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Ask HN: I'm getting overwhelmed by AI. How to cope?
I can't keep up with the advancements in technology and it's taking my sanity away. I remember when GPT-3 was released in 2020 and it was all the news. I remember how "stupid" it was and how we mocked it, last year we got GPT-4 that blew everyone away and this year we are getting GPT-5. Technology is moving forward way too fast for my brain to keep up and all these LLMs are getting so good that almost nothing is worth doing anymore.
Learning takes time. Perfecting a skill takes time. I have to spend a year learning Unity game engine and another year to make a simple video game. Maybe I want to try selling it and make a living out of it. Why bother when AI can alredy give me code snippets and detailed instructions, in a year or two it will be able to produce a complete product. I can't compete with that, there are already tens of thousands video games for sale on Steam alone right now.
Maybe I want to learn digital painting and 3D modelling and animation to show it to others. Why spend years learning all that when text to 3D is already so good you can plug and play without very little work. Unity 6 is introducing an impressive text to 3D animation feature. That will make animators and modellers obsolete overnight.
Maybe I want to write a novel and have people read it, but why bother when Gemini can already do it better than I ever could. It's already producing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction in an automated fashion and it's getting harder and harder to know if it's written by a human or AI. You can't compete with all the spam on Amazon and even if you could, how could you ever prove to someone that you are the sole author and haven't used AI in your work?
Same goes for everything else that is not a strictly physical activity. There is already so much spam generated by people using AI products that I wonder how will anything have value in the future? I watched a Youtube short the other day and I had no idea the video was AI generated (it was a podcast) until I read it in the comments. I could spot these fakes in a split of a second just a year ago.
AI can do it fast, it can do it well and it can do it cheap. Everything I ever wanted to learn or do now seems like a waste of time. I am becoming apathic. I still have the same job I had when GPT-3 came out, still live in the same property and drive the same car. Seems like not much has changed in my personal life but the techno-world we are currently living through is changing so fast that I might not know how to navigate it in the very near future. So how do I cope with that? How do I adjust? What is my responsibility as a member of society in the context of intellectual participation if all the intellectual work is being outsourced to AI? Can I even be useful anymore? What is my role from now on? What do great minds of today think about that?
> AI can do [intellectual work] well
You are living in a radically different world than I am. AI-generated content is noticably shitty in almost every sphere. Improvement probably will come, but it's pretty damn far off from acceptable (let alone good) right now. Literally every time I've tried to use it for coding problems, it's hallucinated a non-existent function/option or given me something that _looks_ correct but has a fundamental flaw, and AI prose has a distinctive and jarring tone.
That said, taking your premises as assumed - well, you have two choices. You can "uplevel" - not in terms of skill, but in terms of "where in the stack" you operate. Instead of creating thought-work outputs, be the one that wrangles and directs the AI-tools (and catches their errors and false assumptions - of which there will be many! In effect, make yourself a Tech Lead of a bunch of developers, where the developers happen to be AIs instead of people).
Or, you can opt out of the technological space and do something that can still only be done by an embodied human - like in-person services, creation/upkeep/maintenance of physical objects or systems.
(This is approaching this from the perspective of "how do I keep remaining valuable and employable to earn a living wage?", rather than "how do I continue to find fulfillment and meaning in my life?", which still hasn't changed - there are plenty of people who are better than me at the things I find enjoyable, and my enjoyment of them wouldn't change if AI also surpassed me. See /u/quasse's comment for a better presentation of this idea)
Yeah, pretty much the same experience here. Prose or poetry, AI-generated text is awful. AI-generated images also tend to look awful unless they're obsessively-directed and processed. AI-generated music is still so bad it's hilarious. Some AI can kinda code, but only if you limit it to the purview of boilerplate generation. A lot of common APIs and libraries simply don't exist, in ChatGPT's head.
I feel like as a programmer this just reaffirms to me why humans are still a valuable resource for problem-solving; text-generation doesn't put food on the table. Thinking is valuable, and while some people might not realize or care, trying to let ChatGPT manage a serious project is like delegating a task to an auditorium of monkeys on typewriters.
> A lot of common APIs and libraries simply don't exist, in ChatGPT's head.
And, conversely, it assumes the existence of a lot of APIs or libraries that it would be nice if they _did_ exist, but they don't (though, as I've seen someone else comment elsewhere - that's no bad thing if you view it as inspiration rather than gospel. You can ask the LLM "what function would make this task easier if it existed?", and then divert your attention to creating _that_ function instead).
