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AI is not your friend
- 0xdead8ead 3y agoamen, brother
- Olesya000 3y ago[dead]
- gentleman11 3y agoRefreshing stylistically. What a nicely written article
- cyanwave 3y agoWe squeezed it too hard. Resource limit hit.
- andybak 3y agoHow did this argument work when talking about locally run LLMs?
- moffkalast 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shinycode 3y agoI think what he meant by AI is AI in services everywhere. I attended an AWS summit this week and 9 out of 10 of the almost 100 companies had AI written on the punchline of their stand. This is the AI the author meant, AI integrated into services that collect data and use that data to feed the AI to sell more stuff.
- nyc_data_geek 3y agoI was at a VC conference several months ago and ever since I've joked that if I learned nothing else while I was there, I learned how to spell "AI". It's the frothiest space now. Interest rates are high, everyone wants thay next funding round, hence they glom onto the buzz and hype even if they don't have a product or a valid use case, even if they don't solve for anything.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoIf anything thats a signal of where not to invest. Ai is a tool but not always the best tool, sometimes (most of the time potentially) simple linear regression or t test/wilcox will do. All done in a line of code in the standard library of R at least.
- sbierwagen 3y agoHe would probably argue that future LLMs are less likely to have their weights released. It is remarkable and strange that we have so many open-weights models right now, considering how much they cost to make.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIt costs a lot of money to an individual, not to a corporation. Estimates are that it cost Facebook around $20 million for LLaMA, for example. This is less than 0.1% of their annual revenue. It's slightly weird that some of the companies doing this are VC-backed startups with no obvious business model, but that's hardly the only way to create them. Companies like Facebook could continue to release them purely for the PR. The cost is within the range of what could be done from donations by a non-profit organization. It's the sort of thing you might build a business model around in the same way that IBM or Intel does with Linux -- an obvious candidate here would be models released by Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Apple/etc. You might also build a business model out of consulting services rather than hardware sales, e.g. here's a free LLM and now you can pay us to integrate it with your company's systems. This is also assuming that nobody ever figures out how to train a model using distributed computing. The second that happens there will be arbitrarily many free models because there are a zillion people willing to contribute a day's worth of consumer GPU time to a free model project.
- rustcleaner 3y ago>It's slightly weird that some of the companies doing this are VC-backed startups with no obvious business model, but that's hardly the only way to create them. If you are a multi hundred-millionaire, do you privately train a model for fun to release for bragging rights and possibly expose yourself directly to some eyewateringly stupid high statutory damage liability? Or do you get a few friends together, funnel your fun money into a protective vehicle that can be sued instead of you, and go to town having fun and maybe making something of it?
- midzer 3y agoNailed it and made my day.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glitchc 3y agoYes, more of this please.
- freecodyx 3y agowe all know by now that, when it’s free, you’re the product
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI swear that the displaced artist writer mafia is pulling all the stops to try and write low grade hit pieces and AI doomer narratives.
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- throwaway5959 3y agoAlmost invariably the “artists” that are the loudest about how bad generative AI is on social media have 35 followers and make shitty digital “art”, which is mostly anime characters.
- bayindirh 3y agoAlmost: https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/ https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/
- cwaffles 3y agoI think its a fair article. How can you tell that AI has been manipulated to make outputs more appealing to make you do certain actions. You could argue that money <-> favor has been long exchanged, but in this case, we don't have someone to name and shame.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoAI is a tool, and there are lots of open source models available, you can compare results easily. Corporations don't need to pay to degrade the models, they paid to degrade the internet and got the models as a temporary ad-on, at least until we get better at cleaning large data sets.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoIs it? Or is tech folks finding out that they're the baddies and not happy with their reality hitting that of the rest of society? I think it's the latter, but only history will tell. "Tech Is Not Your Friend" would've been more apropos, hype cycles and all that (adtech, crypto, gen AI, etc). Just cut the "changing the world" facade (not wrong! just not for the better in a lot of cases) and come right out with "we're extracting from the economy like wall street, but with code instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811287 ("HN: Do artifacts have politics?") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811085 (valuable subthread on the above citation)
- jsyang00 3y agoNo, you author of "Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation", must be.
- NemoNobody 3y agoWell obviously this is true. Doesn't change the fact that to participate in the world in just a few years you better pick one to interact with bc your not going to be doing too much "normal" stuff otherwise, like shop or write an article, or code a website, or go to work, or I think you get it. I don't think AI is my friend. I don't have to like it for it to be necessary. There is no stopping this. Pray tell, what else do we do?
- kjkjadksj 3y agoAt the same time, some members of generations slightly older than us seem to be managing just fine, living the same analog patterns they’ve always lived, which still exist. I am not worried about the coming ai apocalypse to digital media because I am taking steps now to offshore myself from digital media. I hope one day to be an old man with a book or a newspaper under an arm, smiling inwardly.
