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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#731

Post by smm11 »

koliber wrote: post #45

I am approaching AI with caution. Shiny things don't generally excite me. Just this week I installed cursor, the AI-assisted VSCode-like IDE. I am working on a side project and decided to give it a try. I am blown away. I can describe the feature I want built, and it generates changes and additions that get me 90% there, within 15 or so seconds. I take those changes, and carefully review them, as if I was doing a cod…

I was in the newspaper field a year or two before desktop publishing took off, then a few years into that evolution. Rooms full of people and Linotype/Compugraphic equipment were replaced by one Mac and a printer.

I shot film cameras for years, and we had a darkroom, darkroom staff, and a film/proofsheet/print workflow. One digital camera later and that was all gone.

Before me publications were produced with hot lead.

Get off my lawn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#732

Post by lurking_swe »

nils-m-holm wrote: post #150
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…

> 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…

do you see any benefits to using AI to check your book for typos, grammatical issues, or even just general “feedback” prior to publishing?

Seems like there are uses for AI other than “please write it all for me”, no?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#733

Post by lurking_swe »

edavison1 wrote: post #502
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…

>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.

i regularly (at least once a week) spot a typo or grammatical issue in a major news story. I see it in the NYTimes on occasion. I see it in local news ALL THE TIME. I swear an LLM would write better than have the idiots that are cranking out articles.

I agree with you that having elite writing skills will be useful for a long time. But the bar for proof reading seems to be quite low on average in the industry. I think you overestimate the writings skills of your average journalist.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#734

Post by lurking_swe »

DanHulton wrote: post #215
koliber wrote: post #45

I am approaching AI with caution. Shiny things don't generally excite me. Just this week I installed cursor, the AI-assisted VSCode-like IDE. I am working on a side project and decided to give it a try. I am blown away. I can describe the feature I want built, and it generates changes and additions that get me 90% there, within 15 or so seconds. I take those changes, and carefully review them, as if I was doing a cod…

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…

nothing prevents you from asking an LLM to explain a snippet of code. And then ask it to explain deeper. And then finally doing some quick googling to validate the answers seem correct.

Blindly accepting code used to happen all the time, people copy pasted from stack overflow.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#735

Post by palata »

movedx wrote: post #383
palata wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a good point. I'm curious to see if people will keep making selfies everywhere they go after they realize that you can take a selfie at home and have an AI create an image that looks like you are somewhere else. "This is me in front of the Statue of Liberty - Oh, are you in NYC? - Nope, it's a snap filter" Somehow selfies should lose value, right?

A selfie is meant to tell us, your audience, a story about you and the journey you’re on. Selfies are a great tool for telling stories, in fact. One selfie can say a thousand words, and then some. But a selfie taken and then modified to lie to the audience about your story or your journey is simply a fiction. People create fictions to either lie to themselves or to lie to others. Sometimes they’re not about lying to…

But then if instead of spending 20min taking pictures in front of the Mona Lisa to take the perfect selfie you can actually visit the museum and have an AI generate selfies that tell the story of your visit, will you still care to take them "manually" (with all the filters that still count as "manual")?

That's what I was thinking: if you spend hours taking selfies during your weekend, and during this time I just enjoy my time and have an AI generate better selfies of myself. What will you do?

And then when everybody just has an AI generate their story for them, so you know that all the pictures you see are synthesized. Will you care about watching them or will you rather use an app that likes the autogenerated selfies that make sense to you?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#736

Post by bongodongobob »

Gigachad wrote: post #142
thewarrior wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s writing most of my code now. Even if it’s existing code you can feed in the 1-2 files in question and iterate on them. Works quite well as long as you break it down a bit. It’s not gas lighting the latest versions of GPT, Claude, Lama have gotten quite good

These tools must be absolutely massively better than whatever Microsoft has then because I’ve found that GitHub copilot provides negative value, I’d be more productive just turning it off rather than auditing it’s incorrect answers hoping one day it’s as good as people market it as.

My employer blocks ChatGPT at work and we are forced to use Copilot. It's trash. I use Google docs to communicate with GPT on my personal device. GPT is so much better. Copilot reminds me of GPT3. Plausible, but wrong all the time. GPT 4o and o1 are pretty much bang on most of the time.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#737

Post by COAGULOPATH »

spencerchubb wrote: post #682
Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential

In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped.

We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opus, Llama 3.1 405B, GPT4) are nowhere near the top. (Yes, I know Gemma is a pruned Gemini). Fine-tuning > model size, which implies we don't have a path to "superhuman" creative writing (if that even exists). Unlike model size, fine-tuning can't be scaled indefinitely: once you've squeezed all the juice out of a model, what then?

OpenAI's new o1 model exhibits amazing progress in reasoning, math, and coding. Yet its writing is worse than GPT4-o's (as backed by EQBench and OpenAI's own research).

I'd also mention political persuasion (since people seem concerned about LLM-generated propaganda). In June, some researchers tested LLM ability to change the minds of human subjects on issues like privatization and assisted suicide. Tiny models are unpersuasive, as expected. But once a model is large enough to generate coherent sentences, persuasiveness kinda...stops. All large models are about equally persuasive. No runaway scaling laws are evident here.

This picture is uncertain due to instruction tuning. We don't really know what abilities LLMs "truly" possess, because they've been crippled to act as harmless, helpful chatbots. But we now have an open-source GPT-4-sized pretrained model to play with (Llama-3.1 405B base). People are doing interesting things with it, but it's not setting the world on fire.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#738

Post by jwuice »

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 would change to: if you do ANYTHING online and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. you're out.

it's depressing.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#739

Post by citizenpaul »

cubefox wrote: post #250

I'm not tired, I'm afraid. First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment. In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. But superhuman AI seems now only few years away. It will be our last invention, it will mean total automation. There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. Many countries will likely move away from a job-based market…

>technological unemployment.

I am too but not for the same reason. I know for a fact that a huge swath of jobs are basically meaningless. This "AI" is going to start giving execs the cost cutting excuses they need to mass remove jobs of that type. The job will still be meaningless but done but by a computer.

We will start seeing all kinds of disastrously anti-human decisions made and justified by these automated actors that are tuned to decide or "prove" things that just happen to always make certain people more money. Basically the same way "AI" destroys social media. The difference is people will really be affected by this in consequential real world ways, it's already happening.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#740

Post by paulcole »

> AI’s carbon footprint is reaching more alarming levels every day

It really really really really isn’t.

I love how people use this argument for anything they don’t like – crypto, Taylor Swift, AI, etc.

Everybody in the developed world’s carbon footprint is disgusting! Even yours. Even mine. Yes, somebody else is worse than me and somebody else is worse than you, but we’re all still awful.

So calling out somebody else’s carbon footprint is the most eye-rolling “argument” I can imagine.

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