Live data from Hacker News

AI Crap

drewdevault.com

91–100 of 260 posts

Re: AI Crap

#91

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 think what people were tuning into more so than “how good are the models” was “how quickly are the models getting better?”

The jumps from ~nothing general purpose/consumer-facing to GPT3, 3.5, Copilot, GPT4 all seemed enormous and pretty much back-to-back. Extending that curve points to some pretty extreme destinations (positive or negative), but now the sentiment seems to be that curve was a bit of a mirage.

I intuitively share the view that that curve was a mirage (and a byproduct of years of R&D backlog + OpenAI’s release cadence) but that isn’t coming from any rigorous analysis.

Re: AI Crap

#92
post #32

Not sure about creativity. But. Previously, I had to deal with "Junior python" or "Junior bash" crap at $work. Finding the dangerous bugs, was measured in seconds. Helping the person to be better in the future, used to work. Now, all the company is requesting code to ChatGPT. Hey, please, use my script. I have to deal with "looks fine at first/quick view" code, that needs deep analysis to understand what it's trying…

While I sympathize with your point, I found this passage funny:

> code, that needs deep analysis to understand what it's trying to do

Because if there's on thing AI can already do really well, it's explaining what some code is doing.

Re: AI Crap

#93
post #39
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.

> Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved.

I'd like a little more background on that claim.

As far as I've been able to tell from my understanding of LLMs, everything they create is a hallucination. It's just a case of "text that could plausibly come next based on the patterns of language they were trained on". When an LLM gets stuff correct, that doesn't make it not a hallucination, it's just that enough correct stuff was in the training data that a fair amount of hallucinations will turn out to be correct. Meanwhile, the LLM has no concept of "true" or "false" or "reality" or "fiction".

There's no meta-cognition. It's just "what word probably comes next?" How is that just "an engineering problem [that] can be solved"?

Re: AI Crap

#94
post #39
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.

That's what happened with the internet, which was supposed to be the new Library of Alexandria, educating the world, liberating the masses from the grip of corporate ownership of data and government surveillance, and enabling free global communication and publishing.

It's almost entirely shit now. Instead of being educated, people are manipulated into bubbles of paranoid delusion and unreality, fed by memes and disinformation. Instead of liberation from corporate ownership, everything is infested with dark patterns, data mining, advertising, DRM and subscriptions. You will own nothing and be happy. Instead of liberation from government, the internet has become a platform for government surveillance, propaganda and psyops. Everyone used to have personal webpages and blogs, now everything is siloed into algorithmically-driven social media silos, gatekeeping content unless it drives addiction, parasociality or clickbait. What little that remains on the internet that's even worth anyone's time is all but impossible to find, and will eventually succumb to the cancer in due time.

LLMs will go the same way, because there is no other way for technology to go. Everything will be corrupted by the capitalist imperative, everything will be debased by the tragedy of the commons, every app, service and cool new thing will claw its way down the lobster bucket of society, across our beaten and scarred backs, to find the bottom common denominator of value and suck the marrow its bones.

But at least I'll be able to run it on a cellphone. Score for progress?

Re: AI Crap

#95
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yes.

as a musician, did you ever stop to consider the ethical implications of the emissions created by your particular frivolous hobby?

Re: AI Crap

#96
Like social media ruined the world despite it's initial promises, like crypto ended up with grifters of all kinds, AI will follow.

Yes, there are some narrow applications that will be GOOD. But will the good outweigh the bad? No, not at all. It never has.

We'd all be happier as a society if we went back in time.

Re: AI Crap

#97
> SEO hacking content farms dominating search results

It seems like LLMs are destroying traditional search engines (Google) much faster than they are enabling new ones (Bing + GPT).

Are we going to enter a dark age of search where the signal is drowned out by the noise for a few years? SEO blogspam was bad enough when humans had to write it, now it's becoming impossible to avoid.

Re: AI Crap

#98

I wonder how many people would just stop using the internet (or use it in a very limited fashion) because of the explosion of LLM generated content. On a similar note, I watch little TV because of the exact same reason, because I have little control over what I want to see and most of the interesting stuff that I may want to watch may be spread across different channels and broadcasted at nearly the same time. Perhap…

I have decision paralysis and therefore I can only watch TV. Many of my friends think how can I watch TV when I don't even know the local language and I have no control over it, but its still less stress free for me since I can't navigate through the mazes built by Youtube & Netflix

Re: AI Crap

#99
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You say that like humans don't err, either though malice or madness or mistake.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766403612/doctor-gets-40-year...

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/18/us/virginia-former-ob-gyn...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/22/lucy-letby-w...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

Re: AI Crap

#100
post #83
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs. A world that produces enough skilled human doctors to meet everyones needs is even more science fiction than a world with skilled AI doctors.

The richest countries in the world choose not to produce enough competent doctors because of capitalist incentives, not because it's actually impossible.
Post reply on HN