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Knowing less about AI makes people more open to using it
- dartos 2y agoIt’s just like politics! The less you know about any politician, the more you like them!
- Spivak 2y agoEh, politics ain't that special when it comes to this phenomenon. Don't meet your heroes works for pretty much every field.
- allears 2y agoAnd sausage-making...
- venkat223 2y agoAs Phillip Kotler says marketing is cosmetic cheating AI marketing wants all not to know the intricacies and risks by analysing it.They want to celebrate what we get.Sounds like bounded rationalities canvassed by marketing cheaters.
- Qwertious 2y ago>As Phillip Kotler says marketing is cosmetic cheating AI marketing wants all not to know the intricacies and risks by analysing it.They want to celebrate what we get.Sounds like bounded rationalities canvassed by marketing cheaters. Your comment is incomprehensible. Please use commas.
- sebmellen 2y agoHere’s a try: > As Phillip Kotler says: “marketing is cosmetic cheating”. AI marketing wants [us] all not to know the intricacies and risks [that we would find] by analysing [the AI]. [The AI labs] want us to celebrate what we get. Sounds like bounded rationalities [that have been] canvassed by marketing cheaters.
- roywiggins 2y agoAmericans tend to like their own House representatives far more than they like Congress writ large.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 2y agoI don’t know how my ipad works but I like using it a lot. I have no clue how strawberries get from a field to my grocery store but I really like eating them. There’s a limit to how much I am willing to learn and there’s a heck of a lot of things I’ll just accept at face value because I believe they make my life better. So far AI makes my life better so I don’t particularly care to learn about it.
- gumperbumper 2y agoThe assertion here is that there is a negative correlation between knowledge of AI and enjoyment of AI. For both iPads and Strawberries, I expect you would not like them less were you to learn more about them.
- quantified 2y agoIgnorance is bliss.
- paulcole 2y agoHow fun do you think the ipad factories and strawberry fields are to work in? How many pesticides are on the strawberries? How many people in Africa get killed so some warlord can run the cobalt mines.
- sharkjacobs 2y agoThat's a fine and reasonable take, but that's not what the article is about at all > those with less understanding may see AI as magical and awe inspiring. We suggest this sense of magic makes them more open to using AI tools. > this link between lower literacy and higher receptivity persists even though people with lower AI literacy are more likely to view AI as less capable, less ethical, and even a bit scary
- tro2102 2y agoI would also venture a guess that someone on hacker news who claims they know nothing about how an ipad or produce transport works isn't necessarily someone to pay close attention to.
- ksenzee 2y ago> These insights pose a challenge for policymakers and educators. Efforts to boost AI literacy might unintentionally dampen people’s enthusiasm for using AI by making it seem less magical. This creates a tricky balance between helping people understand AI and keeping them open to its adoption. To make the most of AI’s potential, businesses, educators and policymakers need to strike this balance. Why would we avoid educating people, in order to keep them willing to use AI? Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself? Did AI write this article? (Don’t answer that.)
- autobodie 2y agothe profit motive
- blibble 2y ago> Why would we avoid educating people, in order to keep them willing to use AI? Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself? because you can't extract a few tenths of a cent every time someone engages their brain
- LambdaComplex 2y ago> you can't extract a few tenths of a cent every time someone engages their brain Don't give the startups any ideas
- voidhorse 2y agoYou're striking at the fundamental irrationality behind the current hype cycle. It is still, in the vast majority of cases, a solution looking for a real problem. Since there isn't an actual clear benefit or problem to solve yet, that justifies the high costs, people are trying to make their (silly) bets come true by brute force (get everyone to use this thing so I get my ROI, whether it makes any actual sense or not).
- JohnMakin 2y agoI’m sure it’s already a solution to a lot of things, that just aren’t sexy or justifiable for the current cost - for instance, if it was cheap enough, I would never have to use a keyboard again, which due to a disability I have, is becoming more difficult. That would help a lot of people almost certainly, but since it isn’t like, the next iphone, people turn their noses at it. Solutions like neuralink if they become mature could probably use some sort of llm powered translation layer to machine instructions (which neither tech is near being perfect with). Things like that, I think we can technically do already, it is a matter of refining - the magical stuff though, I’m less sure of.
- oidar 2y agoThe paper referenced is behind a paywall. This article is really hard to understand because the paper it is reporting on uses "AI literacy" as the determinant of "openness to AI". I'm very curious about what they mean by "AI literacy".
