17 ms·

AI Crap

279 points by Jiejeing 3y ago

bArray 3y ago
> What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. I see a lot of people want to blame capitalism, but look at any other system, and ultimately they all fail due to human greed. The only way to make capitalism work correctly is with regulation, because once monopolies and collusions are reached, the natural incentives disappear (i.e. the lowest cost service that delivers what the consumer values). > Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Agreed. You will earn less money (relative to cost of living), tax will increase, but yet people will still pretend your quality of life has increased - but they haven't. Many services you now can't reach a human - at all. Emails have disappeared, phone lines have disappeared - I now have to waste 5 minutes speaking to a chat bot that I know cannot solve my issue for it to maybe allow me to type text to what it claims to be a human. > LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. In a sense, most neural networks can be modelled as some form of Markov Model. What's becoming more obvious is that the structures of these models is super important, and there is still a lot to be learned. > Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains. Cars are a decentralised transport (as much as a transport system can be), whereas a train is a centralised transport system. The internet is also a transport system, but with packets instead of people, and this has had great success with a mixture of centralised and decentralised transport mechanisms. The biggest problem with trains is that you create a single point of failure and an unnatural monopoly. Your bandwidth is also heavily reduced due to safety considerations (you want to travel fast over long distances, but need to increase the safety margin to do so). Unlike cars or internet packets, you can't divert a train. One can imagine a new protest group "just stop energy" (instead of "just stop oil") quite trivially bringing an entire Country to a halt by placing cars on all of the tracks. > AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. Interesting to see that none of the climate activists so far have gone for clear winners like crypto mining, or AI training. Instead they would rather keep making the life of the every-day person miserable, as if it isn't miserable enough already. > You will never trust another product review. You find that people pay for reviews anyway. Somebody I know gets sent Amazon products to review, and they get to keep the products. The more positive reviews you give, the more you get selected for future reviews. The only way around this is reputation - I find somebody you trust who has reviewed a product. It's why Linus Tech Tips (LTT) and the recent review scandal was important - they have a reputation and it does inform consumers about expensive computing equipment investments.
block_dagger 3y ago
A one sided argument with sweeping generalities and something about minorities being killed in the process. Got it.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  Seems we just can't resist hating on anything new, no matter what it is these days. Drew has some good ideas but they're often lost in his reactionary rejection of anything not his narrowly defined vision of UNIXy enough. His inexplicable dislike of containers being just one example. There can be nuance to our view of new things. It's important we stress our ability as humans to think this way. LLMs are not all or nothing good bad polarities. They can be just another tool in your toolset. And that's fine. No hatred required.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    Surely you mean "Plan9y enough". https://drewdevault.com/2022/11/12/In-praise-of-Plan-9.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/11/12/In-praise-of-Plan-9.html shows how he prefers Plan 9 over Unix. I think he doesn't like the way Unix containers are done, preferring other ways to get them. From that URL: > Recall that everything really is just a file on Plan 9, unlike Unix. Access to the hardware is provided through normal files, and per-process namespaces do not require special permissions to modify mountpoints. Making a container is thus trivial: just unmount all of the hardware you don’t want the sandboxed program to have access to. Done. You don’t even have to be root. Where does he express a dislike for the concept of containers? After all, he's working on a new microkernel OS, with a permissions model that seem designed to make containers easy to implement.
  - eletrotupi 3y ago
    Yeah, but they are not being stressed enough or considered at a greater level. The same can be said with stuff such as Global Warming for instance, whereas every other company knows that stuff they're doing is terrible, but don't give a shit and we continue to follow as if nothing is going on. AI >right now< is not doing anything specifically dangerous, BUT people adding that "tool to their toolset" is not us, mere mortals but people who intend to use AI in crappier ways. Thinking about those things is not "shitting on anything new" but to think critically about stuff.
noobermin 3y ago
Drew DeVault confirmed Urbanist Bro Completely unserious comment but I enjoy the Alan Fisher reference, it's funny seeing my online spheres intersect. EDIT: serious comment. The whole post is a bit of a doomer one, the thing is in the maximalist bad world that Drew DeVault poses, human interaction (customer support, human written articles and opinions) becomes a premium, meaning the pendulum will swing as people realise the mistake. A lot of people will hurt or even die in the medium term which is true but the world he posits seems one that leads to an unstable maximum.
sph 3y ago
I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth the amount of spam, customer service bollocks and lost jobs LLM will cause to basically make mega-corporations richer. So please tell me, what will LLMs ever do for us?
- funerr 3y ago
  There are too many variables to predict the future. Yet, I believe that it will empower more 1-3 person businesses to compete with the big incumbents. Imagine you could run teams of marketing/sales/support ai-agents and focus on your core business. "The next 1B, 1 Person companies". Just 15 years ago you'd need teams of 10+ people to do basic ml tasks you could do today. Now you have an LLM or a SaaS service that outperforms those teams for the fraction of the cost.
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    I expect such gradients to be temporary. After all, there’s nothing that stops the 100,000 person mega corp to do something with an LLM either.
    - calebkaiser 3y ago
      We will certainly see increased adoption at large corporations, but where LLMs will have a lasting equalizing effect is in areas where scaling has a logarithmic sort of benefit--very impactful going from 0-1, but less and less as scale increases. To give a concrete example, if you're a standard 1-3 person business with a niche enterprise SaaS product targeting the enterprise, outbound sales is likely going to be a meaningful channel for you. Having a team of good SDRs is a huge step function for your org, and if an LLM can give you that functionality without you needing to hire, then they'll make an outsized impact on your business. However, the Google-sized org operating in your space likely already has a huge sales and marketing org. They've likely "saturated" the market in the sense that they're already engaging most of their prospects in one way or another. Adding the functionality of many SDRs via an LLM might give them some efficiency gains, but it won't unlock a new level of growth for them, nor will nullify the value the LLMs provide your smaller org.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
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. Perhaps I should take the same step towards the internet, given that it’s becoming filled with junk that I don’t want.
- jprete 3y ago
  This and Substack are the last two places I still regularly read Internet content.
- falloutx 3y ago
  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
- raincole 3y ago
  > I watch little TV because of the exact same reason Maybe you do. But for most people the reason they watch little TV is because the internet is simply better. So no, not many people would just stop using the internet... unless there is something better.
hoseja 3y ago
>...AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale... Oh come on.
- read_if_gay_ 3y ago
  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?
  - Jenz 3y ago
    yes.
    - read_if_gay_ 3y ago
      as a musician, did you ever stop to consider the ethical implications of the emissions created by your particular frivolous hobby?
  - lijok 3y ago
    > is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics? Quite literally yes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog The reason most people don't think so is because human brains are not wired to comprehend the danger that slow buildups of a negative create. In general, the complete waste developers have been creating by allowing themselves to build extremely inefficient systems because moore's law, has been unethical. Imagine if the single goal of car manufacturers became to create faster and faster consumer cars with higher and higher co2 emissions, even thought those cars sit in a parking lot 95% of the time and when in use are never exercised to their potential.
    - read_if_gay_ 3y ago
      then I'm sure you also believe the logical consequence that all graphical user interfaces are unethical as well due to frivolously wasted compute. out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware? what did you personally find the most ethical choice there? and about those unethical ISPs? and how did you verify that HN's backend is efficient enough to be considered ethical?
danpalmer 3y ago
As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone for customer support (already something companies try to win customers on), or even winning customers on well-paid humans cooking their food for them (something that seems to be increasing). Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on. This may even get worse over time if, say, AI hits education and provides a worse quality education, but that's probably no different to what we already have with public school funding issues in the US/UK and many other countries.