- pksebben 3y agoeasy to live just fine when you bought your house prior to 2008. Just sayin'.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoKind of tangential don’t you think
- pksebben 3y agonot really. There's a difference in how much one needs to keep up with tech trends, because there's a difference in how reliant one is in getting and maintaining a job. Despite being paid fairly well, it's unlikely that I'll be able to retire early, given the housing market. A massive amount of every dollar I make is going to quickly ballooning rent and attempting to chase an ever-distant target of home ownership. I cannot afford to "get by just fine". Nor, I imagine, can many of the people in my cohort. Thus, I regularly familiarize myself with whatever it is that's new that offers the possiblity of working less and accomplishing more, because that's about the only place I find I can purchase some down-time for myself. It's certainly not coming in the form of personal equity and retirement. edit to add: I realize my earlier comment was flippant, and I'm sorry for that. The conversation is better served by engagement and I was being crass.
- autoexec 3y ago> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively. It will learn when you're overwhelmed. When you get hungry. When you're emotionally upset. Those are the times it will try to manipulate you and it will come at you in ways targeted to you individually. It will learn from its failures and successes until it knows exactly what to say and when. As adults, we all have defenses against lies and manipulation, but nobody can be hypervigilant at all times. No matter how educated, or healthy, or reasonable, or cautious you are, there will be times when your defenses will slip and that's when AI will hit you. Our children don't even have those kinds of defenses yet. AI will be learning how to manipulate them while they're still learning what is real, how to navigate their environment, and how to communicate. AI will teach them. They won't stand a chance.
- wisty 3y agoI've thought about trying to write a short story about an apocalypse in which Facebook or Youtube creates an AI that's so effective it traps the entire human race (including the creators) into doing nothing but engaging with the app, and doing the bare minimum to survive (and keep the servers running) since that's what it's told to optimise. But I'm not a great writer, and other stuff always comes up (those shorts aren't going to watch themselves!).
- pestaa 3y agoThis comment of yours reads like chapter one. Well done, I guess? Strangely hard to turn something into fiction what we're already going through.
- mdpye 3y agoHave you read Infinite Jest? Barely any of the book is really about it (the actual theme being a study of addiction is many forms), but the ostensive premise is that a video clip has been created that's so compelling that it's impossible to stop watching it. Some of the asides are also hilariously/terrifyingly prescient. The passages on the evolution of video calling are some of my favourites.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cwillu 3y ago8 paragraphs of negative emotional valence. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, you won't learn anything new here.
- subjectsigma 3y agoI imagine that the author would say something like: One of the core tenets of advertising is that repetition works to make people believe ideas. If you want to fight advertising (or other harmful consumerism), you have to repeat yourself as much or more than they do. I suppose this begs the question: If you use the tactics of surveillance capitalists for "good", do you bring yourself to their level?
- kjkjadksj 3y agoYou don’t even have to do that. You can just ask a simple question when presented some media: “who benefits?” This line of thinking can help you reliably deduce the intentions of many pieces of advertisement and propaganda. To just accept the firehose as it is, is to suck from it as its owners intend. Just take a step back and ask why. Logic will reveal the ground truth.
- seadan83 3y agoSame with your comment? Just don't up-vote or comment in the future?
- cwillu 3y agoMy comment isn't surrounded with multiple calls to action to pay me money in exchange for more of my writing. “Flippantly dismissive” is exactly the level of criticism it deserves, given the amount of cheer-leading inanity on display.
- seadan83 3y agoTo some potentially large extent I agree with what you wrote. Though, this guideline is perhaps violated: > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. The guidelines would dissuade us from making 'flippantly dismissive' comments - even if we feel they are merited.
- richrichie 3y ago> It used to be one member of a family could earn enough for the entire family to live well on. Now, both parents are working and they’re struggling. It is a small price to pay for women in workforce.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- outside1234 3y agoThis is why it is so important we get to OSS AI models and run them locally
- stuckkeys 3y agoWas it ever haha
- Animats 3y agoAdvertising is not your friend. Use ad blockers.
- bediger4000 3y agoAd blockers are personal infosec
- treyd 3y agoAd-based business models have been a cancer on the user experience of software for far too long and it's gotten way too out of hand. Federal agencies have even come out and stated that use of adblockers is good security practice. The advertising industry serves primarily to manipulate consumer decision making and distort markets to prop up products and services that aren't able to stand on their own. We don't need it and it's destroying us.
- bitwize 3y ago"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." Obtaining ad-supported service while blocking ads is theft of service. Do not expect such theft to go unpunished.
- non-chalad 3y agoI will watch their ads, when they stop injecting malware through those ads.
- treyd 3y agoIs it theft of service to mute my TV and look away when I watch OTA television?
- pksebben 3y ago"Powerful technologies, when placed in the hands of bad actors with ugly motives in an incentive structure that encourages usury, are bad". Sure. But how about we do something about all the rest of that instead? Open source all the things. Create locally runnable software. Move from social networks to social protocols. Decouple from the economic juggernaut whose only goal is to maintain a stratification of social class and persist an artificial scarcity that keeps people wage-enslaved. Then we can develop all the superpowered tech we want without stressing about this bullshit, and maybe (just MAYBE) develop something to prevent the oceans from boiling over before 2100.
