5 ms·

An appeal to companies doing AI

80 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

Mbwagava 2y ago
It's not even clear "superintelligence" is a meaningful concept. It could be that the broad conflicts in our society are largely intractable and arbitrary, in which case "superintelligence" can do little but complain about the contradictions its passed (something I suspect many on this forum can understand). Perhaps the calculator is as close as we'll ever get to "superintelligence".
o11c 2y ago
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- cyanydeez 2y ago
  We're in the massively paralleled "Motivated Reasoning Era"
- deleted 2y ago
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_9za9 2y ago
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- interloxia 2y ago
  My translator friends who have lost their jobs agree.
  - bugahbo 2y ago
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- codr7 2y ago
  Not everyone enjoyed the transition from being creators to becoming assistant slop verifiers as much as you did.
  - _9za9 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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mattgreenrocks 2y ago
> Distressingly, the people most passionate about AI often express a not-so-subtle disdain for humanity. I have noticed something similar: those who are ultra-passionate about AI are often Extremely Online, and it seems like their values tilt too far away from humanity for my taste. The use of AI is treated almost as an end in and of itself, which perpetuates a maximalist AI vision. This is also probably why they give off this weird vibe of having their personality outsourced.
- akomtu 2y ago
  AI is the product of the most advanced scientific minds stripped of ethics. What else can they create?
  - Mbwagava 2y ago
    I can't read the tone of this post, but "AI" as it stands as a marketing term for the last ~45 years has little to do with rigor. These are workers producing profit, not scientists. Ethics has nothing to do with it. Scientists deal with empiricism, not sales.
- dinfinity 2y ago
  Regardless of whether this is true, it is still nothing more than an ad hominem. I would argue that the most passionate AI optimism and pessimism stems from a conviction that it is an inevitable next step in evolution. Given the associated potency, it is hard to not take an extreme position with regard to it. The positions in between seem to be of the form "everything will stay largely the same, but with a bit more automation", which seems naive rather than level-headed, imho.
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tomlockwood 2y ago
I've tolerated AI autocomplete in VSCode but I am a bee's dick away from turning it off, because it so often generates a huge chunk of code that is ALMOST correct, and determining where it is wrong is as much a chore as writing it would have been. But, it's like I've got a junior-coder sidekick who doesn't take any feedback. Not great.
danpalmer 2y ago
Tech companies, at least those who weren't founded on AI, have a significant number of people internally who have exactly the opinions in this blog post. Outside of the tech ecosystem, most people I encounter either don't care about AI, or are vaguely positive (and using it to write emails/etc). There are exceptions, writers and artists for example, but they're in the minority. To be clear, I'm also not seeing "normal" people raving about it much either, but most people really do not share the opinion of this post. I realise it may not seem like it, but most big tech companies are not designing for high earning valley software engineers because they are not a big market. They're designing for the world, and the world hasn't made its mind up about AI yet.
- baobun 2y ago
  Counter-point: Dark patterns are also pervasive in more niche applocations including B2Bs targeting tech startups. Some of it is culturally endemic. Obsession with one-size-fits-all, metrics-driven development, and UX excusively aiming for the lowest common denominators are also part of this problematic incentive structure you allude to. > I'm also not seeing "normal" people raving about it much either, but most people really do not share the opinion of this post. I don't think the "we" here was intended to include the general population.
  - daemin 2y ago
    Could the current use of "AI" also be considered a dark pattern? In the way that dark patterns get you to use/pay for a product/service that you might not want to, but are too confused, frustrated, or the cost/time tradeoff is not worth it to understand how to stop using/paying for the product/service. In terms of "AI" in products/services this would be the way that using such an assistant atrophies your skills and knowledge so that you become dependent on the product/service.
gmuslera 2y ago
He is misplacing his concerns. He and the ones like him, to fulfill the "we" there. Oh, in US, for US citizens, intelligence agencies can't do dragnet surveillance. But it seem to be perfectly OK that it does that for the rest of the world. It enables people to do non-consensual pornography. It may have democratized the realistic video part of it, but already was available the fan fiction part. Is the problem the democratization or the ability on who have enough budget or sponsored agenda for it? At some moment you have to cut somewhere and define where is the realistic line. Same goes for misinformation, what is wrong is the democratization and not that the people with enough resources can do it? About displacing industries, it depends, but was already a big abuse of some of those industries to people. Some will adapt. Some will become obsolete as it happened with the industries they replaced in their own turn. AI is a tool. And as any tool, it empowers people using it, for good and bad. Is the people that you keep giving power the main ones misusing them. Those are the elephants in the room that you refuse to see.