- paulgb 2y agoThis seems to be it: https://thearf-org-unified-admin.s3.amazonaws.com/MSI_Report_24-132.pdf https://thearf-org-unified-admin.s3.amazonaws.com/MSI_Report...
- ripped_britches 2y agoOr on the far end of the spectrum of literacy, we have serious techno optimists that understand the fullest potential of lifesaving research (alpha fold, etc)
- paulgb 2y agoThis seems to be largely predicated on the idea that the more you understand how AI works the more the magic disappears[1], but I think the opposite is true -- I like to think I understand this stuff from the logic gates to backpropagation to at least BERT-era attention, and the fact that all of those parts come together into something I now spend hours a day conversing with in plain English to solve real problems is absolutely awe-inspiring to me. [1] from the source article “we argue that consumers who perceive AI as magical will experience feelings of awe leading to greater AI receptivity”
- blooalien 2y agoAlso, for many people I know who don't properly understand "AI", their reaction is less "awe" and more "fear". It's a real challenge to get them to take any of the actual benefits of using it properly at face value, because of all the things they worry about due to Sci-Fi nightmare scenarios and Facebook disinformation (not to mention some of the genuine and valid fears piled on top of all that; mis-use / abuse by corporations and governments, as well as other "bad actors" like spammers and scammers, etc).
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI find it's the opposite. A lot of people think it's like a Google / Wikipedia summarizer, and don't realize it can be wrong because they think it's something like the Watson computer from Jeopardy
- blooalien 2y agoYeah, that's definitely another sub-set of the "completely misinformed about / totally misunderstand AI" crowd. :)
- fumeux_fume 2y agoI don't know. Maybe you're more in the magical group than you think. I spend hours a day helping my client with prompt engineering for customer service training and it's my experience that most of the awe and positivity I see from people comes from a lack of rigorously evaluating the output they're getting back.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dukeofdoom 2y agoWhat I find fascinating is how much it feels like a conversation, but then also like a conversation with yourself. Since you're asking the question, and the AI echos back at you. So I guess one way it can be used is to figure out things about yourself, like a journal. Just the AI helps you to explore questions you might have. "The Socratic Method involves a shared dialogue between teacher and students. The teacher leads by posing thought-provoking questions. Students actively engage by asking questions of their own. The discussion goes back and forth." So AI can be an awesome learning tool, for anyone, at any level. Like many technologies, it is what you make it to be. Even things like Instagram can be educational places.
- resonious 2y agoI think there are a lot of technological advancements that are easy to "not like" when you know some select few details about them. Including literal sausage making as another commenter on here mentioned. T-shirts are great until you hear about the conditions of where they're made and how their disposal is managed. Social media is great until you realize how much they know about you and how they use that knowledge. Modern medicine is easy to not like when you look at the animal experiments that made it happen. And again, sausages - I know some vegetarian folks who are vegetarian in protest of how most meat is produced. I kind of wonder if there is a subset of comfortable modern society where every aspect is easily likable no matter how much you know about it. Bonus points if that society is environmentally sustainable.
- voidhorse 2y agoSure, but I think there is a key diff between those examples and LLMs. In those cases, people don't necessarily mind the machines involved in the process, they dislike the socioeconomic and labor structures around those machines, or the animal cruelty—this is a side effect of the social organization of labor, not of the machine itself. Here, contrarily, the claim is that the machine itself is the thing that becomes less impressive once you know how it works-this is also likely true of any machine, but the point is not about the demystification of the technical function in the tshirt and sausage examples.
- resonious 2y agoYes good call, I do seem to have misinterpreted the text a bit. I suppose using the word "impressive" as you did might make that misunderstanding a bit harder to run into.
- metadat 2y agoLife is [generally] inherently exploitative. Vegetarianism and veganism is a first world luxury, the bottom line is animal protein consumption is a readily available high-quality caloric intake option to encourage children to grow into healthy adults*. Learning to exist in the world and hold the uncomfortable parts of being a human being has been a valuable and useful skill in my life across many dimensions. * I'm not advocating for eating excessive meat, but going to extremes to avoid it does suggests something other factor is in play.
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago[flagged]
- throwawa14223 2y agoGiven the paper you must really understand AI. I feel like I have a good grasp of the math behind LLMs, but I don't understand them in that I don't understand why people find them useful. I was part of a trial using them at work. The chat based ones were worthless for any problem harder than a CS400 class which is what we're actually paid to do. The autocomplete ones produces code so poor it was constantly yanking me out of flow.
- mullingitover 2y agoJust release an AI agent that replaces lawyers.