- noobermin 3y ago
  You of course already have this for the most part, it's just "premier support" vs "faq that doesn't answer you question" for most people. It's just the "premier support" providers will be even more thinned out than they already were.
- dools 3y ago
  > Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.
digitcatphd 3y ago
It’s pretty astonishing how rapidly everyone in the world went from ‘sky net’ to laughable garbage in a matter of a few months.
- mnd999 3y ago
  I’ve been on laughable garbage from day 1. Drew is spot on here.
  - digitcatphd 3y ago
    It all depends on the parameters and constraints. If you spend a lot of time defining, providing sufficient context, and clarifications, they work quite well. I think the reality is people's expectations were unreasonably optimistic and now they are unjustifiably pessimistic. The general public seems to oscillate between extremes quite rapidly while not appreciating the nuances.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  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.
mekoka 3y ago
I'm an age-of-AI optimist. Not in the sense that AI will solve all problems, but rather in the opposite. The allure in the promise of so much power, so much profit, will be irresistible to those organizations that are already too big to fail and have the means to pursue the shimmer. But like this article articulates, it'll exposes even more dysfunctions than we're accustomed to. Within the gaps though, there will be opportunities. Particularly for those who modestly want to make a difference in a given community, without necessarily the ambitions to change the word™. The world doesn't get "better" or "worse", it's an ongoing and never-ending experiment. We don't discover the "right" way to do anything. We just try stuff and when it's annoying enough, we self-correct. AI has so much potential for annoyance that we should just rejoice in the resulting opportunities.
xixixao 3y ago
I have to disagree. Some things will get crappier, and some things will improve. Yes there's hype, but whether it's the same as crypto hype depends on whether there's actually anything useful behind the hype, and unlike crypto, I think it's pretty guaranteed there's something useful here (purely by getting value out of ChatGPT, infinitely more value than I ever got from anything crypto related). > Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Uff, what about crappy therapists? If an AI bot tells you to kill yourself, it's a pretty crappy AI bot. But there are a lot of crappy licensed therapists too. There's also a lot of crappy articles you can find on Google. The world is full of crappy resources. AI can and most likely will be used in all sorts of medical use cases.
- slfnflctd 3y ago
  Regarding therapists, I absolutely see room for disruption. The majority I've been to were truly terrible, just bad at their jobs in very basic ways, and there aren't enough of them to meet demand. Human presence has value, but it's an open question how much value and whether it offsets things like giving poor advice. I tried out one of the newer chatbots tailored for this type of interaction a couple weeks ago, and the discussion was better than what I got from probably 80% of the actual human therapists I've encountered as a patient.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Things might change but I think all author was saying is that right now it’s not advisable to try to get help for suicidal ideation (and probably not very useful and maybe harmful in general). I don’t really see that changing until Her, level AI that is “actually” self aware and possesses the capacity to understand nuanced micro expressions and so on and so forth. Suicidal ideation shouldn’t exist but it does and you have a better chance with a therapist than without. It’s probably irresponsible right now to recommend an AI for treatment. That might change but I bet it’s further away than you’re thinking.
dools 3y ago
> Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you When I read things like this it makes me think the author hasn't used ChatGPT in their job yet. Here is a really simple example of how I used ChatGPT this afternoon that saved me, I would estimate, about 2 hours of work: I had 2 CSV files, with different formats but which (supposedly) had the same functional information in them. I had a very complicated BigQuery SQL statement that worked on the first file format by importing it as a blob to a table then combining it with a bunch of other CSV files. I wanted to know how much I might need to change my query if I started using the 2nd CSV file (which takes much less time to export from the system that produces it). The query of course has a big complicated SELECT statement, but also several common table expressions and joins, some of which use columns from the CSV file I was looking to replace. So I gave ChatGPT the 2 header rows, and the big complicated query. I asked it to tell me likely mapping between the 2 CSV files for similar columns, and to give me a list of columns that appeared in one but not the other. I asked it to mark with an exclamation mark those columns which appeared in the query. It got some of the things wrong but because I'm pretty familiar with the query and the files I was able to pick up on those and it was much, much easier to browse the output and pick out the errors than it was to break down the query and do all that analysis from scratch. The whole process using ChatGPT took me about 15 minutes. And I have wins like that I would say about once per day. I mean it: I'm saving probably about 2 hours work per day by using ChatGPT on average, on tasks just like this. Now multiply that by all the shit that people are doing all the time and think about all the needs that will get met as a result of this increase in productivity that are not currently being met, and you have an idea of why AI is fucking awesome, ESPECIALLY given the fact that we need a decreasing working population to support an increasing retired population.
- jprete 3y ago
  That sounds like a five-minute job.
  - dools 3y ago
    I think this is why most managers take the estimates provided by developers, double them and then go up one unit of time.
jongjong 3y ago
Maybe what we need is a hybrid communist/capitalist system. Governments should nationalize public stock markets and all large companies with a market cap above a certain amount.
- self_awareness 3y ago
  This way the companies will be sure not to ever reach a certain market cap. If they will be close, the companies will split, so that they'll never be big enough.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    Seems like a good thing.
txutxu 3y ago
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 to do, why, and where are the (100% sure) hidden "break production" kind of failures. It's more like "were is waldo"... you know that there will be at least one or two things really really wrong, always, always one or two (or more) catastrophic details, but that they are hidden below something "apparently nice". And what is worse, all effort to point and fix issues, is lost. Or repeated again and again. I apologize, but as a senior sysadmin/oncall model, I cannot run your chatgpt code, until you understand how things work.
- brabel 3y ago
  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.
  - the_other 3y ago
    > Because if there's on thing AI can already do really well, it's explaining what some code is doing. But it just makes up a series of words which sound good. It's accidentally correct 75% of the time and just wrong the other 25%. (and IMO, just wrong in some way almost every time I use it).
asimpletune 3y ago
I think people are just going to spend less time on devices. All in all it’ll probably end up being a net-positive, although it’s a shame that it had to happen in exactly the way. The dawn of the internet was one of hope and optimism and the potential value that it held was an ocean compared to the eventual drops that it was mortgaged in pursuit thereof. Search is becoming useless. People are becoming inoculated to social and its viral effect will slowly wane. People after exposure to all this value-less capitalism will eventually wise up, because that’s what makes sense, and will be left for us in terms of value will be the original oldies but goodies that we started with: Wikipedia, YouTube maybe, personal blogs, and commerce. For many people this has already started. I don’t care about going online so much, and I’m much more interested in my community and what’s happening around me. My friends and I all use social but more as a tool and it’s increasingly becoming more local. When I meet younger people it’s even more extreme. They’re so cynical about tech that I’m convinced they’re going to usher in 3rd spaces and better urban planning and the likes when they grow up. I’m not saying we’ll abandon tech just that we’ll only engage when there’s a legitimate value proposition. Ultimately that’s why there’s so much nonsense anyways, because it is legitimately hard to create actual value. On the long view though only value survives. I didn’t even mention “AI” but that will probably just hasten this process from a content perspective. In the future it’ll be around but we’ll just endure it, but we’ll also seek out meaningful interactions whenever we can.
50 3y ago
As for generative AI: "mimicry is always sinister" (Friendship's Death (1987), Peter Wollen).
sunpazed 3y ago
I’m in my late fourties’ and have witnessed only a handful of transformative technologies in my time. Nothing in the last 15 years has given me that “tingly feeling” of excitement — you know, that feeling that we’re on the cusp of something transformative — than the recent progress in AI. While the new AI frontier might be led by prohibitively expensive (and closed) large language models, we’re also seeing great grass-roots progress at a smaller scale with modest models trained by the developer community. I trained a baby GPT the other day using llama2.c for my own use cases. It’s Linux vs Sun/Unix all over again.
- tim333 3y ago