In fairness - it's still a helpful tool which can provide leverage/acceleration for human-directed creation, and I do believe that the quality will improve drastically over the coming years. But we're still a long way off from the time when they can take the lead rather than be a tool.
> I'm getting overwhelmed by AI. How to cope?
Ignore it.
The world may or may not be going to hell in a handbasket, but the being overwhelmed part is on you.
If it's really immediately interfering with your ability to support yourself, and I mean immediately: Have you been laid off? Is some other aspect preventing you from maing the money to pay your rent? if not, follow the "Ignore it" advice above.
If you really are looking for a long term strategy to prevent being economically sidelined, then consider beconming a plumber, or electrician. This answer is in your intro. Physical trades won't be replaced by software, and they are in demand. Conisder becoming a heat pump installer.
Or, maybe this is all a troll? Written by AI? Who knows, so why worry?
AIs are tools similar to hammers and such. Their function is to help us achieve a goal. Mostly, we don't grab a hammer and think about where we can use it. We start with a problem and then we ask what tools we need to fix it. A hammer might be part of the solution.
We have many problems in real life where AI will help. Our job is to find impactful problems that will help the human race and then use AI to help solve them. Your job is to understand and focus on a section of life, figure out where help is needed and then use the available tools to solve problems. AI might be part of the solution but there are countless other tools that will help too. In short don't let AI dictate your actions. Instead, use (tell) AI where it needs to help.
To start, here are areas of human life that will never change. As long as there are humans. Humans needs such as food, water, sex, companionship, peace keepers, the ability to communicate and on and on. Focus on solutions in any of these areas and you'll be rewarded.
Tools can sometimes be interesting enough in them selves to justify learning about just the tool. Not disagreeing with the comment just adding my take.
I bought a little CNC machine years ago. I just wanted to learn a little more. Then started looking around for projects that might make a little money, more just to know if there are "profitable" projects I could do with it (mildly successful).
As for the original question, start with simple (an alarm clock that tells you why you need to get up?) and build up from there. I would like to hear if you come up with something. Good luck.
Computers are tools similar to hammers, too. Lots of people in the technology industry do, in fact, start with a computer and think about where they can use it to solve a problem.
Firstly, remember the AI companies have something that is able to do interesting product demos but that is it. If I had a dog that could tell me what was happening in the world but got it wrong 5% of the time my response would be "Oh shit, a talking dog!" and then I would keep watching the news as normal. This is not going to get better: the energy demands are enormous, the amount of untapped data sets for consumption into the models is rapidly running out and the one company who I would have thought would have the best data set, Google, has an AI that tells people cook spaghetti in gasoline for flavor.
Secondly, I want you to think about who is most excited for AI "art". Without wishing to disparage them too unfairly, they are the sort of people who could have a meal prepared by a Michelin Star restaurant or the custard machine from Teletubbies and would evaluate both by portion size.
No one is excited to go see an AI generated movie. No one is looking forward to the weekend so they can curl up on the couch and read an AI generated novel. There is no demand for AI art on the consumer side, it is entirely on the production side by bean counters who would have had Michelangelo carve the Statue of David from styrofoam to save money.
The future is not in AI, if anything the oceans of AI slop will destroy the recommendation algorithms so we'll be back to good old fashioned human curation.
Honestly, I would suggest maybe talking to a therapist about these feelings; you cannot look at every aspect of your life through a lens of effort/reward mechanics.
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> Honestly, I would suggest maybe talking to a therapist about these feelings
OP, please do not flippantly write this off - this is excellent advice for anyone (mental health is chronically undervalued), but _especially_ for someone who mired in despair and hopelessness as you seem to be (and as I was ~5 years ago). It might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself.
There seem, to me, really two bifurcating paths ahead. Maybe 2.5.
In both of them, AI is Not My Problem.
In A, we get a technological singularity, and AI is beneficial and benevolent; life is radically improved. In A.5, we don’t quite get to that technological singularity immediately, but get vast improvements in domain-specific systems from individually optimized models. Life is still significantly improved, so much that the edges of post-scarcity start to hit. This is the only one with a maybe caveat, but if anything it’d be leveling disparities.
In B, we get a technological singularity (or closeish) but fail to get the alignment problem down. The Terminator movies are so far from how badly we’d lose it won’t matter.