7 ms·

It's become almost comical to me to read articles like this and wait for the part that, in this example, comes pretty close to the beginning: "This isn’t a rant

It's become almost comical to me to read articles like this and wait for the part that, in this example, comes pretty close to the beginning: "This isn’t a rant against AI." It's not? Why not? It's a "wake-up call", it's a "warning shot", but heaven forbid it's a rant against AI. To me it's like someone listing off deaths from fentanyl, how it's destroyed families, ruined lives, but then tossing in a disclaimer that "this isn't a rant against fentanyl". In my view, the ways that people use and are drawn into AI usage has all the hallmarks of a spiral into drug addiction. There may be safe ways to use drugs but "distribute them for free to everyone on the internet" is not among them.

ketzo 2y ago
It’s already becoming politicized, in the lowercase-p sense of the word. One is assumed to be either pro- or anti-AI, and so you gotta do your best to signal to the reader where you lie.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  > so you gotta do your best to signal to the reader where you lie Or what?
  - brain5ide 2y ago
    Or the reader will put you into a category yourself and won't be willing to look at the essence of the argument. I'd say the better word for that is polarising than political, but they synonims these days.
SoftTalker 2y ago
The difference is that between a considered critique and unhinged venting.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc. No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span
- nostrebored 2y ago
  That’s a much harder claim to prove. The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate? If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through? I suspect that as the problem spaces diverge enough you’ll have two skill sets. Who can solve n problems the fastest and who can determine which k problems require deep thought and narrow direction. Right now we have the same group of people solving both.
  - friendzis 2y ago
    > The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate? Gell-Mann Amnesia. Attention span limits the amount information of information we can process and with attention spans decreasing, increases to information flow stop having a positive effect. People simply forget what they started with even if that contradicts previous information. > If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through? You don't end up solving the problem in near constant time, you end up applying the last suggested solution. There's a difference.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  I think people don't consider that because the usual criticism of television and video games is that people spend too long paying attention to them. One of the famous Greek philosophers complained that books were hurting people's minds because they no longer memorized information, so this kind of complaint is as old as civilization itself. There is no evidence that we would be on Mars by now already if we had never invented books or television.
  - pasabagi 2y ago
    Pluto? Plotto? Platti? Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.
woah 2y ago
They have to preface their articles with "This isn’t a rant against AI." because there are a lot of rants against AI out there, such as your comment.
dragonwriter 2y ago
Because "rant" is irrational, and the author wants to be seen as staking out a rational opposition. Of course, every ranter wants to be seen that way, and so a protest that something isn't a rant against X is generally a sign that it absolutely is a rant against X that the author is pre-emptively defending.
- voxl 2y ago
  I've rarely read a rant that didn't consist of some good logical points
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - croes 2y ago
    Doesn‘t mean listing logical points makes it a rant
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      If logical points are all against sth that is debatable then it's a rant. They can be good points tho.
      - croes 2y ago
        • Instead of forming hypotheses, users asked the AI for ideas. • Instead of validating sources, they assumed the AI had already done so. • Instead of assessing multiple perspectives, they integrated and edited the AI’s summary and moved on. These are point against certain actions with a tool not against the tool. AI is for the starting point not the final result. AI must never be the last step but it often is because people trust computers especially if they answer in a confident language. It's the ELIZA effect all over again.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  The classic hallmark of rant is picking some study, not reading the methodology etc and making wild conclusion on it. For example for a study it says: > The study revealed a clear pattern: the more confidence users had in the AI, the less they thought critically And the study didn't even checked that. They just plotted the correlation between how much user think they rely on AI vs how much effort they think they saved. Isn't it expected to be positive even if they think as critically. [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf?utm_source=newsletter.danielmiessler.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=unsupervised-learning-no-475 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
throwaway894345 2y ago
TFA makes the point pretty clear IMHO: they aren’t opposed to AI, they’re opposed to over-reliance on AI.
overgard 2y ago
Well I mean, nitpick, but Fentanyl is a useful medication in the right context. It's not inherently evil. I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. I'm deeply concerned that our technocrats are running full speed at AGI with like zero plan for what happens if it "disrupts" 50% of jobs in a shockingly short period of time, or worse outcomes (theres some evidence the new tariff policies were generated with LLMs.. its probably already making policy. But it could be worse. What happens when bad actors start using these things to intentionally gaslight the population?) But I actually think AI (not AGI) as an assistant can be helpful.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. [...] (not AGI) Speaking of Wisdom and a different "AGI", I think there's an old Dungeons and Dragons joke that can be reworked here: Intelligence is knowing than an LLM uses vector embeddings of tokens. Wisdom is knowing LLMs shouldn't be used for business rules.
- brain5ide 2y ago
  Are we talking about structural things or about individual perspective things? At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV. At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit. Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    > build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
croes 2y ago
It’s a rant against the wrong usage of a tool not the tool as such.
- Turskarama 2y ago
  It's a tool that promotes incorrect usage though, and that is an inherent problem. All of these companies are selling AI as a tool to do work for you, and the AI _sounds confident_ not matter what it spits out.
  - croes 2y ago
    That's the real danger of AI. The false promises of the AI companies and the false expectations of the management and users. Had it just recently for a data migration where the users asked if they still need to enter meta data for documents they just could use AI to query data that was usually based on that meta data. They trust AI before it's even there and don't even consider a transition period where they check if the result are correct. Like with security convenience prevails.
    - blackqueeriroh 2y ago
      But isn’t this just par for the course with every new technological revolution? “It’ll change everything!” they said, as they continued to put money in their pockets as people were distracted by the shiny object.
      - croes 2y ago
        With every revolution and with every fake revolution. NFTs didn't change much, money changed its owner
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    My personal pet-peeve is how a great majority of people--and too many developers--are being misled into believing a fictional character coincidentally named "Assistant" inside a story-document half-created by an LLM is the author-LLM. If a human generates a story containing Count Dracula, that doesn't mean vampires are real, or that capabilities like "turning into a cloud of bats" are real, or that the algorithm "thirsts for the blood of the innocent." The same holds when the story comes from an algorithm, and it continues to hold when story is about a differently-named character named "AI Assistant" who is "helpful". Getting people to fall for this illusion is great news for the companies though, because they can get investor-dollars and make sales with the promise of "our system is intelligent", which is true in the same sense as "our system converts blood into immortality."
EGreg 2y ago
Reminds me of people who say “there is nothing wrong with capitalism but…” You shall not criticize the profit!
yapyap 2y ago
It’s not a rant against fentanyl, it’s a rant against irresponsible use of fentanyl. Just like this is a rant against irresponsible use of AI. Hope this helps
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Yes, that makes much more sense.
johnisgood 2y ago
Both substances and AI can be used responsibly. It is not the fault of substances nor AI. People is why we can't have anything nice. It sucks. I have medical reasons to take opioids, but in the eyes of people, I am a junkie. I would not be considered a junkie if I kept popping ibuprofen. It is silly. Opioids do not even make me high to begin with (it is complicated).
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I bet the downvotes are done by people who have absolutely no need to take any medications, or have no clue what it is like to be called a junkie for the rest of your life for taking medications that were prescribed to begin with. Or if not, then what, is it not true that both substances and AI can be used responsibly, and irresponsibly? "People is why we can't have anything nice. It sucks." is also true, applies to many things, just consider vending machines alone, or bags in public (for dog poop) and anything of the sort. We no longer have bags anymore, because people stole it. A great instance of "this is why we can't have nice things". Pretty sure you can think of more. Make the down-votes make sense, please. (I do not care about the down-votes per se, I care about why I am being disagreed with without any responses.)