  Late 50s here and I think it'll be transformative like nothing in the past million years. I mean zooming out at history the first 13bn years have been planets form, life evolves gets conscious but has to watch it's conscious loved ones age die in a tiny fraction if that time. Now we can kind of merge with AI and live on as long as wanted in some probably much enhanced form. And all a lot of people can say is it may make spam worse! Incidentally I wrote about that stuff for my uni entrance exam ages 17 and it has always seemed kind of obvious and inevitable to me. It surprises me there are so many skeptics.
PoignardAzur 3y ago
> Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI, and [...] What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. This type of reasoning is really getting on my nerves lately. Predicting the future is hard, yeah. But your predictions don't become systematically more accurate just by tackling "boring" and "capitalism" to them. A lot of technologies can change our societies in emergent, non-boring ways. Climate change is an emergent effect of fossil fuel usage that you wouldn't predict by just looking at 19th century factories and imaging how they would evolve with "boring capitalism". The internet is extremely non-boring and has had profound effects on our society. Nuclear mutually-assured destruction is an extremely non-boring existential threat. It could be that the dangers of AI is from the military, or the police, or terrorists, or from corporations seeking to replace labor, other conventional threats we already have a reference frame for, yes. Or it could be a completely novel from of disaster, like the equivalent of a school shooter getting AlphaFold 8 to make a novel virus that kills 70% of the population before we even realize there's a pandemic going on. Just because this isn't something we're used to doesn't mean it's fundamentally unlikely to happen.
bArray 3y ago
I think that much of what is addressed here will not entirely be from AI, but may in the future be misattributed to it because the curves appear to line up. Don't forget that wage increases have been stagnant for a long time, and that inflation is always growing - we never see deflation in the so-called 'good times' [+]. The climate change movement for example is ultimately a movement to reduce the resource usage of the working class. Reduced resource usage should in theory lead to a reduction in economic growth - but it hasn't. This is because they simply attained their growth through other means - reduced salary (adjusted for inflation), larger tax, shrink-flation (selling something smaller at the same price), etc. They will always post record profits to appease investors, and that growth will directly come from your pockets. AI is probably the only thing slowing this down, and it likely is a bubble. When it bursts, do you think these companies will go back to employing humans for customer services? Like hell they will, you just won't get any customer support at all. You may say "fine, I'll take my money elsewhere", but you'll find yourself picking the lesser of evils [++]. Anybody who tries to offer human interaction will simply not be competitive on price, and people are relatively poorer than they were - so they have no choice. It's not as if you can go without water, gas, electric, phone, phone provider, ISP, etc. [+] The coming economic recession will also not be enough to reset this trend, and there is no political will to address it. [++] The government may mandate that these companies have human operators, but it won't work, they'll just maliciously comply. One human operator, a call queue of thousands of people, "our lines are unusually busy at the moment", outsource the humans to the current poorest Country and give them zero power to deal with customer queries, etc. It would be exceptionally difficult to prove they are not providing a good service, and at worst they fine them - which might still work out cheaper than dealing with customer queries.
thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
I don’t fully get this meme. AI isn’t dangerous because (litany of terrible effects goes here). This is the tech equivalent of “ignore global warming; bad weather is dangerous now”. Every problem in scope now was science fiction three years ago. To say confidently that an intelligent computer virus is off the table is already presumptuous but to offer a litany of other AI dangers as your evidence is just weird.
rvz 3y ago
> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster. Again, I've said this same thing months and yet the AI bros continue to deflect with more nonsense to justify burning the planet with their snake-oil garbage. Drews points still stand and the Deep Learning industry has no methods of efficient methods of training, fine-tuning and inference and continues to burn down the planet no matter the amount of greenwashing they continue to project.
- danielbln 3y ago
  What a load of snide hogwash. First of all, how are LLMs snake oil? There is actual usefulness to be had. And I can run inference on my laptop, transferring capabilities to smaller models is a thing, quantization is a thing, optimization is a thing. And, DL has been feasible for barely a decade, LLMs for a few years. Are you talking about crypto by any chance?
  - rvz 3y ago
    > What a load of snide hogwash. First of all, how are LLMs snake oil? There is actual usefulness to be had. It is an energy wasting snake-oil burning the planet. [0] [1] Especially when they confidently hallucinate without any transparent reasoning or explanation other than the regurgitation that it has been trained to do, or more accurately they are stochastic parrots. The issue is fundamental to LLMs and deep learning and researchers still don't know why other than tweaking parameters and fine tuning / re-training it with GPUs still incinerating the planet with no viable alternative to such wasteful methods. > And I can run inference on my laptop, transferring capabilities to smaller models is a thing, quantization is a thing, optimization is a thing. We are talking worst case for inference not 'smaller models' which still need to be trained or fine-tuned to exist in the first place and for improvements. For the so-called 'serious' cloud-based LLMs, they need to continuously serve every inference and that requires a fleet of GPUs to serve lots of users as the parameter count of the model gets larger. > And, DL has been feasible for barely a decade, LLMs for a few years. Neural networks which are fundamental to LLMs have been around for decades and are still unexplainable black boxes which are incapable of transparent reasoning other than regurgitating responses that it was trained on. Unacceptable and useless for a wave of use-cases that require explainability. > Are you talking about crypto by any chance? Crypto already has viable alternatives to its energy wasting problem [2] available today right now. Deep Learning still does not. [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water... [2] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...
icrbow 3y ago
> Flame bait I'll take it. > ChatGPT is the new techno-atheist's substitute for God Not really, no ~~true~~ AInotKillingeveryoneIst says that ChatGPT (or GPT-like) is ASI. Please stop beating this particular strawman.
- gjm11 3y ago
  Your second thing-that-looks-like-a-quotation does not appear to be quoted from anywhere. I don't think you should do that. (I am not sure whether your last line is your actual opinion or sarcastic, given the "no true ..." phrasing, but for what it's worth I think it's unironically correct: no one with any brain thinks ChatGPT is anything much like a superintelligence. There are people who expect AI to become godlike, for better or for worse, but the most they're saying about the likes of ChatGPT in this connection is "progress sure seems to be pretty fast these days".)
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Why is this a strawman? Have you seen the Jesus AI on Twitch? Seriously- Goes way back. In the movie THX 1138 the population talk to a AI Jesus.
sharts 3y ago
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.
- woeirua 3y ago
  I'm only in my mid 30s. I'm _very_ convinced that the world was a better place overall before 2008. Before smartphones, and social media.
  - raincole 3y ago
    Like good old late 80s, when the world was on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#/media/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_stockpiles.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#/media/File:...
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Nuclear apocalypse risk is not a linear function of warheads. There is still more than enough warheads to cause near total annihilation and politically, we are closer to it than at any point in the 80s.
habosa 3y ago
> 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.
- projektfu 3y ago
  It would be nice if the search engines could put the main site for something first. They already do it with their own properties, so it's possible. But they've gotten very bad at it with everything else. For example, you want to search about a car, you'll get some blogspam, a few car magazines, a few local shops, and down the line the manufacturer's website. Now, sometimes the manufacturer doesn't answer a question, but it's amazing how much the search engines promote these SEO articles that repeat a question over and over without answering it.
josu 3y ago