- charleslmunger 2y ago
  >Oh, in US, for US citizens, intelligence agencies can't do dragnet surveillance. They can, and do? What else would you call https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco... That's just one example, Snowden published tons of this stuff.
  - some_furry 2y ago
    Conveniently the rest of the sentence from the article was "of encrypted messages". The encrypted part is kind of important. I blog about the topic a lot!
- baobun 2y ago
  > AI is a tool. And as any tool, it empowers people using it, for good and bad. Is the people that you keep giving power the main ones misusing them. Those are the elephants in the room that you refuse to see. Try reading the post again? It's in there.
djoldman 2y ago
> I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI will enable. > Coordinated inauthentic behavior > Misinformation > Nonconsensual pornography > Displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income The first three of these existed and occurred before the arrival of AI. Perhaps AI makes doing the first 3 easier. If there are not laws governing the first three post-AI, do we need laws governing them? If so, what do those look like? As for "displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income" - yea, as a civilization we need to retrain and reeducate those whose livelihoods are displaced by automation. This too has been true forever...
- binary132 2y ago
  Artists being replaced by idiot machines that can do approximately 15% as good of a job but almost for free is very sad and bad.
- pluto_modadic 2y ago
  yes, but a machine gun is faster than a musket. these uses of AI are force multipliers for diarrhea levels of bullshit. I think there are two takes: - investors should know that consumers will eventually find their products distasteful for the lackluster quality - users can pay a little more for products that never have, and never will, use AI. it's moreso that... the displacement is very... on the nose this time. but... jevons paradox withstanding, I think when you replace human calculators with computers what you end up with is wanting to crunch /even more numbers/. It never slows down. The labor only cheapens...
forrestthewoods 2y ago
> why we dislike AI For some completely unspecified group of “we”. At least the post itself says “why I personally dislike AI”.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
Here’s the thing…as long as we live in a capitalist society, money will be put in front of people because the very essence of capitalism is to turn a higher profit and anything that impedes that is evolved away. So the question to ask is whether we will remain a capitalist society. If you believe the answer is yes, the only thing to do is adapt, whether you like it or not. Resisting the change will only put you behind the curve. I’m not proclaiming a stance on AI here, but I think it’s prudent to be a realist.
moralestapia 2y ago
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scotty79 2y ago
My only concern about AI is that it will get stuck again for another few decades and I'll become elderly before I see what's next. 20 years ago my dream was to see a nimble robot running up the mountain path live. I hope this event is not another 20 years away. Future comes so horribly slowly.
- beefnugs 2y ago
  Yes there was something truly special in the movie Mother, when that heavy ass robot was thumping down the hallway. Make sure to watch the boston dynamics outtakes when they break an ankle to alleviate some existential tension afterward
  - scotty79 2y ago
    I love the movie "I am mother". Terribly chilling depiction of "end justifies the means", "might makes right" and possibly "hell is paved with good intentions" from the POV of subdued party (which is humanity in this case). Also it's great because it makes you constantly re-evaluate characters intentions and truthfulness of what they are saying.
  - tim333 2y ago
    I guess this https://youtu.be/yuUWUdzELDQ?t=3 https://youtu.be/yuUWUdzELDQ?t=3 ? I looked it up having not seen the movie.
Handprint4469 2y ago
> But there is a feedback loop: If you change the incentive structures, people’s behaviors will certainly change, but subsequently so, too, will those incentive structures. This is a good point, and somewhat subtle too. Something that worries me is the acceleration of the feedback loop. The Internet, social media, smartphones, and now generative AI are all things that changed how information is generated, consumed and distributed, and changing that affects the incentive structures and behaviors of the people interacting with that information. But information is spread increasingly faster, in higher amounts and with higher noise, and so the incentives landscape keeps shifting continuously to keep up, without giving people time to adapt and develop immunity against the viral/parasitic memes that each landscape births. And so the (meta)game keeps changing under our feet, increasingly accelerating towards chaos or, more worryingly, meta-stable ideologies that can survive the continuous bombardment of an adversarial memetic environment. I say worryingly, because most of those ideologies have to be, by definition, totalizing and highly hostile to anything outside of them. So yeah, interesting times.
- karategeek6 2y ago
  This post sounds too much like an SCP for my comfort. Just administer the amnestics now.
- dinfinity 2y ago
  The problem is quite the opposite: a large part of the incentive structure is effectively static. Our biological makeup hardly changes, so we're still drawn to all kinds of primitive things. Without strong cultural overrides we are sitting ducks, ready to be exploited by click and engagement bait. With an analogy: Connecting an average human to social media is like connecting a Windows 95 machine to the internet.
pixelready 2y ago