- shlomo_z 2y agoFirst release one that replaces programmers then we'll talk :).
- mullingitover 2y agoI think we can all agree the first to go should be the VCs.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoThe fact that anyone thinks this will ever happen reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a lawyer does. They are responsible and liable for your case to be presented to a judge. An AI can't be liable and responsible for that. It will still need someone to rubber stamp its output. And that person will be a credentialed lawyer
- mullingitover 2y agoTrue, but one lawyer can do a huge amount of rubber stamping. That takes the price of billable hours to nearly zero. Don’t get me started on replacing judges with AI agents. At the end of the day they’re just lawyers as well.
- jongjong 2y agoIt's kind of weird how AI isn't yet about robots or reasoning but merely the last phase in the evolution of search engines. An LLM is essentially an extremely user-friendly search engine without the commercial/product aspect. It's an ideal information engine. It's understandable why LLMs pose a major threat to Google. Google search is essentially an information engine where the information is intermingled with junk commercial content. These days I only use Google for cases where I want to go to a website I already know but I'm too lazy to type in the URL or use a bookmark. The utility it provides now is merely a convenience.
- voidhorse 2y agoRight, until they start stuffing the junk commercial content into the LLM interfaces, which will happen eventually.
- shlomo_z 2y agoReminds me of the saying (internet meme): "Give a man a game and he'll have fun for a day. Teach a man to make games and he'll never have fun again"
- tracerbulletx 2y agoThere's probably a reversal of that trend when you know a lot about it. I don't know how you could go through building your own GPT-2 and not see it as an incredible technology and useful advancement that is going to give us an incredible number of insights and tools. I still can't get over how soon people just accepted that you can universally translate all languages, that audio can be accurately transcribed, that you can speak a sentence and get pretty good research on a topic. These things are all actually insane and everyone has just decided to ignore this and focus on the aesthetic grossness of some of the things people are trying to get them to do.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI mean, if you are willing to accept mistakes, then a lot of this was doable a while ago. Google Translate has been around a long time (and it's improved due to transformers but it was pretty good a long time ago too). Wikipedia has been around forever. Siri and other such agents have been doing audio transcription well long before. So all of these have improved. But they aren't completely novel
- Izkata 2y agoThere were shareware Windows programs for audio transcription and even controlling the computer with your voice back in the 90s, I had some fun playing with one of them around 1999/2000. You had to train it to your voice by reading some text it gave you, but after that was pretty good. The modern stuff is definitely better untrained, but I'm not so sure about after training, though it has been a long time since I've used it.
- Drew_ 2y agoYeah I remember discovering the voice controls built into Windows Vista when I was a kid and being blown away by it.
- vrighter 2y agoBecause the only time I can be confident in the answers it gives me, is when I already knew the answer before asking, which makes using the LLM pointless. Anything else would require me to do research to fact check it anyway. Might as well skip the LLM and do the research directly. This is what a lot of people forget about LLMs, if you didn't already know what the answer should be, then you won't know when it's giving you crappy responses. And if you do know what you are talking about and actually do catch it giving wrong information (or think you did), it'll just say "whoops.... you're right!". Sometimes, even if you aren't. The only things I can feel confident asking an LLM is stuff that I already know.
- analog31 2y agoI wonder if the "literacy" about AI is not so much about the inner workings of the technology, but about the broad ramifications of its use. It takes at least a wee bit of sophistication to go from "this is a neat search engine, and it can help me with my writing tasks" to "the stuff that's generated by this thing is going to affect society in unpredictable ways that are not necessarily positive." A similar spectrum of attitudes may already exist for social media, where the term "algorithm" predated the term "AI."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- floppiplopp 2y agoThat's how scams work.
- dartos 2y ago> balance between helping people understand AI and keeping them open to its adoption. Why is the latter a goal?
- dns_snek 2y agoThe thought that there's a magical machine that I can just ask for an answer and it's going to provide the correct one is absolutely thrilling, but then I remember that at least 1/3rd of LLM-provided answers in my own domains of knowledge turn out to be wrong upon closer inspection. I don't think the human brain is evolved to deal with a machine that promises to have all the answers, always speaks with an authoritative tone, and is trained to be agreeable. As a species we like shortcuts and we don't like to think critically, an easy to get answer is always going to be infinitely more appealing than a correct answer, no matter how wrong it is. Right now there's a generation of kids growing up who believe that they don't have to learn anything because LLMs have all the answers. World leaders don't seem concerned about this, likely because a dumb population who doesn't know how to think critically is easy to control.