- temporarely 3y agoToo bad Gerry didn't ask an LLM to help him out with the article. A 'bit' over the top. In fact, it did make me wonder if this is supposed to be a send up sponsored by the Ad Council.. "Free. Any world built on free is a scam world, a grift world, a con world, a world of lies. And so much of the Internet is built on free. Because free is a lie. A Big Lie." OSS, gerry. Now mom and dad can't make ends meet not because of advertising but because the political economy changed. It is not because mom and dad are induced to consume more by advertising. No, Gerry, the purpose of advertising in that case is to offer 'consolation of consumerism' to deal with realities of the political economy and their seat at the table. No, Gerry, the actual problem with advertising is that it is used as a pretext to foist the Surveillance System on the Western "democracies" so that the little snitch we "must" carry on our person is made prone to surveillance "because advertising". The problem with AI as an social intermediary is that it can manipulate us, not to "buy stuff", no Gerry, but to change our minds about actually important matter. Stuff like keeping the folks who have a perch at the table above and want to keep it that way for themselves and their issue perpetually in power and control.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway5959 3y agoY’all need to put your phones down and step away from your computers for a while. Maybe touch some grass. Or smoke some.
- kazinator 3y agoI've not been advertised to by any AI so far. I've not had a product or service promoted to me by a chat answer, nor have I seen any advertising elements in an AI-generated image. The chat experience has been a lot better than, say, Google search, in terms of spam. The claim would have to be that those promotional elements are there, but are subliminal, so as not to be consciously perceived, which is a stretch. To be sure, there are likely developments coming which will bear out the concerns in the article. Also, a lot of AI out there is paid. You get some limited free service, but must sign up and pay for a premium experience. That's the model, not ad support. Some of the sites are additionally ad supported, but in the regular way in that ads appear in the UI (easily blocked by a browser extension).
- nickpsecurity 3y agoI’ll note that Google itself originally started where it was mostly serving its users. Many social media sites were like that. The Xbox Home Screen used to be like that. They captured a huge market, figured out how to integrate ads, and then forced them on their users. AI made or used by ad companies might follow a similar path. I think they’ll mostly try to show you ads outside the AI itself, though. Maybe on the page or in the app where you interact with the AI. Or it stays as bait for their ad-driven services.
- kazinator 3y agoIt will be interesting to see how AI gets deliberately enshittified, and whether those strategies will work. I have a feeling (and I hope I'm right) that people will not tolerate bullshit AI interactions as much as they tolerated crap web search results. My reasoning is due to these differences. - Under web searching, the Ad results (sponsored links) are delineated. You can filter those out or skip them, and you know there is real search content after that. - In the reach search content, there is spam. But there is a rhetoric that at least used to be plausible that the spam is not the search engine's fault. The search engine indexing and ranking follow some algorithm that is not highly intelligent, and is being gamed by the SEO bad guys. Not only did people make that excuse, but they knew that if they sift through the long tail of the search result, they may be able to find what they are looking for; i.e. that it's there, just outranked. I suspect, people won't be willing to apologetic excuses on behalf of AI. If it's bullshitting them, they will end the conversation and go to another AI. Google built an advantage in the search space through massive infrastructure. In AI, it's possible to wield market power through hardware also. All else being equal, people will go for the free, highly available, fast AI, compared to slow, paid, downtime-riddled AI. There will probably be a battle among AIs for integration into applications and services. That's where a particular AI will be able to get a stranglehold on the users: AI integrated into apps for which there are no easy substitutes, and where you can't choose another AI.
- rustcleaner 3y agoAnti-surveillance will be a basis in this millennium's new techno- religious systems. Removing hokus pokus folk spirituality for a moment, the psyche is effectively equivalent to the 'soul' insofar as surveillance and advertising systems are designed to attack their targets at their most spiritual level. Money is highly religious: it is the balancer of your behaviors and relationship with the social whole and the ecosystem. I quote nothing from any text, this is from occult knowledge one gathers on one's path toward enlightenment; you are little different from fields of soy or oats when it comes to marketing (growing the crop) and value extraction (harvest the crop), in minds of these systems. It's rarely "How do we make existence more tolerable for more minds, and possibly help awaken their minds;" and more "How do we maximize yield this quarter to increase our bonuses?" You have to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to start getting paranoid about data which can be gleaned from your behaviors.
- ofcourseyoudo 3y agoThis piece is so incomprehensible and poorly-written it seems like it was generated by an AI (and not even a good one). The BLUF is: AI might be selling your interactions to advertisers. Second point, not original, much belabored is that nothing is truly "free" on the internet.
- tim333 3y agoThe article all seems a bit negative. I mean AI isn't you friend or your enemy. It's a tool that can do some quite useful stuff, in a similar way to the internet or cell phones or whatever. There can be good and bad aspects to all of those. And none are going away because for every misery who thinks they are predators etc. there are quite a lot of us who like using them.