Ahead of the inevitable Luddite comments. Here’s your daily reminder that the Luddites were not just technophobes, but were in fact artisans who were concerned about the leverage technology was providing capital to suppress worker rights while eroding the quality of the products. This tension should resonate with us. https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-luddites-workers https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-luddi... The AI conversation tends to split folks along similar “passionate engineer craftsman” vs. “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” lines.
streptomycin 2y ago
> I do not actually believe “The Singularity” is a realistic threat due to every system that exhibits exponential growth encountering carrying capacities, which converts it into an S-curve. Depending on the parameters of the curve, an S-curve may be effectively the same as an exponential curve. For instance if the IQ of AIs reach a plateau of 500 rather than exponentially increasing to infinity, we may not be around to see the plateau.
- some_furry 2y ago
  > For instance if the IQ of AIs reach a plateau of 500 rather than exponentially increasing to infinity, we may not be around to see the plateau. If the premise for this is, "because we might not survive each other," rather than the AI being specifically an extinction event for humanity, then I think we agree.
- baobun 2y ago
  I don't see why an LLM (not) maxing out on IQ would be an existential concern.
biophysboy 2y ago
> If you do not understand people, you will fail to understand the harms that AI will unleash on the world. Case in point: the official white house social media account regularly posts low-effort AI meme propaganda.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  The White House very much understands the harm they are unleashing. That's the point.
  - biophysboy 2y ago
    Yes, obviously the White House understands - I am saying that AI companies failed to predict political consequences (or, perhaps more likely, chose to look the other way)
cryptozeus 2y ago
Disabling ai at this point is like using your app in off line mode. Not a lots of people want to build for that
kevinsync 2y ago
I'm very much into AI, in terms of judicious and sprinkled usage across disciplines -- but I'm a computer guy, I produce and support a lot of code, art, audio, video, social, multimedia etc content, and I've incorporated bits and pieces of AI here and there to achieve a vision or get work done (LLMs, diffusion, etc) -- my main issue with it, like anything technical, is that the mainstream interpretation / instinct by the average bozo is that the machine will do my work for me, and nothing could be further from the truth. There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment from the mainstream, but I'm noticing the pro-AI mainstream sentiment comes from people who are either technically-minded grifters looking to deploy automated solutions to snake $$$ from people's pockets, or lazy / disengaged worker drones who just want the computer to do their middling work for them. And it will, up to a point, where your "work" plateaus into a mess of predictable, non-novel banality lol, unless you invest the time to master the tool (which, for what it's worth, isn't like introducing the toothed saw, it's more like a Dremel or a SAWZALL that have specific purposes but casual users won't ever master them) Buying a digital ELPH in 2001 didn't make you a photographer unless you were a photographer with an open mind. Squarespace doesn't make you a web designer unless you've studied the system and understand the tradeoffs. AWS doesn't solve infrastructure unless you learn how to architect a solution that works for your use-case. AI, by the same property, is shit until you research how it works, experiment with solutions, and find novel workflows to get something out the other end that's new, fresh and exciting. Companies just rolling "AI" into their products aren't gonna win over customers and users unless they use the tool to deliver something of exceedingly-needed value. If it's a short-term grift or "hail mary", good luck! You'll need it!
- some_furry 2y ago
  This is an incredibly level-headed and good take.
- dangus 2y ago
  This is a great way to put it. Some more annoying personas in the AI space: - AI CEOs lying to investors and claiming their AIs will one day be impossibly smart. - Companies that are consumers of AI products having CEOs pushing AI onto their employees as a quick fix thinking that they will get magic productivity gains and be able to cut staff if they just force employees to use it (I have even seen some real examples of companies adding AI usage to performance reviews) - Companies claiming to be AI-first without launching any significant AI-powered product But I do think it’s a very measured way to read the situation to refrain from joining the knee-jerk into being an AI-hater. That sentiment is basically just a counter-culture reaction to dislike AI, especially since it seems to most negatively impact creatives such as illustrators. I think that some professionals who refrain from leveraging it from an ethical standpoint will legitimately fall behind their labor competition.
atumalaca 2y ago
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exiguus 2y ago
> What I found most interesting is that the multiple choice options included a lot of “I found the Terminator movies scary”, “I read too much Ray Kurzweil”, and/or “I am or was a SF Bay Area rationalist” undertones, but actual ethical objections were strangely absent. After reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book and see the current state of democracy in the USA and some European countries (apart from the fact that democracies are too slow to regulate anyway), I see little hope for the future.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > I see little hope for the future. Try reading some Sarah Kendzior [0] if you want to lose whatever shreds you had left (or if you'd like to base any droplets of hope on a more accurate world-view). Wynn-Williams, and the author of this post, both severely underestimate how dark the tech-bros vision for the future actually is and how far along they are. Envision Snow Crash, but without the humor. 0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining-the-2024 https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining...
