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>Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses

>Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted?

happytoexplain 2y ago
I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.
- tempfile 2y ago
  It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.
  - happytoexplain 2y ago
    I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts. Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem. This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when people talk about AI, they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code (as opposed to e.g. medical diagnosis).
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code That was what I took TFA to be speaking about. It's ambiguous, probably because author didn't expect an audience of HN readers, but most of the enumerated concerns and uses cases are specific to "AI as replacement for human creativity, in artistic endeavors."
  - pxc 2y ago
    > It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it. A lot of people (particularly Americans) seem to think of nuclear bombs in exactly this way. They typically see the 'some task' to be of extremely outsized necessity and importance, and I think they'd say that makes the two ideas cohere.
    - tempfile 2y ago
      Then those people do not seriously think nuclear weapons are an affront to humanity. It doesn't just mean "very bad". It's against human dignity. You shouldn't do it, ever. Killing isn't an affront to humanity, but torture is, for example. If you think using nuclear weapons can be justified, then you don't think they're evil, you just think they're dangerous.
      - pxc 2y ago
        I absolutely agree about nukes. The US' use of nukes was barbaric imperialism and when USians' say it was justified I think that's a transparent post-hoc rationalization. And I agree totally that the position I outlined is deeply hypocritical. I'm less sure that it's an outright logical contradiction, but I'm inclined to agree with you there as well.
      - Vecr 2y ago
        If you claim something is an "affront to humanity" it clearly induces doubt in your opponent that you would use it. Not a good negotiating position where deterrence is concerned.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Not really, many AI doomer types use AI for various tasks. Obviously they need to for research, but even outside that they say they get benefit.
- pxc 2y ago
  Indeed the latter is kind of a precursor to the former: AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall. Setting aside the apocalyptic prediction in particular, this sort of thing is already the case with many things that have become irritating or pernicious at scale, like automated phone systems and SEO. The latter of those examples already includes AI more and more. If AI weren't a helpful device for reducing writing costs, it wouldn't be playing a role in filling the web with worthless SEO-spam garbage.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall. I'm sure the strong proponents of AI in all the places have never griped about false positive account permabans from cloud services or app stores. What could possible go wrong with turning a function over to an automated system that's <100% correct, realizing cost savings by downsizing the human support backing it, and then eventually just engineering the process so all appeals are piped to /dev/null? PS: What we need are mandatory rights to appeal to a human, when automated decision systems are used, with legally defined response time SLAs and arbitration options.
    - airspresso 2y ago
      This seems misplaced in a discussion about generative AI. Automated systems for handling appels are already a thing and don't necessarily rely on generative AI like LLMs. I agree that bans and appeal handling needs a human in the loop to work as intended, to have some way of handling the false positives. Without a human in the loop the appeal process can just as well be removed entirely, because it won't fulfill its purpose.
      - pxc 2y ago
        Whether it's misplaced or not kinda depends on how big of a deal you think recent and upcoming generative AIs are. If they're really incredible, their recognition as something that makes moderation automation cheaper and/or better is likely to inject new energy into the preexisting drive to automate tasks like moderation and policy appeals. In the same way, if they make it possible to automate things that strictly required humans before (which seems to be the case for LLMs already), new classes of tasks will be automated that weren't before. Those things make things like a general right to appeals before competent, human reviewers more urgent, even if it's been a good idea for a long time. On the other hand, if you don't see recent and upcoming generative AIs as that world-changing, they don't really change the picture as to whether or not the enshrinement of such a right into policy is warranted.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  This. The question isn't whether or not there are benefits to be had from the technology. The question is whether or not the cost/benefit ratio is favorable. It's not clear to me what the answer to that actually is.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
I thought so too. But then I changed my mind [0]. Especially after asking some other people what they thought. In a nutshell it's about association. People see an AI image and start thinking... hey maybe the prose and video had a little 'help' too. Still haven't got around to replacing all the generative thumbnails. Once AI stuff get's into your content it's like pollution and a royal PITA to sieve out. [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/nomoreai https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/nomoreai
wasteduniverse 2y ago
[dead]
yugffred 2y ago
Someone has to stop giving these sloppyjoes the clicks, because then they’ll stop making slop. They are uninterested in the content they just want the clicks. If a doctor just slops a diagnosis that results in malpractice via “hallucination” then people will stop going to them. Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle? What a weird interpretation of what I said. Obviously I mean a competent doctor that uses AI-assistance in a responsible manner, not a dangerous doctor that commits malpractice.
