. After all, there’s nothing that stops the 100,000 person mega corp to do something with an LLM either.

Re: AI Crap

#72

Post by ben_w »

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…

> The logical conclusion of perfect sensors and tensors is not here, and the lacking substitutes along the way will be profit-driven, not solution-driven.

Quite possibly both; governments only switched to universal education instead of having 12 year olds in factories because it was good for the economy, even if some of the lessons are supposed to be good for the (for lack of a better term) "soul".

Re: AI Crap

#73

Post by lijok »

dools wrote: post #21

> Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you When I read things like this it makes me think the author hasn't used ChatGPT in their job yet. Here is a really simple example of how I used ChatGPT this afternoon that saved me, I would estimate, about 2 hou…

I stopped writing tests a while ago. I define the protocol, ask ChatGPT to implement it using some tech, feed that back in and ask it to write tests for it.

The implementation always needs massaging before, but the tests are almost always great, albeit it likes to produce pointless ones sometimes.

Re: AI Crap

#74

Post by ben_w »

krapp wrote: post #62
dagw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By itself it's an argument for both; the argument for "we can't have more doctors" is "we want some of those people to do other things besides doctoring".

Re: AI Crap

#75

Post by zyuiop »

Jack000 wrote: post #39
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…

> what will LLMs ever do for us? Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.

Are they not an inherent problem with the LLM technology?

Re: AI Crap

#76

Post by andai »

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…

>bias towards speaking to a human on the phone

Hatred of phone calls aside, I heard an interesting take from Alex Hormozi (paraphrased): "You're on the phone and you say, are you human? No? Oh thank God, because you know the AI has a thousand times more experience than all the humans combined."

Re: AI Crap

#77

Post by RecycledEle »

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…

The good AI can do for humanity is increasing our productivity.

It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible.

Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work.

Humanity gain the productivity of that other work.

If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we were at the time of the American Revolution in the 1770's.

If you oppose progress due to the job losses, please at least be consistent and become a subsistence farmer.

Re: AI Crap

#78

Post by lordnacho »

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,…

Well let's hope that's the worst effect.

I'm seeing a world where kids are put in a room with an AI that "educates" them, setting the lowest possible bar for personal development for your average kid and as quickly as possible expelling kids who are deemed to be a problem.

Having real teachers will be a luxury.

Re: AI Crap

#79

Post by andai »

dools wrote: post #28
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 Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.

I submitted a bug yesterday and got an automated response asking if I'd tried turning it off and on again... now that's not AI but I thought it was funny.

I asked it to forward my email to their devs, human or not ;)

Re: AI Crap

#80

Post by lijok »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #9
hoseja wrote: post #6

>...AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale... Oh come on.

just a typical degrowther take downvoters: is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?

> is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?

Quite literally yes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

The reason most people don't think so is because human brains are not wired to comprehend the danger that slow buildups of a negative create.

In general, the complete waste developers have been creating by allowing themselves to build extremely inefficient systems because moore's law, has been unethical.

Imagine if the single goal of car manufacturers became to create faster and faster consumer cars with higher and higher co2 emissions, even thought those cars sit in a parking lot 95% of the time and when in use are never exercised to their potential.

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