  - exiguus 2y ago
    > underestimate how dark the tech-bros vision When ic the "German spy agency labels AfD as ‘confirmed rightwing extremist’ force". Which will now lead to the removal of AfD members and sympathizers from the civil service. I at least, have a little hope for Germany e.g. Europe. A little hope that the End of the Capitalist era will not end in fascism and there is another way now open for discus involving not only elites (aka tech-bros and old white male).
    - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
      Nah, why? If the people want their fascism back, let them have it good and hard. WWII was obviously not close enough to the brink to teach us a permanent lesson. Let the next nationalistic spasm destroy everything, and then maybe the ones who survive us will figure it out because we are certainly failing.
dangus 2y ago
I actually think that many of the concerns the author doesn’t have are the more concerning ones and some of the concerns they do have are more likely to be not much of a big deal. The privacy concern I find to be particularly overstated. This is an identical concern to ones that have existed before AI ever entered the fray. Anytime you send data to a system that someone else controls you run those exact same risks. I also think there’s an overstated fear that an app focused on private data (something similar to Signal) would just add some kind of AI functionality one day out of the blue and suddenly ship your data off to a hive mind. Any app that is willing to cross that line already has done so (e.g., Facebook). It also seems to be technologically simple to perform a lot of AI tasks without compromising privacy. E.g., chips with local-first AI computational ability are reaching consumer level devices. Even the much-maligned Windows Recall feature specifically emphasizes how it never sends information to Microsoft servers nor processes data in the cloud.
- baobun 2y ago
  On privacy, the shift in incentives have changed the game. "More is better" is a new mantra and the perceived value of gathering and labeling arbitrary organic data has gone up significantly. This offsets or outright obliterates the liability aspect of data-hoarding. This will have privacy implications for individuals referenced in some of those datasets.
- rpgwaiter 2y ago
  The risk isn’t that Signal itself will add AI features, it’s more that it will be built-in to your OS that’s running Signal (Apple Intelligence, Windows Recall, etc). These types watch everything you do on-device by default and learn a ton from your E2EE messages regardless of the intentions of the Signal devs.
  - dangus 2y ago
    I would say that in practice that doesn’t seem to be how some of these examples are being architected. Apple Intelligence as an example only seems to be reading information from Apple’s own default apps as of today, and their developer documentation suggests that capabilities require developers to implement features via their APIs. It isn’t really a correct read of the situation to say that Apple Intelligence is “watching everything you do” like a service that is just watching your screen output at all times. Even the service that does do that exact sort of thing (Windows Recall) has an extensive set of controls around filtering out specific apps and private browsing mode and other sensitive information, enabled by default: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont... So I think the reality is that a lot of the big players making this technology recognize the privacy and security concerns and are designing their AI applications to address those concerns. I personally feel like AI products are frequently launching with more transparency about data usage than a lot of Web 2.0 era applications like Facebook.
waltercool 2y ago
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YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
I followed the HN-targeted link at the top ("It gets exhausting") and Oh. My. Good. Lord: >> Something Awful had a particular response to furries. After creating a subforum specifically for furries to post in, everyone who used it was marked with a custom yellow star avatar, then banned. https://archive.md/fX8Jo https://archive.md/fX8Jo I used to think the early internet was less shite than the current internet. Maybe I've been mollycoddled, wrapped in the HN blanket where behaviour like that would never be condoned. Maybe I need to see more social media. But, really? Yellow stars? OK wow.
- Izkata 2y ago
  They and a few others flew under the radar while 4chan got all the heat. Most people had no idea those places existed, while your remembrance is probably more accurate for the early internet in general.
- some_furry 2y ago
  Wait until you hear about the furry convention that was the target of a terrorist attack via chlorine gas in 2014, which the news anchors laughed at when they heard what furries are. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXiMXx2shRmvI-PuBbmMlTlCC4Odv04ia https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXiMXx2shRmvI-PuBbmMl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j6ZdVSrXNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j6ZdVSrXNg Or, a less drastic and recent example, a furry in Australia getting jumped unprovoked: https://x.com/Dennis_Gunnn/status/1918591407314661399 https://x.com/Dennis_Gunnn/status/1918591407314661399 You can find hateful behavior everywhere if you look for it. This isn't exclusive to how people treat the furry fandom.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    I don't understand people. Thanks for sharing.

