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AI Is a Waste of Time
- lucideer 3y agoExtremely obvious & predictable clickbait - a little surprising coming from The Atlantic tbh.
- adamnemecek 3y agoAI is gunning after their jobs, so predictable.
- philll 3y agoI typically enjoy reading Derek's content. Surprised he wrote this.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoI’m surprised that you find it surprising. There’s a Twitter account called The Pacific that exists for the sole purpose of mocking the kind of articles that The Atlantic publishes. Awhile back one of their reporters blocked me on Twitter for mildly questioning the government’s narrative around a political event.
- lucideer 3y agoTheir content may be questionable &/or formulaic but I wouldn't've thought they were known explicitly for clickbait.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoFair enough
- rebeccaskinner 3y agoPlay is a path to discovery. There's a lot of hype and vaporware in AI these days. There's also some real value there, but I'm not sure we've really figured out what the real value propositions are. I strongly suspect the inherent limitations in AI means that many of the current applications are doomed to failure. Playing with AI will give people a better internalized sense of the strengths and weaknesses, and it will do that broadly in ways that will let more people with more problems recognize when these tools can actually help them. The real problem we have today is that most people just don't really have a good intuition for that.
- prox 3y agoUnfortunately what we see so often is that a lot of money is being poured into something that is just a sinkhole. Take NFTs for instance. People get swept up by fads far easier than by genuine improvements. I am actually in favor of a global debate on AI at this point, probably led by the UN so to reach as much nations as possible. Because we already know this is going to be needed as the year rolls on. Because the ball is moving fast.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoCrypto saw a very slow reaction, and you'd think something that might disrupt the global financial system would be a big deal. Why would their response to AI be any different?
- prox 3y agoIt is one of those crystal ball moments, nobody really knows what impact it’s going to have and at what speed. Will my job (frontend dev) be gone by years end? Maybe, maybe not. But if the numbers do get scary, I think we do need to have a collective sit down as societies come under stress of job loss.
- cookingrobot 3y agoI’d say approximately nobody believed NFTs had any value or invested any money. AI seems quite different.
- endisneigh 3y agothat's definitely not true. Unstoppable raised like 70 million and that was a single company.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoPlenty of people thought they did, esp. hucksters and rubes. There is a use for NFTs, and I could see implementations being a thing in industries like title insurance and deeds. But as it stands, right now it's mostly bag holders and money laundering.
- dpflan 3y agoDidn't personal computers in general began as toys for hobbyists? Look where that got us...
- Jtsummers 3y agoOne of the topics of the article (though he doesn't mention PCs themselves, but other technologies). > In 1994, the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer studied how various 20th-century technologies had spread among households. They concluded that “time using” technologies (for example, TV and radio) diffused faster than “time saving” technologies (vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines).
- cloudking 3y agoWhat is a business problem you solved with LLMs that you couldn't solve as efficiently without them?
- thomasahle 3y agoCustomer support.
- endisneigh 3y agodo you have an example? from my experience most customers support related issues are self inflicted (e.g. not allowing the customer to self service all tasks and instead gatekeeping it to some support rep) I do not see how a LLM will help in a way that was not achievable before.
- thomasahle 3y agoPrevious chatbots were too dumb to handle said tasks. LLMs may be able to understand the internal APIs and perform the task, without the company having to design a UI for self service.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hammyhavoc 3y agoThis depends on so many variables, including complexity of the average problem, the obscurity of the average problem, having documentation or a knowledgebase with a known solution. ChatGPT hallucinates so many things that don't exist, e.g., buttons or menu options in programs that don't exist, not considering file compatibility issues etc. I could go on for hours. If the average problem is "I got locked out of my account" or basic and common stuff like this that just warrants giving someone a link or telling them to reboot their router, sure, maybe it'll be better than dealing with a human being in x out of y occurrences, hallucination not withstanding. If it's something more complex like needing an NGINX configuration when a company has only ever considered Apache htaccess in the past, the customer is probably seven kinds of fucked. I wasted days trying to get something other than nonsense out of ChatGPT for an NGINX config, even going so far as to feed it documentation and the lines it would need for implementing URL rewrites. It kept hallucinating things that didn't exist in the documentation, and was a complete waste of time. Even after correcting it umpteen times, it still gave the same response. There's no reasoning applied. Is there potential? Sure. But it isn't replacing human beings in a lot of cases. And for even more cases, just using a search function on a knowledgebase or search engine will yield more accurate information than trusting it isn't hallucinating. I have wasted far more time than I've saved due to hallucinations. If all customer support does is search the problem on a knowledgebase, sure, it makes sense, because the support agent is already just doing what the LLM does if they can't apply logic and reasoning to the query. But why not just access the knowledgebase directly and not risk hallucinations?