I told chatGPT to replace reference to AI with references to computers. The arguments seem just as valid (and wrong). Here is a snippet. "Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed. Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it." The rest of the article. There is a computer bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by computers. But it will probably be crappier, not better. Contrary to the doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to computers. Contemporary advances in computing aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018: A panel from the webcomic “xkcd” showing a timeline from now into the distant future, dividing the timeline into the periods between “computers become advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of robots” and “computers become self-aware and rebel against human control”. The period from self-awareness to the indefinite future is labelled “the part lots of people seem to worry about”; Randall is instead worried about the part between these two epochs. What will happen to computers is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Language models are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and computers will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains. The biggest lasting changes from computers will be more like the following: - A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work - The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles - More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams - SEO hacking content farms dominating search results - Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market - Computer-generated content overwhelming social media - Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising Computer companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the data monster. You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those computer-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with computer content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm. All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the computer epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math. This will be incredibly profitable for the computer barons, and to secure their investment they are deploying an immense, expensive, world-wide propaganda campaign. To the public, the present-day and potential future capabilities of the technology are played up in breathless promises of ridiculous possibility. In closed-room meetings, much more realistic promises are made of cutting payroll budgets in half. The propaganda also leans into the mystical sci-fi computer canon, the threat of smart computers with world-ending power, the forbidden allure of a new Manhattan project and all of its consequences, the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts and the barons themselves, but the illusion is maintained in the interests of lobbying lawmakers to help the barons erect a moat around their new industry. Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed. Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.
xvilka 3y ago
Just like in Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts, Internet will become unusable thanks to AI-driven spam, phishing, SEO, and other junk content.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Is that really because of the AI, or because of humans controlling them? We already have incredible levels of spam, phishing, junk SEO content. Created from humans and scripts driven by humans.
  - xvilka 3y ago
    Humans, of course. The AI is just better tool for this "job", better than anything existing before.
bionhoward 3y ago
This part seems sketchy: “the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts” Which experts? Yann? Not sure he counts.
pwillia7 3y ago
This still feels like it's missing the point most doomer technologists do even though it calls them out for it -- The world will be changed by AI, just like the internet, and, just like the internet, it will be full of problems, but problems we mostly can't envision or see. The 'trump card' for all the AI negativity is education. Think of the 590 million Indian kids that live in poverty, for example. If they can get access to a computer and the internet, they will have access to on demand 24/7 first class education. They can even ask questions like they could of a real teacher. The boon to human productivity and possibility for less suffering in our Capitalist earth can't possibly be outweighed by some boogey-man negatives which will probably never materialize anyway.
jostmey 3y ago
I think this article makes sense when analyzing the current technology of AI. But it doesn’t make sense if AI continues to improve. I honestly believe AI will lead to a singularity in the sense that the future of AI cannot be defined and is currently unknowable
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AJRF 3y ago
The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome. Why write this article other than to to smugly say "told you so" in the cases where you turn out right. It is a zero risk take. Looking at the advances in AI (Chess, Go, Protein Folding, MidJourney, ChatGPT) and your takeaway being "Humans will use this in bad ways" shows a ferocious lack of imagination. I notice a desperate, but failing, attempt to lump the advances in AI to the same pool as Crypto greed because that was the smug naysayers nirvana.
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- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Yeah it's like crypto created this weird crop of "debunkers" who think that being permacynical is good just because it was smart to be cynical about crypto. So now "everything I don't like is just like crypto currency"
  - captainbland 3y ago
    I think it's about more than crypto. 'Enshittification' as described here has created a lot of distrust: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-...
- dethos 3y ago
  > The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome. I also get that feeling. It seems it is now fashionable to take down anything that might change things (I'm not saying that all change is good). Change resistance is something that always existed and we are already used to, but somehow this looks a bit different, more ideological.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
This is basically MOLOCH. We can't stop ourselves from 'crappifying' ourselves. We are driven by local min/max in society that we can't break free from, until the system breaks. Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ Past post on 'enshittification' from Cory Doctorow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245
npteljes 3y ago
I agree with the message completely. The facade is new, but it can be very similar to the industrial revolution, and how that upset the order of the then-current times. If we want happier, more well-adjusted people, a better functioning world, we will need a better functioning system, of which AI can be a part as much as any other machine already is. No technology will bring us there however. If it's going to happen, it will happen because people will bring it to life. Until that, things are just going to be as-is. Sometimes up, sometimes down, overall upwards hopefully, and sometimes advances will upset the status quo. And hopefully no tech will solidify the absurd rich-poor divide permanently.
nojvek 3y ago
> In case you need to hear it: do not (TW: suicide) seek out OpenAI’s services to help with your depression. Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Talk to your friends and ask them to help you find the right care for your needs. In US healthcare including therapists are quite expensive. Back in the day I was an indie dev and that was really hard on me. In my lows I thought I’d seek a therapist but at $500/half hour appointment that felt like a gut punch. Didn’t have any insurance then. ChatGPT is instantly available and free. Yes, it’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing. For a large part of US, mental therapists are not really accessible when they most need it.
self_awareness 3y ago
I'm not sure if anyone should take the guy seriously. For a person who has "I don't want to talk about AI" in his profile, and banning everyone who dares to have a different opinion, he sure talks about AI a lot.
camdenlock 3y ago
Socialists really are a dreary miserable lot, aren’t they.
nunez 3y ago
Strong points, but I disagree with the timeline a little bit. > A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work I agree and disagree with this. Stable diffusion is art, but creating the art is still within the realm of artists. Also, they'll still need copyediting, refining, etc. I think creatives will transfer or complement their skills with this stuff, like some are already doing. (Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VGa1imApfdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VGa1imApfdg) I also very highly doubt that fine art will ever be 100% AI. Uniqueness drives their value. > The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles Definitely not. Human customer service is key for achieving high eNPS scores. People will always want to talk to other people, even if IVR and chat can address their needs. > More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams Definitely, but it is well documented that the most common types of scams are made to be deliberately "off" to find easy marks more quickly. > SEO hacking content farms dominating search results > Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market Both of these have been happening for many years. OpenAI will make it easier to stand up boilerplate hello-world starters though (as OP called out). I suppose Google will downrank sites like this to prevent incentivizing this. > AI-generated content overwhelming social media Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising This is the one thing I'm actually concerned about. I hope that Reddit doesn't become people talking to other people via ChatGPT assistants. That would be a cultural net loss.
tim333 3y ago
>AI is defined by aggressive capitalism You could have said that for almost all tech improvements in history - electricity, medicine, radio, cars, trains, plumbing etc. Capitalism as in people selling stuff for money is just how things get done. At least to begin with.
berniedurfee 3y ago
I agree with the sentiment overall. There will absolutely be some great benefits provided by LLMs and the like. Alexa type devices that are more useful than a light switch. Auto spelling correction that actually works most of the time. Maybe a microwave oven that just has one ‘Heat this up’ button. But I think the beneficial use cases will be a fraction of the overall use cases. These technologies are going to be far more effective at enshitifying our world. Spam, scams, replacing artists and knowledge workers with tools that can produce ‘good enough’ output… and yeah, military capabilities that’ll allow humans to kill more humans more cost effectively. I’m looking forward to the good stuff, it’ll be neat. But absolutely dreading the wave of horribleness that’ll inevitably come of this.

