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From the article: > That sounds good, but a "responsible AI user" is an oxymoron. For all the crap about how AI will encourage us to spend more time doing bett

From the article: > That sounds good, but a "responsible AI user" is an oxymoron. For all the crap about how AI will encourage us to spend more time doing better work, the truth is AI users write fake papers including bullshit results. I don't really think AI was ever meant to make us do "better" work, but more efficient work defined within a narrow set of parameters. Technology that scales encourages the optimization of single parameters, and the greater it scales, the more efficient that optimization is. For example, Google Search is a great example: huge scale, optimizing for SEO spam that is practically useless if you want to go into nuanced depth. AI is even worse than that: it trades efficiency for accuracy, but efficiency at what? Production of things to be consumed, whether accurate, personally valuable, or not. After all, the internet has already tended towards this trend of production of the novel, at least for the average person. Yes, we can all point to subsystems that are nuanced and detailed such as some scientific paper repositories, but even science is being gamed and eaten up by the superficial. We have instincts: to find new information, and that instinct itself is being gamed by AI that is perfect at finding the lowest-cost, lowest-quality information that is just so designed to stimulate our instinct of consumption. In the short term, it does "help" us, but it also makes us less useful as "computational units", and thus more replaceable and slowly and subtly shifts our role from unique and creative souls to swappable computation units/consumers to direct AI. No one designed it that way, but it's the emergent direction of the system.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> I don't really think AI was ever meant to make us do "better" work I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah). Even from the less hyperbolic types, I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah). I get that. I do think there are three different levels we must distinguish between when considering this though: 1) What those who are selling AI want us to believe so we buy it 2) What those who are selling AI want 3) What AI actually will do based on its fundamental properties, and the emergent effects of mass human instinct operating on it I was referring more to 3 and tangentially 2, not really to 1, which in my opinion is as relevant as a used car salesman telling you that that used Ford Fiesta in the corner is the most reliable thing you'll buy in the next ten years. > I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are. True, I think that's a goal of AI researchers, or at least AI computer scientists like the team who eventually build Deep Blue and similar folk. Though, the goal of the companies today are probably just "build it as good as it gets to get the money".

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

> I don't really think AI was ever meant to make us do "better" work I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah). Even from the less hyperbolic types, I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
> I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah). I get that. I do think there are three different levels we must distinguish between when considering this though: 1) What those who are selling AI want us to believe so we buy it 2) What those who are selling AI want 3) What AI actually will do based on its fundamental properties, and the emergent effects of mass human instinct operating on it I was referring more to 3 and tangentially 2, not really to 1, which in my opinion is as relevant as a used car salesman telling you that that used Ford Fiesta in the corner is the most reliable thing you'll buy in the next ten years. > I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are. True, I think that's a goal of AI researchers, or at least AI computer scientists like the team who eventually build Deep Blue and similar folk. Though, the goal of the companies today are probably just "build it as good as it gets to get the money".