- ryanklee 3y agoIn the coming months, all these idiotic hot takes are going to get washed away by the raging sea of value transformation that is generative AI. No one will even have the strength to stand up in the surf to blabber on like this. The amount of naive reactive denialism is embarrassing.
- throwawa14223 3y agoThe same people pushing coins are pushing 'AI'.
- Robotbeat 3y agoYou’re over-fitting. Hype maximizers will hype everything, fundamentally useful or not. They are not a discriminating signal for whether or not something is useful.
- brokencode 3y agoI’ve yet to hear a really compelling use case for cryptocurrency that doesn’t seem like it’d be better solved in some other way. It’s incredibly obvious how AI tools can be applied to many different problems. So even if it’s the same people “pushing” both, that doesn’t mean they are the same. These people are tech enthusiasts who want to make money, and they will be excited by any promising new tech.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago>I’ve yet to hear a really compelling use case for cryptocurrency that doesn’t seem like it’d be better solved in some other way. Getting your life savings out of a warzone
- brokencode 3y agoAre there examples where this is possible but other forms of transfer are not possible? From my experience working with crypto exchanges, there are a lot of regulations and processes that make them just as slow as a bank in a pinch. And if your country is war torn, I find it unlikely any exchanges would even operate effectively there. This type of use mostly seems like a crypto bro fantasy to me, but I’d definitely be interested to see some reporting on this actually working.
- TurkishPoptart 3y agoThe Atlantic is a waste of time.
- Rochus 3y agoThis applies to any journalist who reproduces opinions (often his/her own), instead of presenting relevant facts. However, there are good articles and good journalism now and then, even if that seems to be the exception rather than the rule these days.
- bjornlouser 3y ago"As you go through life, take time to monetize the roses." https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/issue-cartoons/cartoons-september-8-2014-issue https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/issue-cartoons/cartoons-s...
- jytechdevops 3y agoI'll save you the time of this garbage hot take. He is saying that AI will produce a lot of content...thus leading to time wasted (memes, funny stuff, lame stuff, pictures, etc). that is all. that's the entire article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- senko 3y agoIt's ironic that a content-free article rails aginst AI because of the potential to generate content-free articles. I guess this one is handcrafted free-range GPT-free 100% authentic human-made and some people may find that important.
- golergka 3y agoI hope you generated this summary via an LLM instead of reading the whole thing yourself.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Julesman 3y agoI sense an agenda in how many empty hit piece stories we are seeing about LLMs from mainstream sources. No not some paranoid lizard people agenda (thank god) but just the force of the status quo protecting itself. Institutions are clearly threatened by this tech as it promises to upend many professional fields and economic relationships. In my case I'm seeing teachers suggest that GPT will ruin education, as though we haven't said the same thing about calculators or the internet or whatever the next thing is for generations. Like many similar articles in the NYT and WaPo this article is nearly anti-intellectual is it's lack of basic research and curiosity. It's like these people haven't used the thing for even a half hour. But yet they speak with authority on the implications. That demonstrates fear or gatekeeping. It demonstrates an interest in slowing down the change we are seeing. And it's pretty embarrassing to watch because you can't really hide that agenda when you don't know what you are talking about and are only coming from a place of defending the status quo. Who buys into this? Who is this for? Who is convinced? They must be talking to people who want this answer and find it comforting. But given that it's not really very insightful or true, and has no shelf life, what's the point? I really wonder.
- version_five 3y agoSeems a lot of people are taking this as some kind of slight against AI. My read was just that the tech has (obviously) a lot of time wasting potential as people play with it and that that's likely to make it more lasting than something purely utilitarian. This checks out to me. The obvious reason current "AI" is so popular is because everyone can play with it and get results they understand. It was a lot less fun doing MNIST classifier tutorials.
- carlosdp 3y agoThe article itself isn't actually dunking on AI, the title is a (kinda clever) clickbait. If you actually read it, the author uses image gen models and such a lot, and is opining on how technology that allows us to tinker and "waste time" can be more impactful than technology that is simply "productive."
- thy77 3y agoWe have a very exciting NFT at inpersona. It mines other coin as it tracks your sleep.