Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

aphyr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 177 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#71

Post by groundzeros2015 »

api wrote: post #59
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized This is exactly how we got here though. Technology is not passive. It changes incentives, procedures, ideas and shapes the world. If we don't structurally limit what and how it's used, then we are not in control, no matter what are choices personally are.

A major problem is that if we structurally limit what technologies do, we are still not in control. Now whoever we empowered to control and limit the technology is in control. Who keeps them accountable? You’ll probably get one of three outcomes: regulatory capture by monopolies, self dealing by bureaucrats to enrich themselves or gain power, or regulatory capture by self absorbed ideologues who halt all progress or…

I don’t disagree. A consumer oriented democracy is not well equipped for the challenge.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#72

Post by slopinthebag »

_doctor_love wrote: post #62

I've been enjoying these articles by 'aphyr and I think they raise important points. Primarily though, they read to me as polemics of a curiously American nature. The pattern goes something like this: - this development is bad - companies will be unrestrained in their use of this development - there will be no rules so they can do whatever they want - we are all fucked as a result But then...propose that we make some…

What regulations would you suggest?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#73

Post by bluefirebrand »

petermcneeley wrote: post #11

> Since LLMs are unpredictable and vulnerable to injection attacks, customer service machines must also have limited power Haha yes. I interacted with a bank one. It was like press 5 for mortgages but with a text to speech front end. At the end of the day the LLM can be tricked into doing anything.

I wonder if there's also less of a stigma and sense of wrongdoing about tricking an LLM versus tricking an employee

We intuitively know that an employee will be punished and may get fired if we trick them. Many of us won't try to trick human employees as a result, because we would feel bad if they had bad consequences as a result of our trickery

There is likely no such hesitation around tricking LLMs. I know I personally wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Mostly because any computerized customer service process is annoying so anything I can do to limit my time dealing with it is a win in my books

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#74

Post by mentalgear »

Leomuck wrote: post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

> Time to organize around groups and collectives that we know we can trust

I’ve had the same thoughts, but if you look deeper, it all circles back to what we already had: (open, transparent) public institutions, society, and government by the people. The foundation wasn't the problem; the environment was.

Along the way, social media noise, engagement-optimisation and Kardashian-style "entertainment news" infecting real news made an attention economy where, no matter how scandalous you are, attention can be minted into dollars. That is what polluted our infosphere and lead to the lack of trust.

Now, nobody trusts these previously mentioned public entities any more - sometimes due to state-actor or ad-tech disinformation, and sometimes for good reason like when the poisoned public allowed these 80s-style telemarketer-style political weirdos and their cronies to take over public administration.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#75

Post by drzaiusx11 »

Leomuck wrote: post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

The majority of human history has been written by the ruling class of the day. Transparency only seems to follow in the wake of their inevitable fall, usually at great cost in retrospective research via the oft thankless unraveling of threads of truth from their more copious fictions. Much like the machines we construct in our likeness, we too seem to get stuck in endless regressive cycles.

Folks in the "now" have always had a tendency to cling to their fictions as if they were truth for whatever reason; like nationalist exceptionalism, racial superiority, or religions rooted in "othering", etc. Humans seem to have an innate desire to fool themselves and trust in things they should not. Perhaps it's simply a sort of existential coping mechanism of living in a cold, unforgiving reality. We seek the comfort of lies.

Organizing around groups of trust, tends to lead to factionalism and conflicts. Knowing and trusting are sadly very different things in our species.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#76

Post by Scholmo »

layer8 wrote: post #64
Scholmo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to add any argument so we can discuss this? I mean, did you not write with ChatGPT and were surprised how well it response? I'm schocked how well i can talk to an AI through some app like Gemini or ChatGTP. A few years ago i couldn't imagine building such a generic system which such high quality of understanding. I was playing around with dragon naturally speaking and similiar dictation tools 10 years ago…

Not the OP, but you wrote “LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human”. That’s a specific and very encompassing claim. I can only think of very simplistic systems (like a microwave oven maybe) where a current LLM could function perfectly as the sole command interface, much less when LLMs first became available. For systems of any significant complexity, it tends to turn into…

It was a significant jump from whatever we had before to a quality unseen before. As i mentioned, i threw english and german at it.

How many people can change the time on their microwave?

How many people can ask an LLM through voice or text to change the time of the microwave?

A LLM is an interface to a service if you add a MCP Server. Now i can ask Jira things like "hey whats my current task? And what do i need to do?"

Its also an interface to documentation. I asked it to help me build up a hugo templating based website because just reading the hugo docs did not help me as much as the LLM did (and that was 2 years ago).

In best case, as long as an LLM is not AGI or ASI, we have good tools with validation behind the LLMs before the LLM becomes the system itself.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#77

Post by intended »

Leomuck wrote: post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

Our society, pre internet, built systems to manage trust. The conditions that allowed those systems to exist (the speed of transmission of data, the ratio of content generation to verification, the ability to shape consensus), have changed.

You are ringing the clarion call for community and cooperation, and it will not work. Not because people don’t want community or the better things, but because incentives make the world go round.

The choice between making some money at the cost of polluting the information commons is no choice at all. That degradation of the commons means no one can escape. No community you form, no group you build, dodges the fallout when someone decides to set fire to shared infrastructure.

We are moving into the dark forest era of the information economy. As models improve, inference costs drop, and capacity increases, the primary organism creating content online will be the bot.

Instead of building communities of people, build collections based on rules of engagement. Participants - be it bots or humans - must follow proscribed rules of conflict and debate.

That way it doesn’t matter if you are talking to a machine or a person. All that matters is that the rules were followed.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#78

Post by intended »

_doctor_love wrote: post #62

I've been enjoying these articles by 'aphyr and I think they raise important points. Primarily though, they read to me as polemics of a curiously American nature. The pattern goes something like this: - this development is bad - companies will be unrestrained in their use of this development - there will be no rules so they can do whatever they want - we are all fucked as a result But then...propose that we make some…

I’d andd another layer - for American tech workers, regulation also reduces profits. This hurts salaries, stocks options and career growth.

Incentives make the world go round, so even if people recognize the issue, they would rather it become someone else’s problem, than willingly harm their own future.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#79

Post by intended »

kevg123 wrote: post #22

I sent the entire series by Aphyr [1] to some friends. Two of them, independently, responded with a variant of, "TLDR, can you give a summary?" I chat with these friends a lot but I rarely send articles that I suggest they read and that I think are profound, so I expected them to read it. These are smart people that have a history of reading lots of books. They are both huge AI proponents now and use AI for nearly ev…

MIT actually has a paper on how ChatGPT use impacted cognitive skills for essay writing.

> Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

> Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. …

> Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#80

Post by intended »

KronisLV wrote: post #10

> ML models will hurt innocent people. Lots of blaming LLMs but I think the root cause lies elsewhere, I’m not even sure whether dismissing it as “capitalism” or “profit motives” would do it justice, because in general it feels more like the world that we live in lacks humanity . Even in a capitalist world, a company could take a stance and decide not to purposefully screw people over, but in the world that we live i…

The articles didn’t blame LLMs, they talked about how they would get used, precisely through the lens of systems, incentives and culture.
Post reply on HN