279 points by Jiejeing 3y ago

> What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. I see a lot of people want to blame capitalism, but look at any other system, and ultimately they all fail due to human greed. The only way to make capitalism work correctly is with regulation, because once monopolies and collusions are reached, the natural incentives disappear (i.e. the lowest cost service that delivers what the consumer values). > Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Agreed. You will earn less money (relative to cost of living), tax will increase, but yet people will still pretend your quality of life has increased - but they haven't. Many services you now can't reach a human - at all. Emails have disappeared, phone lines have disappeared - I now have to waste 5 minutes speaking to a chat bot that I know cannot solve my issue for it to maybe allow me to type text to what it claims to be a human. > LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. In a sense, most neural networks can be modelled as some form of Markov Model. What's becoming more obvious is that the structures of these models is super important, and there is still a lot to be learned. > Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains. Cars are a decentralised transport (as much as a transport system can be), whereas a train is a centralised transport system. The internet is also a transport system, but with packets instead of people, and this has had great success with a mixture of centralised and decentralised transport mechanisms. The biggest problem with trains is that you create a single point of failure and an unnatural monopoly. Your bandwidth is also heavily reduced due to safety considerations (you want to travel fast over long distances, but need to increase the safety margin to do so). Unlike cars or internet packets, you can't divert a train. One can imagine a new protest group "just stop energy" (instead of "just stop oil") quite trivially bringing an entire Country to a halt by placing cars on all of the tracks. > AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. Interesting to see that none of the climate activists so far have gone for clear winners like crypto mining, or AI training. Instead they would rather keep making the life of the every-day person miserable, as if it isn't miserable enough already. > You will never trust another product review. You find that people pay for reviews anyway. Somebody I know gets sent Amazon products to review, and they get to keep the products. The more positive reviews you give, the more you get selected for future reviews. The only way around this is reputation - I find somebody you trust who has reviewed a product. It's why Linus Tech Tips (LTT) and the recent review scandal was important - they have a reputation and it does inform consumers about expensive computing equipment investments.

block_dagger 3y ago

A one sided argument with sweeping generalities and something about minorities being killed in the process. Got it.

emptysongglass 3y ago
Seems we just can't resist hating on anything new, no matter what it is these days. Drew has some good ideas but they're often lost in his reactionary rejection of anything not his narrowly defined vision of UNIXy enough. His inexplicable dislike of containers being just one example. There can be nuance to our view of new things. It's important we stress our ability as humans to think this way. LLMs are not all or nothing good bad polarities. They can be just another tool in your toolset. And that's fine. No hatred required.
- eesmith 3y ago
  Surely you mean "Plan9y enough". https://drewdevault.com/2022/11/12/In-praise-of-Plan-9.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/11/12/In-praise-of-Plan-9.html shows how he prefers Plan 9 over Unix. I think he doesn't like the way Unix containers are done, preferring other ways to get them. From that URL: > Recall that everything really is just a file on Plan 9, unlike Unix. Access to the hardware is provided through normal files, and per-process namespaces do not require special permissions to modify mountpoints. Making a container is thus trivial: just unmount all of the hardware you don’t want the sandboxed program to have access to. Done. You don’t even have to be root. Where does he express a dislike for the concept of containers? After all, he's working on a new microkernel OS, with a permissions model that seem designed to make containers easy to implement.
- eletrotupi 3y ago
  Yeah, but they are not being stressed enough or considered at a greater level. The same can be said with stuff such as Global Warming for instance, whereas every other company knows that stuff they're doing is terrible, but don't give a shit and we continue to follow as if nothing is going on. AI >right now< is not doing anything specifically dangerous, BUT people adding that "tool to their toolset" is not us, mere mortals but people who intend to use AI in crappier ways. Thinking about those things is not "shitting on anything new" but to think critically about stuff.

noobermin 3y ago

Drew DeVault confirmed Urbanist Bro Completely unserious comment but I enjoy the Alan Fisher reference, it's funny seeing my online spheres intersect. EDIT: serious comment. The whole post is a bit of a doomer one, the thing is in the maximalist bad world that Drew DeVault poses, human interaction (customer support, human written articles and opinions) becomes a premium, meaning the pendulum will swing as people realise the mistake. A lot of people will hurt or even die in the medium term which is true but the world he posits seems one that leads to an unstable maximum.

sph 3y ago

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth the amount of spam, customer service bollocks and lost jobs LLM will cause to basically make mega-corporations richer. So please tell me, what will LLMs ever do for us?

funerr 3y ago
There are too many variables to predict the future. Yet, I believe that it will empower more 1-3 person businesses to compete with the big incumbents. Imagine you could run teams of marketing/sales/support ai-agents and focus on your core business. "The next 1B, 1 Person companies". Just 15 years ago you'd need teams of 10+ people to do basic ml tasks you could do today. Now you have an LLM or a SaaS service that outperforms those teams for the fraction of the cost.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  I expect such gradients to be temporary. After all, there’s nothing that stops the 100,000 person mega corp to do something with an LLM either.
  - calebkaiser 3y ago
    We will certainly see increased adoption at large corporations, but where LLMs will have a lasting equalizing effect is in areas where scaling has a logarithmic sort of benefit--very impactful going from 0-1, but less and less as scale increases. To give a concrete example, if you're a standard 1-3 person business with a niche enterprise SaaS product targeting the enterprise, outbound sales is likely going to be a meaningful channel for you. Having a team of good SDRs is a huge step function for your org, and if an LLM can give you that functionality without you needing to hire, then they'll make an outsized impact on your business. However, the Google-sized org operating in your space likely already has a huge sales and marketing org. They've likely "saturated" the market in the sense that they're already engaging most of their prospects in one way or another. Adding the functionality of many SDRs via an LLM might give them some efficiency gains, but it won't unlock a new level of growth for them, nor will nullify the value the LLMs provide your smaller org.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

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. Perhaps I should take the same step towards the internet, given that it’s becoming filled with junk that I don’t want.

jprete 3y ago
This and Substack are the last two places I still regularly read Internet content.
falloutx 3y ago
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
raincole 3y ago
> I watch little TV because of the exact same reason Maybe you do. But for most people the reason they watch little TV is because the internet is simply better. So no, not many people would just stop using the internet... unless there is something better.

hoseja 3y ago

>...AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale... Oh come on.

read_if_gay_ 3y ago
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?
- Jenz 3y ago
  yes.
  - read_if_gay_ 3y ago
    as a musician, did you ever stop to consider the ethical implications of the emissions created by your particular frivolous hobby?
- lijok 3y ago
  > is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics? Quite literally yes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog The reason most people don't think so is because human brains are not wired to comprehend the danger that slow buildups of a negative create. In general, the complete waste developers have been creating by allowing themselves to build extremely inefficient systems because moore's law, has been unethical. Imagine if the single goal of car manufacturers became to create faster and faster consumer cars with higher and higher co2 emissions, even thought those cars sit in a parking lot 95% of the time and when in use are never exercised to their potential.
  - read_if_gay_ 3y ago
    then I'm sure you also believe the logical consequence that all graphical user interfaces are unethical as well due to frivolously wasted compute. out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware? what did you personally find the most ethical choice there? and about those unethical ISPs? and how did you verify that HN's backend is efficient enough to be considered ethical?

danpalmer 3y ago

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone for customer support (already something companies try to win customers on), or even winning customers on well-paid humans cooking their food for them (something that seems to be increasing). Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on. This may even get worse over time if, say, AI hits education and provides a worse quality education, but that's probably no different to what we already have with public school funding issues in the US/UK and many other countries.