  - yugffred 2y ago
    It’s helpful to examine extremes to see where your logic breaks down. You are assuming a “competent” blogger even in the face of a slop banner. How will you know the doctor is competent? All you know is they give sloppy diagnoses. How will the op know the blog writer is competent? Their metric is “if they use slop at the top of their blog it’s a waste of their time to investigate further”.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Not sure if you mean me but I wasn't interested in clicks when writing this article. In fact, I was getting thousands of clicks and comments on Medium and now I get almost none because I deleted all my articles there. I wasn't making money either. So, not about clicks. I'm just genuinely concerned about the future of life on this planet.
packetlost 2y ago
> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >In 2020, Zhang’s team developed an AI imaging-assisted diagnosis system for COVID-19 pneumonia and published in Cell. Based on the 500,000 copies of CT images that the team studied, the system was able to distinguish COVID-19 from other viral pneumonias within 20 seconds, with an accuracy rate of more than 90%. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=cookies_not_supported&code=eadf6250-1e42-4c6a-8ca3-7dbfb9c2f109 https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=coo... >AI improves the lives of patients, physicians, and hospital managers by doing activities usually performed by people but in a fraction of the time and the expense. [...] Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8754556/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8754556/
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    I mean if I was given a COVID diagnosis or non-diagnosis based on the above, I'd be reporting the doctor, because it's far worse accuracy than generally available methods (even antigen methods)... Even if visual methods were the only means of diagnosing COVID (as was the case for the first few weeks after the virus emerged), sorry, but I'd be asking for an actual radiologist. Radiologists were able to do this with better accuracy. Really, the only way this could possibly be useful were in a hypothetical case where only visual methods were available and there weren't enough radiologists, and even then it wouldn't be _very_ useful, given the high failure rate. > Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. This sounds very fuzzy. Can you appoint to specific approved applications, or is this all hypothetical?
JohnFen 2y ago
> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? I can't speak for the author, obviously, but personally my answer would be "it depends". If the diagnosis came from a doctor who happened to use AI as one of their tools, I'm OK with that (as long as it was a locally-hosted AI, but that's a different issue). If the diagnosis came from AI without a substantial amount of analysis from a doctor, then I'd absolutely reject that.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  That sounds like a completely reasonable approach! What the author has written, in my opinion, is unreasonable because it is absolute in its hatred for AI.
rsynnott 2y ago
> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Increasingly (and I think certainly in the above case) AI is used as shorthand for genAI (which is unsurprising, as up until recently most AI-ish things got called ML anyway). I certainly hope no-one's using LLMs for medical diagnoses... > I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? It really depends on what you mean by 'AI-assisted', IMO. If you mean that the doctor had asked a chatbot, I'd very much be looking for a second opinion. What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind. The designed-for-medicine kind, not the ChatGPT kind.
jaredcwhite 2y ago
I'm 100% in agreement with the author, and to answer your question: if I found out my doctor had based their diagnosis on output from an AI, I'd find another doctor.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  I find that wild, but to each their own!
  - nunez 2y ago
    i find it wild that you would trust technology that has no problem with giving you wildly wrong information!
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      We're not talking about a doctor logging onto ChatGPT and asking it a question then blindly following what ChatGPT says.
      - nunez 2y ago
        But we _are_ talking about developers working on critical path software, like medical devices, who would do exactly this. (There have also been some reports of doctors making diagnosis decisions based on ChatGPT results.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewinardeer 2y ago
  How do you reconcile that you interact with AI when you may not even realise? This could be in the form of a recommendation feed, a newsreader delivering a story on the 6 o'clock news or using software that was built by it?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
nunez 2y ago
I think it's an incredibly valid take. People are already using AI to write emails, essays, publications, and more. SWEs are using it to literally do their job. This stuff brings us even closer to the last act of the movie "Up." It's insane to me that people _don't_ see this.
thankyoufriend 2y ago
GenAI will just be a way to reduce labor costs and capture/monetize customer data even further. IMO, everyone should be against non-local GenAI in any product and they should be against even local GenAI when its downstream effects clash with human interests. Does GenAI monetarily disincentivize the self-expression of humanity through art and other creative endeavors, such endeavors that were already difficult to make a living on pre-GenAI? I think it does.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? If I had a choice, I would not allow the doctor to give me an AI assisted diagnosis in the first place.