80 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

It's not even clear "superintelligence" is a meaningful concept. It could be that the broad conflicts in our society are largely intractable and arbitrary, in which case "superintelligence" can do little but complain about the contradictions its passed (something I suspect many on this forum can understand). Perhaps the calculator is as close as we'll ever get to "superintelligence".

o11c 2y ago

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cyanydeez 2y ago
We're in the massively paralleled "Motivated Reasoning Era"
deleted 2y ago
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_9za9 2y ago

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interloxia 2y ago
My translator friends who have lost their jobs agree.
- bugahbo 2y ago
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- _9za9 2y ago
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codr7 2y ago
Not everyone enjoyed the transition from being creators to becoming assistant slop verifiers as much as you did.
- _9za9 2y ago
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mattgreenrocks 2y ago

> Distressingly, the people most passionate about AI often express a not-so-subtle disdain for humanity. I have noticed something similar: those who are ultra-passionate about AI are often Extremely Online, and it seems like their values tilt too far away from humanity for my taste. The use of AI is treated almost as an end in and of itself, which perpetuates a maximalist AI vision. This is also probably why they give off this weird vibe of having their personality outsourced.

akomtu 2y ago
AI is the product of the most advanced scientific minds stripped of ethics. What else can they create?
- Mbwagava 2y ago
  I can't read the tone of this post, but "AI" as it stands as a marketing term for the last ~45 years has little to do with rigor. These are workers producing profit, not scientists. Ethics has nothing to do with it. Scientists deal with empiricism, not sales.
dinfinity 2y ago
Regardless of whether this is true, it is still nothing more than an ad hominem. I would argue that the most passionate AI optimism and pessimism stems from a conviction that it is an inevitable next step in evolution. Given the associated potency, it is hard to not take an extreme position with regard to it. The positions in between seem to be of the form "everything will stay largely the same, but with a bit more automation", which seems naive rather than level-headed, imho.
- deleted 2y ago
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tomlockwood 2y ago

I've tolerated AI autocomplete in VSCode but I am a bee's dick away from turning it off, because it so often generates a huge chunk of code that is ALMOST correct, and determining where it is wrong is as much a chore as writing it would have been. But, it's like I've got a junior-coder sidekick who doesn't take any feedback. Not great.

danpalmer 2y ago

Tech companies, at least those who weren't founded on AI, have a significant number of people internally who have exactly the opinions in this blog post. Outside of the tech ecosystem, most people I encounter either don't care about AI, or are vaguely positive (and using it to write emails/etc). There are exceptions, writers and artists for example, but they're in the minority. To be clear, I'm also not seeing "normal" people raving about it much either, but most people really do not share the opinion of this post. I realise it may not seem like it, but most big tech companies are not designing for high earning valley software engineers because they are not a big market. They're designing for the world, and the world hasn't made its mind up about AI yet.

baobun 2y ago
Counter-point: Dark patterns are also pervasive in more niche applocations including B2Bs targeting tech startups. Some of it is culturally endemic. Obsession with one-size-fits-all, metrics-driven development, and UX excusively aiming for the lowest common denominators are also part of this problematic incentive structure you allude to. > I'm also not seeing "normal" people raving about it much either, but most people really do not share the opinion of this post. I don't think the "we" here was intended to include the general population.
- daemin 2y ago
  Could the current use of "AI" also be considered a dark pattern? In the way that dark patterns get you to use/pay for a product/service that you might not want to, but are too confused, frustrated, or the cost/time tradeoff is not worth it to understand how to stop using/paying for the product/service. In terms of "AI" in products/services this would be the way that using such an assistant atrophies your skills and knowledge so that you become dependent on the product/service.

gmuslera 2y ago

He is misplacing his concerns. He and the ones like him, to fulfill the "we" there. Oh, in US, for US citizens, intelligence agencies can't do dragnet surveillance. But it seem to be perfectly OK that it does that for the rest of the world. It enables people to do non-consensual pornography. It may have democratized the realistic video part of it, but already was available the fan fiction part. Is the problem the democratization or the ability on who have enough budget or sponsored agenda for it? At some moment you have to cut somewhere and define where is the realistic line. Same goes for misinformation, what is wrong is the democratization and not that the people with enough resources can do it? About displacing industries, it depends, but was already a big abuse of some of those industries to people. Some will adapt. Some will become obsolete as it happened with the industries they replaced in their own turn. AI is a tool. And as any tool, it empowers people using it, for good and bad. Is the people that you keep giving power the main ones misusing them. Those are the elephants in the room that you refuse to see.