ketzo 2y ago

It’s already becoming politicized, in the lowercase-p sense of the word. One is assumed to be either pro- or anti-AI, and so you gotta do your best to signal to the reader where you lie.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
> so you gotta do your best to signal to the reader where you lie Or what?
- brain5ide 2y ago
  Or the reader will put you into a category yourself and won't be willing to look at the essence of the argument. I'd say the better word for that is polarising than political, but they synonims these days.

SoftTalker 2y ago

The difference is that between a considered critique and unhinged venting.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc. No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span

nostrebored 2y ago
That’s a much harder claim to prove. The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate? If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through? I suspect that as the problem spaces diverge enough you’ll have two skill sets. Who can solve n problems the fastest and who can determine which k problems require deep thought and narrow direction. Right now we have the same group of people solving both.
- friendzis 2y ago
  > The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate? Gell-Mann Amnesia. Attention span limits the amount information of information we can process and with attention spans decreasing, increases to information flow stop having a positive effect. People simply forget what they started with even if that contradicts previous information. > If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through? You don't end up solving the problem in near constant time, you end up applying the last suggested solution. There's a difference.
mike_hearn 2y ago
I think people don't consider that because the usual criticism of television and video games is that people spend too long paying attention to them. One of the famous Greek philosophers complained that books were hurting people's minds because they no longer memorized information, so this kind of complaint is as old as civilization itself. There is no evidence that we would be on Mars by now already if we had never invented books or television.
- pasabagi 2y ago
  Pluto? Plotto? Platti? Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.

woah 2y ago

They have to preface their articles with "This isn’t a rant against AI." because there are a lot of rants against AI out there, such as your comment.

dragonwriter 2y ago

Because "rant" is irrational, and the author wants to be seen as staking out a rational opposition. Of course, every ranter wants to be seen that way, and so a protest that something isn't a rant against X is generally a sign that it absolutely is a rant against X that the author is pre-emptively defending.