noobermin 3y ago
You of course already have this for the most part, it's just "premier support" vs "faq that doesn't answer you question" for most people. It's just the "premier support" providers will be even more thinned out than they already were.
dools 3y ago
> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad. What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.

digitcatphd 3y ago

It’s pretty astonishing how rapidly everyone in the world went from ‘sky net’ to laughable garbage in a matter of a few months.

mnd999 3y ago
I’ve been on laughable garbage from day 1. Drew is spot on here.
- digitcatphd 3y ago
  It all depends on the parameters and constraints. If you spend a lot of time defining, providing sufficient context, and clarifications, they work quite well. I think the reality is people's expectations were unreasonably optimistic and now they are unjustifiably pessimistic. The general public seems to oscillate between extremes quite rapidly while not appreciating the nuances.
ethanbond 3y ago
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.

mekoka 3y ago

I'm an age-of-AI optimist. Not in the sense that AI will solve all problems, but rather in the opposite. The allure in the promise of so much power, so much profit, will be irresistible to those organizations that are already too big to fail and have the means to pursue the shimmer. But like this article articulates, it'll exposes even more dysfunctions than we're accustomed to. Within the gaps though, there will be opportunities. Particularly for those who modestly want to make a difference in a given community, without necessarily the ambitions to change the word™. The world doesn't get "better" or "worse", it's an ongoing and never-ending experiment. We don't discover the "right" way to do anything. We just try stuff and when it's annoying enough, we self-correct. AI has so much potential for annoyance that we should just rejoice in the resulting opportunities.

xixixao 3y ago

I have to disagree. Some things will get crappier, and some things will improve. Yes there's hype, but whether it's the same as crypto hype depends on whether there's actually anything useful behind the hype, and unlike crypto, I think it's pretty guaranteed there's something useful here (purely by getting value out of ChatGPT, infinitely more value than I ever got from anything crypto related). > Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Uff, what about crappy therapists? If an AI bot tells you to kill yourself, it's a pretty crappy AI bot. But there are a lot of crappy licensed therapists too. There's also a lot of crappy articles you can find on Google. The world is full of crappy resources. AI can and most likely will be used in all sorts of medical use cases.

slfnflctd 3y ago
Regarding therapists, I absolutely see room for disruption. The majority I've been to were truly terrible, just bad at their jobs in very basic ways, and there aren't enough of them to meet demand. Human presence has value, but it's an open question how much value and whether it offsets things like giving poor advice. I tried out one of the newer chatbots tailored for this type of interaction a couple weeks ago, and the discussion was better than what I got from probably 80% of the actual human therapists I've encountered as a patient.
ShamelessC 3y ago
Things might change but I think all author was saying is that right now it’s not advisable to try to get help for suicidal ideation (and probably not very useful and maybe harmful in general). I don’t really see that changing until Her, level AI that is “actually” self aware and possesses the capacity to understand nuanced micro expressions and so on and so forth. Suicidal ideation shouldn’t exist but it does and you have a better chance with a therapist than without. It’s probably irresponsible right now to recommend an AI for treatment. That might change but I bet it’s further away than you’re thinking.

dools 3y ago

> Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you When I read things like this it makes me think the author hasn't used ChatGPT in their job yet. Here is a really simple example of how I used ChatGPT this afternoon that saved me, I would estimate, about 2 hours of work: I had 2 CSV files, with different formats but which (supposedly) had the same functional information in them. I had a very complicated BigQuery SQL statement that worked on the first file format by importing it as a blob to a table then combining it with a bunch of other CSV files. I wanted to know how much I might need to change my query if I started using the 2nd CSV file (which takes much less time to export from the system that produces it). The query of course has a big complicated SELECT statement, but also several common table expressions and joins, some of which use columns from the CSV file I was looking to replace. So I gave ChatGPT the 2 header rows, and the big complicated query. I asked it to tell me likely mapping between the 2 CSV files for similar columns, and to give me a list of columns that appeared in one but not the other. I asked it to mark with an exclamation mark those columns which appeared in the query. It got some of the things wrong but because I'm pretty familiar with the query and the files I was able to pick up on those and it was much, much easier to browse the output and pick out the errors than it was to break down the query and do all that analysis from scratch. The whole process using ChatGPT took me about 15 minutes. And I have wins like that I would say about once per day. I mean it: I'm saving probably about 2 hours work per day by using ChatGPT on average, on tasks just like this. Now multiply that by all the shit that people are doing all the time and think about all the needs that will get met as a result of this increase in productivity that are not currently being met, and you have an idea of why AI is fucking awesome, ESPECIALLY given the fact that we need a decreasing working population to support an increasing retired population.

jprete 3y ago
That sounds like a five-minute job.
- dools 3y ago
  I think this is why most managers take the estimates provided by developers, double them and then go up one unit of time.

jongjong 3y ago

Maybe what we need is a hybrid communist/capitalist system. Governments should nationalize public stock markets and all large companies with a market cap above a certain amount.

self_awareness 3y ago
This way the companies will be sure not to ever reach a certain market cap. If they will be close, the companies will split, so that they'll never be big enough.
- jongjong 3y ago
  Seems like a good thing.

txutxu 3y ago

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 to do, why, and where are the (100% sure) hidden "break production" kind of failures. It's more like "were is waldo"... you know that there will be at least one or two things really really wrong, always, always one or two (or more) catastrophic details, but that they are hidden below something "apparently nice". And what is worse, all effort to point and fix issues, is lost. Or repeated again and again. I apologize, but as a senior sysadmin/oncall model, I cannot run your chatgpt code, until you understand how things work.

brabel 3y ago
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.
- the_other 3y ago
  > Because if there's on thing AI can already do really well, it's explaining what some code is doing. But it just makes up a series of words which sound good. It's accidentally correct 75% of the time and just wrong the other 25%. (and IMO, just wrong in some way almost every time I use it).

asimpletune 3y ago

I think people are just going to spend less time on devices. All in all it’ll probably end up being a net-positive, although it’s a shame that it had to happen in exactly the way. The dawn of the internet was one of hope and optimism and the potential value that it held was an ocean compared to the eventual drops that it was mortgaged in pursuit thereof. Search is becoming useless. People are becoming inoculated to social and its viral effect will slowly wane. People after exposure to all this value-less capitalism will eventually wise up, because that’s what makes sense, and will be left for us in terms of value will be the original oldies but goodies that we started with: Wikipedia, YouTube maybe, personal blogs, and commerce. For many people this has already started. I don’t care about going online so much, and I’m much more interested in my community and what’s happening around me. My friends and I all use social but more as a tool and it’s increasingly becoming more local. When I meet younger people it’s even more extreme. They’re so cynical about tech that I’m convinced they’re going to usher in 3rd spaces and better urban planning and the likes when they grow up. I’m not saying we’ll abandon tech just that we’ll only engage when there’s a legitimate value proposition. Ultimately that’s why there’s so much nonsense anyways, because it is legitimately hard to create actual value. On the long view though only value survives. I didn’t even mention “AI” but that will probably just hasten this process from a content perspective. In the future it’ll be around but we’ll just endure it, but we’ll also seek out meaningful interactions whenever we can.