charleslmunger 2y ago
>Oh, in US, for US citizens, intelligence agencies can't do dragnet surveillance. They can, and do? What else would you call https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco... That's just one example, Snowden published tons of this stuff.
- some_furry 2y ago
  Conveniently the rest of the sentence from the article was "of encrypted messages". The encrypted part is kind of important. I blog about the topic a lot!
baobun 2y ago
> AI is a tool. And as any tool, it empowers people using it, for good and bad. Is the people that you keep giving power the main ones misusing them. Those are the elephants in the room that you refuse to see. Try reading the post again? It's in there.

djoldman 2y ago

> I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI will enable. > Coordinated inauthentic behavior > Misinformation > Nonconsensual pornography > Displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income The first three of these existed and occurred before the arrival of AI. Perhaps AI makes doing the first 3 easier. If there are not laws governing the first three post-AI, do we need laws governing them? If so, what do those look like? As for "displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income" - yea, as a civilization we need to retrain and reeducate those whose livelihoods are displaced by automation. This too has been true forever...

binary132 2y ago
Artists being replaced by idiot machines that can do approximately 15% as good of a job but almost for free is very sad and bad.
pluto_modadic 2y ago
yes, but a machine gun is faster than a musket. these uses of AI are force multipliers for diarrhea levels of bullshit. I think there are two takes: - investors should know that consumers will eventually find their products distasteful for the lackluster quality - users can pay a little more for products that never have, and never will, use AI. it's moreso that... the displacement is very... on the nose this time. but... jevons paradox withstanding, I think when you replace human calculators with computers what you end up with is wanting to crunch /even more numbers/. It never slows down. The labor only cheapens...

forrestthewoods 2y ago

> why we dislike AI For some completely unspecified group of “we”. At least the post itself says “why I personally dislike AI”.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

Here’s the thing…as long as we live in a capitalist society, money will be put in front of people because the very essence of capitalism is to turn a higher profit and anything that impedes that is evolved away. So the question to ask is whether we will remain a capitalist society. If you believe the answer is yes, the only thing to do is adapt, whether you like it or not. Resisting the change will only put you behind the curve. I’m not proclaiming a stance on AI here, but I think it’s prudent to be a realist.

moralestapia 2y ago

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scotty79 2y ago

My only concern about AI is that it will get stuck again for another few decades and I'll become elderly before I see what's next. 20 years ago my dream was to see a nimble robot running up the mountain path live. I hope this event is not another 20 years away. Future comes so horribly slowly.

beefnugs 2y ago
Yes there was something truly special in the movie Mother, when that heavy ass robot was thumping down the hallway. Make sure to watch the boston dynamics outtakes when they break an ankle to alleviate some existential tension afterward
- scotty79 2y ago
  I love the movie "I am mother". Terribly chilling depiction of "end justifies the means", "might makes right" and possibly "hell is paved with good intentions" from the POV of subdued party (which is humanity in this case). Also it's great because it makes you constantly re-evaluate characters intentions and truthfulness of what they are saying.
- tim333 2y ago
  I guess this https://youtu.be/yuUWUdzELDQ?t=3 https://youtu.be/yuUWUdzELDQ?t=3 ? I looked it up having not seen the movie.

Handprint4469 2y ago

> But there is a feedback loop: If you change the incentive structures, people’s behaviors will certainly change, but subsequently so, too, will those incentive structures. This is a good point, and somewhat subtle too. Something that worries me is the acceleration of the feedback loop. The Internet, social media, smartphones, and now generative AI are all things that changed how information is generated, consumed and distributed, and changing that affects the incentive structures and behaviors of the people interacting with that information. But information is spread increasingly faster, in higher amounts and with higher noise, and so the incentives landscape keeps shifting continuously to keep up, without giving people time to adapt and develop immunity against the viral/parasitic memes that each landscape births. And so the (meta)game keeps changing under our feet, increasingly accelerating towards chaos or, more worryingly, meta-stable ideologies that can survive the continuous bombardment of an adversarial memetic environment. I say worryingly, because most of those ideologies have to be, by definition, totalizing and highly hostile to anything outside of them. So yeah, interesting times.

karategeek6 2y ago
This post sounds too much like an SCP for my comfort. Just administer the amnestics now.
dinfinity 2y ago
The problem is quite the opposite: a large part of the incentive structure is effectively static. Our biological makeup hardly changes, so we're still drawn to all kinds of primitive things. Without strong cultural overrides we are sitting ducks, ready to be exploited by click and engagement bait. With an analogy: Connecting an average human to social media is like connecting a Windows 95 machine to the internet.

