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Please stop the AI confidence theater

elenaverna.com

91–100 of 282 posts

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#91
post #80
post #36

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis. A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code. The psychology b…

That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work. Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.

The problem is that these people are left untreated because that is what people at power can exploit.

This is social collapse.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#92

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.

The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.

I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.

Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#93

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

I think this is very domain-specific.

FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.

LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#94
post #14

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then market…

It’s the old lifecycle of a scene. 1) cool people do cool things, start a scene 2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word 3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass 4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers. 5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad ex…

Burning Man?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#95
post #14

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then market…

Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#96
Ok I'll take the bait.

> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day.

Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one.

Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later:

> And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.

AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#98
post #14

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then market…

The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation

I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#100
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of…

Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.

Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...

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