voxl 2y ago
I've rarely read a rant that didn't consist of some good logical points
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- croes 2y ago
  Doesn‘t mean listing logical points makes it a rant
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    If logical points are all against sth that is debatable then it's a rant. They can be good points tho.
    - croes 2y ago
      • Instead of forming hypotheses, users asked the AI for ideas. • Instead of validating sources, they assumed the AI had already done so. • Instead of assessing multiple perspectives, they integrated and edited the AI’s summary and moved on. These are point against certain actions with a tool not against the tool. AI is for the starting point not the final result. AI must never be the last step but it often is because people trust computers especially if they answer in a confident language. It's the ELIZA effect all over again.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
The classic hallmark of rant is picking some study, not reading the methodology etc and making wild conclusion on it. For example for a study it says: > The study revealed a clear pattern: the more confidence users had in the AI, the less they thought critically And the study didn't even checked that. They just plotted the correlation between how much user think they rely on AI vs how much effort they think they saved. Isn't it expected to be positive even if they think as critically. [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf?utm_source=newsletter.danielmiessler.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=unsupervised-learning-no-475 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

throwaway894345 2y ago

TFA makes the point pretty clear IMHO: they aren’t opposed to AI, they’re opposed to over-reliance on AI.

overgard 2y ago

Well I mean, nitpick, but Fentanyl is a useful medication in the right context. It's not inherently evil. I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. I'm deeply concerned that our technocrats are running full speed at AGI with like zero plan for what happens if it "disrupts" 50% of jobs in a shockingly short period of time, or worse outcomes (theres some evidence the new tariff policies were generated with LLMs.. its probably already making policy. But it could be worse. What happens when bad actors start using these things to intentionally gaslight the population?) But I actually think AI (not AGI) as an assistant can be helpful.

Terr_ 2y ago
> I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. [...] (not AGI) Speaking of Wisdom and a different "AGI", I think there's an old Dungeons and Dragons joke that can be reworked here: Intelligence is knowing than an LLM uses vector embeddings of tokens. Wisdom is knowing LLMs shouldn't be used for business rules.
brain5ide 2y ago
Are we talking about structural things or about individual perspective things? At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV. At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit. Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.
- walterbell 2y ago
  > build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

croes 2y ago

It’s a rant against the wrong usage of a tool not the tool as such.

Turskarama 2y ago
It's a tool that promotes incorrect usage though, and that is an inherent problem. All of these companies are selling AI as a tool to do work for you, and the AI _sounds confident_ not matter what it spits out.
- croes 2y ago
  That's the real danger of AI. The false promises of the AI companies and the false expectations of the management and users. Had it just recently for a data migration where the users asked if they still need to enter meta data for documents they just could use AI to query data that was usually based on that meta data. They trust AI before it's even there and don't even consider a transition period where they check if the result are correct. Like with security convenience prevails.
  - blackqueeriroh 2y ago
    But isn’t this just par for the course with every new technological revolution? “It’ll change everything!” they said, as they continued to put money in their pockets as people were distracted by the shiny object.
    - croes 2y ago
      With every revolution and with every fake revolution. NFTs didn't change much, money changed its owner
- Terr_ 2y ago
  My personal pet-peeve is how a great majority of people--and too many developers--are being misled into believing a fictional character coincidentally named "Assistant" inside a story-document half-created by an LLM is the author-LLM. If a human generates a story containing Count Dracula, that doesn't mean vampires are real, or that capabilities like "turning into a cloud of bats" are real, or that the algorithm "thirsts for the blood of the innocent." The same holds when the story comes from an algorithm, and it continues to hold when story is about a differently-named character named "AI Assistant" who is "helpful". Getting people to fall for this illusion is great news for the companies though, because they can get investor-dollars and make sales with the promise of "our system is intelligent", which is true in the same sense as "our system converts blood into immortality."

EGreg 2y ago

Reminds me of people who say “there is nothing wrong with capitalism but…” You shall not criticize the profit!

yapyap 2y ago

It’s not a rant against fentanyl, it’s a rant against irresponsible use of fentanyl. Just like this is a rant against irresponsible use of AI. Hope this helps

johnisgood 2y ago
Yes, that makes much more sense.

johnisgood 2y ago

Both substances and AI can be used responsibly. It is not the fault of substances nor AI. People is why we can't have anything nice. It sucks. I have medical reasons to take opioids, but in the eyes of people, I am a junkie. I would not be considered a junkie if I kept popping ibuprofen. It is silly. Opioids do not even make me high to begin with (it is complicated).

johnisgood 2y ago
I bet the downvotes are done by people who have absolutely no need to take any medications, or have no clue what it is like to be called a junkie for the rest of your life for taking medications that were prescribed to begin with. Or if not, then what, is it not true that both substances and AI can be used responsibly, and irresponsibly? "People is why we can't have anything nice. It sucks." is also true, applies to many things, just consider vending machines alone, or bags in public (for dog poop) and anything of the sort. We no longer have bags anymore, because people stole it. A great instance of "this is why we can't have nice things". Pretty sure you can think of more. Make the down-votes make sense, please. (I do not care about the down-votes per se, I care about why I am being disagreed with without any responses.)