pixelready 2y ago

Ahead of the inevitable Luddite comments. Here’s your daily reminder that the Luddites were not just technophobes, but were in fact artisans who were concerned about the leverage technology was providing capital to suppress worker rights while eroding the quality of the products. This tension should resonate with us. https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-luddites-workers https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-luddi... The AI conversation tends to split folks along similar “passionate engineer craftsman” vs. “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” lines.

streptomycin 2y ago

> I do not actually believe “The Singularity” is a realistic threat due to every system that exhibits exponential growth encountering carrying capacities, which converts it into an S-curve. Depending on the parameters of the curve, an S-curve may be effectively the same as an exponential curve. For instance if the IQ of AIs reach a plateau of 500 rather than exponentially increasing to infinity, we may not be around to see the plateau.

some_furry 2y ago
> For instance if the IQ of AIs reach a plateau of 500 rather than exponentially increasing to infinity, we may not be around to see the plateau. If the premise for this is, "because we might not survive each other," rather than the AI being specifically an extinction event for humanity, then I think we agree.
baobun 2y ago
I don't see why an LLM (not) maxing out on IQ would be an existential concern.

biophysboy 2y ago

> If you do not understand people, you will fail to understand the harms that AI will unleash on the world. Case in point: the official white house social media account regularly posts low-effort AI meme propaganda.

minimaxir 2y ago
The White House very much understands the harm they are unleashing. That's the point.
- biophysboy 2y ago
  Yes, obviously the White House understands - I am saying that AI companies failed to predict political consequences (or, perhaps more likely, chose to look the other way)

cryptozeus 2y ago

Disabling ai at this point is like using your app in off line mode. Not a lots of people want to build for that

kevinsync 2y ago

I'm very much into AI, in terms of judicious and sprinkled usage across disciplines -- but I'm a computer guy, I produce and support a lot of code, art, audio, video, social, multimedia etc content, and I've incorporated bits and pieces of AI here and there to achieve a vision or get work done (LLMs, diffusion, etc) -- my main issue with it, like anything technical, is that the mainstream interpretation / instinct by the average bozo is that the machine will do my work for me, and nothing could be further from the truth. There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment from the mainstream, but I'm noticing the pro-AI mainstream sentiment comes from people who are either technically-minded grifters looking to deploy automated solutions to snake $$$ from people's pockets, or lazy / disengaged worker drones who just want the computer to do their middling work for them. And it will, up to a point, where your "work" plateaus into a mess of predictable, non-novel banality lol, unless you invest the time to master the tool (which, for what it's worth, isn't like introducing the toothed saw, it's more like a Dremel or a SAWZALL that have specific purposes but casual users won't ever master them) Buying a digital ELPH in 2001 didn't make you a photographer unless you were a photographer with an open mind. Squarespace doesn't make you a web designer unless you've studied the system and understand the tradeoffs. AWS doesn't solve infrastructure unless you learn how to architect a solution that works for your use-case. AI, by the same property, is shit until you research how it works, experiment with solutions, and find novel workflows to get something out the other end that's new, fresh and exciting. Companies just rolling "AI" into their products aren't gonna win over customers and users unless they use the tool to deliver something of exceedingly-needed value. If it's a short-term grift or "hail mary", good luck! You'll need it!

some_furry 2y ago
This is an incredibly level-headed and good take.
dangus 2y ago
This is a great way to put it. Some more annoying personas in the AI space: - AI CEOs lying to investors and claiming their AIs will one day be impossibly smart. - Companies that are consumers of AI products having CEOs pushing AI onto their employees as a quick fix thinking that they will get magic productivity gains and be able to cut staff if they just force employees to use it (I have even seen some real examples of companies adding AI usage to performance reviews) - Companies claiming to be AI-first without launching any significant AI-powered product But I do think it’s a very measured way to read the situation to refrain from joining the knee-jerk into being an AI-hater. That sentiment is basically just a counter-culture reaction to dislike AI, especially since it seems to most negatively impact creatives such as illustrators. I think that some professionals who refrain from leveraging it from an ethical standpoint will legitimately fall behind their labor competition.

atumalaca 2y ago

[flagged]

exiguus 2y ago

> What I found most interesting is that the multiple choice options included a lot of “I found the Terminator movies scary”, “I read too much Ray Kurzweil”, and/or “I am or was a SF Bay Area rationalist” undertones, but actual ethical objections were strangely absent. After reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book and see the current state of democracy in the USA and some European countries (apart from the fact that democracies are too slow to regulate anyway), I see little hope for the future.