50 3y ago

As for generative AI: "mimicry is always sinister" (Friendship's Death (1987), Peter Wollen).

sunpazed 3y ago

I’m in my late fourties’ and have witnessed only a handful of transformative technologies in my time. Nothing in the last 15 years has given me that “tingly feeling” of excitement — you know, that feeling that we’re on the cusp of something transformative — than the recent progress in AI. While the new AI frontier might be led by prohibitively expensive (and closed) large language models, we’re also seeing great grass-roots progress at a smaller scale with modest models trained by the developer community. I trained a baby GPT the other day using llama2.c for my own use cases. It’s Linux vs Sun/Unix all over again.

tim333 3y ago
Late 50s here and I think it'll be transformative like nothing in the past million years. I mean zooming out at history the first 13bn years have been planets form, life evolves gets conscious but has to watch it's conscious loved ones age die in a tiny fraction if that time. Now we can kind of merge with AI and live on as long as wanted in some probably much enhanced form. And all a lot of people can say is it may make spam worse! Incidentally I wrote about that stuff for my uni entrance exam ages 17 and it has always seemed kind of obvious and inevitable to me. It surprises me there are so many skeptics.

PoignardAzur 3y ago

> Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI, and [...] What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. This type of reasoning is really getting on my nerves lately. Predicting the future is hard, yeah. But your predictions don't become systematically more accurate just by tackling "boring" and "capitalism" to them. A lot of technologies can change our societies in emergent, non-boring ways. Climate change is an emergent effect of fossil fuel usage that you wouldn't predict by just looking at 19th century factories and imaging how they would evolve with "boring capitalism". The internet is extremely non-boring and has had profound effects on our society. Nuclear mutually-assured destruction is an extremely non-boring existential threat. It could be that the dangers of AI is from the military, or the police, or terrorists, or from corporations seeking to replace labor, other conventional threats we already have a reference frame for, yes. Or it could be a completely novel from of disaster, like the equivalent of a school shooter getting AlphaFold 8 to make a novel virus that kills 70% of the population before we even realize there's a pandemic going on. Just because this isn't something we're used to doesn't mean it's fundamentally unlikely to happen.

bArray 3y ago

I think that much of what is addressed here will not entirely be from AI, but may in the future be misattributed to it because the curves appear to line up. Don't forget that wage increases have been stagnant for a long time, and that inflation is always growing - we never see deflation in the so-called 'good times' [+]. The climate change movement for example is ultimately a movement to reduce the resource usage of the working class. Reduced resource usage should in theory lead to a reduction in economic growth - but it hasn't. This is because they simply attained their growth through other means - reduced salary (adjusted for inflation), larger tax, shrink-flation (selling something smaller at the same price), etc. They will always post record profits to appease investors, and that growth will directly come from your pockets. AI is probably the only thing slowing this down, and it likely is a bubble. When it bursts, do you think these companies will go back to employing humans for customer services? Like hell they will, you just won't get any customer support at all. You may say "fine, I'll take my money elsewhere", but you'll find yourself picking the lesser of evils [++]. Anybody who tries to offer human interaction will simply not be competitive on price, and people are relatively poorer than they were - so they have no choice. It's not as if you can go without water, gas, electric, phone, phone provider, ISP, etc. [+] The coming economic recession will also not be enough to reset this trend, and there is no political will to address it. [++] The government may mandate that these companies have human operators, but it won't work, they'll just maliciously comply. One human operator, a call queue of thousands of people, "our lines are unusually busy at the moment", outsource the humans to the current poorest Country and give them zero power to deal with customer queries, etc. It would be exceptionally difficult to prove they are not providing a good service, and at worst they fine them - which might still work out cheaper than dealing with customer queries.

thatjoeoverthr 3y ago

I don’t fully get this meme. AI isn’t dangerous because (litany of terrible effects goes here). This is the tech equivalent of “ignore global warming; bad weather is dangerous now”. Every problem in scope now was science fiction three years ago. To say confidently that an intelligent computer virus is off the table is already presumptuous but to offer a litany of other AI dangers as your evidence is just weird.

rvz 3y ago

> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster. Again, I've said this same thing months and yet the AI bros continue to deflect with more nonsense to justify burning the planet with their snake-oil garbage. Drews points still stand and the Deep Learning industry has no methods of efficient methods of training, fine-tuning and inference and continues to burn down the planet no matter the amount of greenwashing they continue to project.

danielbln 3y ago
What a load of snide hogwash. First of all, how are LLMs snake oil? There is actual usefulness to be had. And I can run inference on my laptop, transferring capabilities to smaller models is a thing, quantization is a thing, optimization is a thing. And, DL has been feasible for barely a decade, LLMs for a few years. Are you talking about crypto by any chance?
- rvz 3y ago
  > What a load of snide hogwash. First of all, how are LLMs snake oil? There is actual usefulness to be had. It is an energy wasting snake-oil burning the planet. [0] [1] Especially when they confidently hallucinate without any transparent reasoning or explanation other than the regurgitation that it has been trained to do, or more accurately they are stochastic parrots. The issue is fundamental to LLMs and deep learning and researchers still don't know why other than tweaking parameters and fine tuning / re-training it with GPUs still incinerating the planet with no viable alternative to such wasteful methods. > And I can run inference on my laptop, transferring capabilities to smaller models is a thing, quantization is a thing, optimization is a thing. We are talking worst case for inference not 'smaller models' which still need to be trained or fine-tuned to exist in the first place and for improvements. For the so-called 'serious' cloud-based LLMs, they need to continuously serve every inference and that requires a fleet of GPUs to serve lots of users as the parameter count of the model gets larger. > And, DL has been feasible for barely a decade, LLMs for a few years. Neural networks which are fundamental to LLMs have been around for decades and are still unexplainable black boxes which are incapable of transparent reasoning other than regurgitating responses that it was trained on. Unacceptable and useless for a wave of use-cases that require explainability. > Are you talking about crypto by any chance? Crypto already has viable alternatives to its energy wasting problem [2] available today right now. Deep Learning still does not. [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water... [2] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

icrbow 3y ago

> Flame bait I'll take it. > ChatGPT is the new techno-atheist's substitute for God Not really, no ~~true~~ AInotKillingeveryoneIst says that ChatGPT (or GPT-like) is ASI. Please stop beating this particular strawman.

gjm11 3y ago
Your second thing-that-looks-like-a-quotation does not appear to be quoted from anywhere. I don't think you should do that. (I am not sure whether your last line is your actual opinion or sarcastic, given the "no true ..." phrasing, but for what it's worth I think it's unironically correct: no one with any brain thinks ChatGPT is anything much like a superintelligence. There are people who expect AI to become godlike, for better or for worse, but the most they're saying about the likes of ChatGPT in this connection is "progress sure seems to be pretty fast these days".)
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Why is this a strawman? Have you seen the Jesus AI on Twitch? Seriously- Goes way back. In the movie THX 1138 the population talk to a AI Jesus.

sharts 3y ago

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.

woeirua 3y ago
I'm only in my mid 30s. I'm _very_ convinced that the world was a better place overall before 2008. Before smartphones, and social media.
- raincole 3y ago
  Like good old late 80s, when the world was on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#/media/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_stockpiles.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#/media/File:...
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Nuclear apocalypse risk is not a linear function of warheads. There is still more than enough warheads to cause near total annihilation and politically, we are closer to it than at any point in the 80s.

habosa 3y ago

> 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.

projektfu 3y ago
It would be nice if the search engines could put the main site for something first. They already do it with their own properties, so it's possible. But they've gotten very bad at it with everything else. For example, you want to search about a car, you'll get some blogspam, a few car magazines, a few local shops, and down the line the manufacturer's website. Now, sometimes the manufacturer doesn't answer a question, but it's amazing how much the search engines promote these SEO articles that repeat a question over and over without answering it.