happytoexplain 2y ago

I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.

tempfile 2y ago
It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts. Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem. This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when people talk about AI, they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code (as opposed to e.g. medical diagnosis).
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code That was what I took TFA to be speaking about. It's ambiguous, probably because author didn't expect an audience of HN readers, but most of the enumerated concerns and uses cases are specific to "AI as replacement for human creativity, in artistic endeavors."
- pxc 2y ago
  > It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it. A lot of people (particularly Americans) seem to think of nuclear bombs in exactly this way. They typically see the 'some task' to be of extremely outsized necessity and importance, and I think they'd say that makes the two ideas cohere.
  - tempfile 2y ago
    Then those people do not seriously think nuclear weapons are an affront to humanity. It doesn't just mean "very bad". It's against human dignity. You shouldn't do it, ever. Killing isn't an affront to humanity, but torture is, for example. If you think using nuclear weapons can be justified, then you don't think they're evil, you just think they're dangerous.
    - pxc 2y ago
      I absolutely agree about nukes. The US' use of nukes was barbaric imperialism and when USians' say it was justified I think that's a transparent post-hoc rationalization. And I agree totally that the position I outlined is deeply hypocritical. I'm less sure that it's an outright logical contradiction, but I'm inclined to agree with you there as well.
    - Vecr 2y ago
      If you claim something is an "affront to humanity" it clearly induces doubt in your opponent that you would use it. Not a good negotiating position where deterrence is concerned.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Not really, many AI doomer types use AI for various tasks. Obviously they need to for research, but even outside that they say they get benefit.
pxc 2y ago
Indeed the latter is kind of a precursor to the former: AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall. Setting aside the apocalyptic prediction in particular, this sort of thing is already the case with many things that have become irritating or pernicious at scale, like automated phone systems and SEO. The latter of those examples already includes AI more and more. If AI weren't a helpful device for reducing writing costs, it wouldn't be playing a role in filling the web with worthless SEO-spam garbage.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall. I'm sure the strong proponents of AI in all the places have never griped about false positive account permabans from cloud services or app stores. What could possible go wrong with turning a function over to an automated system that's <100% correct, realizing cost savings by downsizing the human support backing it, and then eventually just engineering the process so all appeals are piped to /dev/null? PS: What we need are mandatory rights to appeal to a human, when automated decision systems are used, with legally defined response time SLAs and arbitration options.
  - airspresso 2y ago
    This seems misplaced in a discussion about generative AI. Automated systems for handling appels are already a thing and don't necessarily rely on generative AI like LLMs. I agree that bans and appeal handling needs a human in the loop to work as intended, to have some way of handling the false positives. Without a human in the loop the appeal process can just as well be removed entirely, because it won't fulfill its purpose.
    - pxc 2y ago
      Whether it's misplaced or not kinda depends on how big of a deal you think recent and upcoming generative AIs are. If they're really incredible, their recognition as something that makes moderation automation cheaper and/or better is likely to inject new energy into the preexisting drive to automate tasks like moderation and policy appeals. In the same way, if they make it possible to automate things that strictly required humans before (which seems to be the case for LLMs already), new classes of tasks will be automated that weren't before. Those things make things like a general right to appeals before competent, human reviewers more urgent, even if it's been a good idea for a long time. On the other hand, if you don't see recent and upcoming generative AIs as that world-changing, they don't really change the picture as to whether or not the enshrinement of such a right into policy is warranted.
JohnFen 2y ago
This. The question isn't whether or not there are benefits to be had from the technology. The question is whether or not the cost/benefit ratio is favorable. It's not clear to me what the answer to that actually is.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

I thought so too. But then I changed my mind [0]. Especially after asking some other people what they thought. In a nutshell it's about association. People see an AI image and start thinking... hey maybe the prose and video had a little 'help' too. Still haven't got around to replacing all the generative thumbnails. Once AI stuff get's into your content it's like pollution and a royal PITA to sieve out. [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/nomoreai https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/nomoreai

wasteduniverse 2y ago

[dead]

yugffred 2y ago

Someone has to stop giving these sloppyjoes the clicks, because then they’ll stop making slop. They are uninterested in the content they just want the clicks. If a doctor just slops a diagnosis that results in malpractice via “hallucination” then people will stop going to them. Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?