mandmandam 2y ago
> I see little hope for the future. Try reading some Sarah Kendzior [0] if you want to lose whatever shreds you had left (or if you'd like to base any droplets of hope on a more accurate world-view). Wynn-Williams, and the author of this post, both severely underestimate how dark the tech-bros vision for the future actually is and how far along they are. Envision Snow Crash, but without the humor. 0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining-the-2024 https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining...
- exiguus 2y ago
  > underestimate how dark the tech-bros vision When ic the "German spy agency labels AfD as ‘confirmed rightwing extremist’ force". Which will now lead to the removal of AfD members and sympathizers from the civil service. I at least, have a little hope for Germany e.g. Europe. A little hope that the End of the Capitalist era will not end in fascism and there is another way now open for discus involving not only elites (aka tech-bros and old white male).
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    Nah, why? If the people want their fascism back, let them have it good and hard. WWII was obviously not close enough to the brink to teach us a permanent lesson. Let the next nationalistic spasm destroy everything, and then maybe the ones who survive us will figure it out because we are certainly failing.

dangus 2y ago

I actually think that many of the concerns the author doesn’t have are the more concerning ones and some of the concerns they do have are more likely to be not much of a big deal. The privacy concern I find to be particularly overstated. This is an identical concern to ones that have existed before AI ever entered the fray. Anytime you send data to a system that someone else controls you run those exact same risks. I also think there’s an overstated fear that an app focused on private data (something similar to Signal) would just add some kind of AI functionality one day out of the blue and suddenly ship your data off to a hive mind. Any app that is willing to cross that line already has done so (e.g., Facebook). It also seems to be technologically simple to perform a lot of AI tasks without compromising privacy. E.g., chips with local-first AI computational ability are reaching consumer level devices. Even the much-maligned Windows Recall feature specifically emphasizes how it never sends information to Microsoft servers nor processes data in the cloud.

baobun 2y ago
On privacy, the shift in incentives have changed the game. "More is better" is a new mantra and the perceived value of gathering and labeling arbitrary organic data has gone up significantly. This offsets or outright obliterates the liability aspect of data-hoarding. This will have privacy implications for individuals referenced in some of those datasets.
rpgwaiter 2y ago
The risk isn’t that Signal itself will add AI features, it’s more that it will be built-in to your OS that’s running Signal (Apple Intelligence, Windows Recall, etc). These types watch everything you do on-device by default and learn a ton from your E2EE messages regardless of the intentions of the Signal devs.
- dangus 2y ago
  I would say that in practice that doesn’t seem to be how some of these examples are being architected. Apple Intelligence as an example only seems to be reading information from Apple’s own default apps as of today, and their developer documentation suggests that capabilities require developers to implement features via their APIs. It isn’t really a correct read of the situation to say that Apple Intelligence is “watching everything you do” like a service that is just watching your screen output at all times. Even the service that does do that exact sort of thing (Windows Recall) has an extensive set of controls around filtering out specific apps and private browsing mode and other sensitive information, enabled by default: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont... So I think the reality is that a lot of the big players making this technology recognize the privacy and security concerns and are designing their AI applications to address those concerns. I personally feel like AI products are frequently launching with more transparency about data usage than a lot of Web 2.0 era applications like Facebook.

waltercool 2y ago

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YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

I followed the HN-targeted link at the top ("It gets exhausting") and Oh. My. Good. Lord: >> Something Awful had a particular response to furries. After creating a subforum specifically for furries to post in, everyone who used it was marked with a custom yellow star avatar, then banned. https://archive.md/fX8Jo https://archive.md/fX8Jo I used to think the early internet was less shite than the current internet. Maybe I've been mollycoddled, wrapped in the HN blanket where behaviour like that would never be condoned. Maybe I need to see more social media. But, really? Yellow stars? OK wow.

Izkata 2y ago
They and a few others flew under the radar while 4chan got all the heat. Most people had no idea those places existed, while your remembrance is probably more accurate for the early internet in general.
some_furry 2y ago
Wait until you hear about the furry convention that was the target of a terrorist attack via chlorine gas in 2014, which the news anchors laughed at when they heard what furries are. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXiMXx2shRmvI-PuBbmMlTlCC4Odv04ia https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXiMXx2shRmvI-PuBbmMl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j6ZdVSrXNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j6ZdVSrXNg Or, a less drastic and recent example, a furry in Australia getting jumped unprovoked: https://x.com/Dennis_Gunnn/status/1918591407314661399 https://x.com/Dennis_Gunnn/status/1918591407314661399 You can find hateful behavior everywhere if you look for it. This isn't exclusive to how people treat the furry fandom.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  I don't understand people. Thanks for sharing.