josu 3y ago

I told chatGPT to replace reference to AI with references to computers. The arguments seem just as valid (and wrong). Here is a snippet. "Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed. Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it." The rest of the article. There is a computer bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by computers. But it will probably be crappier, not better. Contrary to the doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to computers. Contemporary advances in computing aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018: A panel from the webcomic “xkcd” showing a timeline from now into the distant future, dividing the timeline into the periods between “computers become advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of robots” and “computers become self-aware and rebel against human control”. The period from self-awareness to the indefinite future is labelled “the part lots of people seem to worry about”; Randall is instead worried about the part between these two epochs. What will happen to computers is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Language models are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and computers will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains. The biggest lasting changes from computers will be more like the following: - A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work - The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles - More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams - SEO hacking content farms dominating search results - Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market - Computer-generated content overwhelming social media - Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising Computer companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the data monster. You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those computer-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with computer content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm. All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the computer epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math. This will be incredibly profitable for the computer barons, and to secure their investment they are deploying an immense, expensive, world-wide propaganda campaign. To the public, the present-day and potential future capabilities of the technology are played up in breathless promises of ridiculous possibility. In closed-room meetings, much more realistic promises are made of cutting payroll budgets in half. The propaganda also leans into the mystical sci-fi computer canon, the threat of smart computers with world-ending power, the forbidden allure of a new Manhattan project and all of its consequences, the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts and the barons themselves, but the illusion is maintained in the interests of lobbying lawmakers to help the barons erect a moat around their new industry. Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed. Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.

xvilka 3y ago

Just like in Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts, Internet will become unusable thanks to AI-driven spam, phishing, SEO, and other junk content.

ilaksh 3y ago
Is that really because of the AI, or because of humans controlling them? We already have incredible levels of spam, phishing, junk SEO content. Created from humans and scripts driven by humans.
- xvilka 3y ago
  Humans, of course. The AI is just better tool for this "job", better than anything existing before.

bionhoward 3y ago

This part seems sketchy: “the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts” Which experts? Yann? Not sure he counts.

pwillia7 3y ago

This still feels like it's missing the point most doomer technologists do even though it calls them out for it -- The world will be changed by AI, just like the internet, and, just like the internet, it will be full of problems, but problems we mostly can't envision or see. The 'trump card' for all the AI negativity is education. Think of the 590 million Indian kids that live in poverty, for example. If they can get access to a computer and the internet, they will have access to on demand 24/7 first class education. They can even ask questions like they could of a real teacher. The boon to human productivity and possibility for less suffering in our Capitalist earth can't possibly be outweighed by some boogey-man negatives which will probably never materialize anyway.

jostmey 3y ago

I think this article makes sense when analyzing the current technology of AI. But it doesn’t make sense if AI continues to improve. I honestly believe AI will lead to a singularity in the sense that the future of AI cannot be defined and is currently unknowable

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AJRF 3y ago

The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome. Why write this article other than to to smugly say "told you so" in the cases where you turn out right. It is a zero risk take. Looking at the advances in AI (Chess, Go, Protein Folding, MidJourney, ChatGPT) and your takeaway being "Humans will use this in bad ways" shows a ferocious lack of imagination. I notice a desperate, but failing, attempt to lump the advances in AI to the same pool as Crypto greed because that was the smug naysayers nirvana.

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mardifoufs 3y ago
Yeah it's like crypto created this weird crop of "debunkers" who think that being permacynical is good just because it was smart to be cynical about crypto. So now "everything I don't like is just like crypto currency"
- captainbland 3y ago
  I think it's about more than crypto. 'Enshittification' as described here has created a lot of distrust: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-...
dethos 3y ago
> The rush to just shit on everything is so tiresome. I also get that feeling. It seems it is now fashionable to take down anything that might change things (I'm not saying that all change is good). Change resistance is something that always existed and we are already used to, but somehow this looks a bit different, more ideological.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

This is basically MOLOCH. We can't stop ourselves from 'crappifying' ourselves. We are driven by local min/max in society that we can't break free from, until the system breaks. Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ Past post on 'enshittification' from Cory Doctorow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245

npteljes 3y ago

I agree with the message completely. The facade is new, but it can be very similar to the industrial revolution, and how that upset the order of the then-current times. If we want happier, more well-adjusted people, a better functioning world, we will need a better functioning system, of which AI can be a part as much as any other machine already is. No technology will bring us there however. If it's going to happen, it will happen because people will bring it to life. Until that, things are just going to be as-is. Sometimes up, sometimes down, overall upwards hopefully, and sometimes advances will upset the status quo. And hopefully no tech will solidify the absurd rich-poor divide permanently.

nojvek 3y ago

> In case you need to hear it: do not (TW: suicide) seek out OpenAI’s services to help with your depression. Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Talk to your friends and ask them to help you find the right care for your needs. In US healthcare including therapists are quite expensive. Back in the day I was an indie dev and that was really hard on me. In my lows I thought I’d seek a therapist but at $500/half hour appointment that felt like a gut punch. Didn’t have any insurance then. ChatGPT is instantly available and free. Yes, it’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing. For a large part of US, mental therapists are not really accessible when they most need it.

self_awareness 3y ago

I'm not sure if anyone should take the guy seriously. For a person who has "I don't want to talk about AI" in his profile, and banning everyone who dares to have a different opinion, he sure talks about AI a lot.

camdenlock 3y ago

Socialists really are a dreary miserable lot, aren’t they.

nunez 3y ago

Strong points, but I disagree with the timeline a little bit. > A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work I agree and disagree with this. Stable diffusion is art, but creating the art is still within the realm of artists. Also, they'll still need copyediting, refining, etc. I think creatives will transfer or complement their skills with this stuff, like some are already doing. (Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VGa1imApfdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VGa1imApfdg) I also very highly doubt that fine art will ever be 100% AI. Uniqueness drives their value. > The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles Definitely not. Human customer service is key for achieving high eNPS scores. People will always want to talk to other people, even if IVR and chat can address their needs. > More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams Definitely, but it is well documented that the most common types of scams are made to be deliberately "off" to find easy marks more quickly. > SEO hacking content farms dominating search results > Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market Both of these have been happening for many years. OpenAI will make it easier to stand up boilerplate hello-world starters though (as OP called out). I suppose Google will downrank sites like this to prevent incentivizing this. > AI-generated content overwhelming social media Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising This is the one thing I'm actually concerned about. I hope that Reddit doesn't become people talking to other people via ChatGPT assistants. That would be a cultural net loss.

tim333 3y ago

>AI is defined by aggressive capitalism You could have said that for almost all tech improvements in history - electricity, medicine, radio, cars, trains, plumbing etc. Capitalism as in people selling stuff for money is just how things get done. At least to begin with.

berniedurfee 3y ago

I agree with the sentiment overall. There will absolutely be some great benefits provided by LLMs and the like. Alexa type devices that are more useful than a light switch. Auto spelling correction that actually works most of the time. Maybe a microwave oven that just has one ‘Heat this up’ button. But I think the beneficial use cases will be a fraction of the overall use cases. These technologies are going to be far more effective at enshitifying our world. Spam, scams, replacing artists and knowledge workers with tools that can produce ‘good enough’ output… and yeah, military capabilities that’ll allow humans to kill more humans more cost effectively. I’m looking forward to the good stuff, it’ll be neat. But absolutely dreading the wave of horribleness that’ll inevitably come of this.