ziddoap 2y ago
>Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle? What a weird interpretation of what I said. Obviously I mean a competent doctor that uses AI-assistance in a responsible manner, not a dangerous doctor that commits malpractice.
- yugffred 2y ago
  It’s helpful to examine extremes to see where your logic breaks down. You are assuming a “competent” blogger even in the face of a slop banner. How will you know the doctor is competent? All you know is they give sloppy diagnoses. How will the op know the blog writer is competent? Their metric is “if they use slop at the top of their blog it’s a waste of their time to investigate further”.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
Not sure if you mean me but I wasn't interested in clicks when writing this article. In fact, I was getting thousands of clicks and comments on Medium and now I get almost none because I deleted all my articles there. I wasn't making money either. So, not about clicks. I'm just genuinely concerned about the future of life on this planet.

packetlost 2y ago

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.

ziddoap 2y ago
>In 2020, Zhang’s team developed an AI imaging-assisted diagnosis system for COVID-19 pneumonia and published in Cell. Based on the 500,000 copies of CT images that the team studied, the system was able to distinguish COVID-19 from other viral pneumonias within 20 seconds, with an accuracy rate of more than 90%. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=cookies_not_supported&code=eadf6250-1e42-4c6a-8ca3-7dbfb9c2f109 https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=coo... >AI improves the lives of patients, physicians, and hospital managers by doing activities usually performed by people but in a fraction of the time and the expense. [...] Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8754556/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8754556/
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean if I was given a COVID diagnosis or non-diagnosis based on the above, I'd be reporting the doctor, because it's far worse accuracy than generally available methods (even antigen methods)... Even if visual methods were the only means of diagnosing COVID (as was the case for the first few weeks after the virus emerged), sorry, but I'd be asking for an actual radiologist. Radiologists were able to do this with better accuracy. Really, the only way this could possibly be useful were in a hypothetical case where only visual methods were available and there weren't enough radiologists, and even then it wouldn't be _very_ useful, given the high failure rate. > Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. This sounds very fuzzy. Can you appoint to specific approved applications, or is this all hypothetical?

JohnFen 2y ago

> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? I can't speak for the author, obviously, but personally my answer would be "it depends". If the diagnosis came from a doctor who happened to use AI as one of their tools, I'm OK with that (as long as it was a locally-hosted AI, but that's a different issue). If the diagnosis came from AI without a substantial amount of analysis from a doctor, then I'd absolutely reject that.

ziddoap 2y ago
That sounds like a completely reasonable approach! What the author has written, in my opinion, is unreasonable because it is absolute in its hatred for AI.

rsynnott 2y ago

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Increasingly (and I think certainly in the above case) AI is used as shorthand for genAI (which is unsurprising, as up until recently most AI-ish things got called ML anyway). I certainly hope no-one's using LLMs for medical diagnoses... > I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? It really depends on what you mean by 'AI-assisted', IMO. If you mean that the doctor had asked a chatbot, I'd very much be looking for a second opinion. What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind.

ziddoap 2y ago
>What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind. The designed-for-medicine kind, not the ChatGPT kind.

jaredcwhite 2y ago

I'm 100% in agreement with the author, and to answer your question: if I found out my doctor had based their diagnosis on output from an AI, I'd find another doctor.

ziddoap 2y ago
I find that wild, but to each their own!
- nunez 2y ago
  i find it wild that you would trust technology that has no problem with giving you wildly wrong information!
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    We're not talking about a doctor logging onto ChatGPT and asking it a question then blindly following what ChatGPT says.
    - nunez 2y ago
      But we _are_ talking about developers working on critical path software, like medical devices, who would do exactly this. (There have also been some reports of doctors making diagnosis decisions based on ChatGPT results.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
andrewinardeer 2y ago
How do you reconcile that you interact with AI when you may not even realise? This could be in the form of a recommendation feed, a newsreader delivering a story on the 6 o'clock news or using software that was built by it?
- ethbr1 2y ago

nunez 2y ago

I think it's an incredibly valid take. People are already using AI to write emails, essays, publications, and more. SWEs are using it to literally do their job. This stuff brings us even closer to the last act of the movie "Up." It's insane to me that people _don't_ see this.

thankyoufriend 2y ago

GenAI will just be a way to reduce labor costs and capture/monetize customer data even further. IMO, everyone should be against non-local GenAI in any product and they should be against even local GenAI when its downstream effects clash with human interests. Does GenAI monetarily disincentivize the self-expression of humanity through art and other creative endeavors, such endeavors that were already difficult to make a living on pre-GenAI? I think it does.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? If I had a choice, I would not allow the doctor to give me an AI assisted diagnosis in the first place.