13 ms·

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit

by gyomu 1y ago

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. > I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good. But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle. I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

maegul 1y ago
Agreed! The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline. Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value. Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.
- bruce511 1y ago
  To be fair, LLMs are just the most recent step in a long road of doing the same thing. At any point of progress in history you can look backwards and forwards and the world is different. Before tractors a man with an ox could plough x field in y time. After tractors he can plough much larger areas. The nature of farming changes. (Fewer people needed to farm more land. ) The car arrives, horses leave. Computers arrive, the typing pool goes away. Typing was a skill, now everyone does it and spell checkers hide imperfections. So yeah LLMs make "drawing easier". Which means just that. Is that good or bad? Well I can't draw the old fashioned way so for me, good. Cooking used to be hard. Today cooking is easy, and very accessible. More importantly good food (cooked at home or elsewhere) is accessible to a much higher % of the population. Preparing the evening meal no longer starts with "pluck 2 chickens" and grinding a kilo of dried corn. So yeah, LLMs are here. And yes things will change. Some old jobs will become obsolete. Some new ones will appear. This is normal, it's been happening forever.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - thankyoufriend 1y ago
    The difference between GenAI and your examples is a theft component. They stole our data - your data - and used it to build a machine that diverts wealth to the rich. The only equitable way for GenAI to move forward is if we all own a share of it, since it would not exist in its current form without our data. GenAI should be a Universal Basic Asset.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      I appreciate the idealism but your argument has some flaws. Firstly the "theft component" isn't exactly new. There have always been rich and poor. Secondly everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. The Beatles were influenced by the works of others. Paul and John learned to write by mimicking other writers. That code you right is the pinicle of endless work dine by others. By Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing and Brian Kernigan and Denis Ritchie and Doug Englebart and thousands and thousands more. By your logic the entire output of all industries for all foreseeable generations should be universally owned. [1] But that's not the direction we have built society on. Rather society has evolved in the US to reward those who create value out of the common space. The oil in Texas doesn't belong to all Texans, it doesn't belong to the pump maker, it belongs to the company that pumps the oil. Equally there's no such thing as 'your data'. It's your choice to publish or not. Information cannot be 'owned'. Works can be copyrighted, but frankly you have a bigger argument on that front going after Google (and Google Books, not to mention the Internet Archive) than AI. AI may train on data you produced, but it does not copy it. [1] I'm actually for a basic income model, we don't need everyone working all day like it's 1900 anymore. That means more taxes on companies and the ultra wealthy. Apparently voters disagree as they continue to vote for people who prefer the opposite.
pjc50 1y ago
More fundamental question: if everyone can generate an album in an afternoon, why would anyone else listen to any of those? It turns into dust in the long tail.
- dvaun 1y ago
  All we are is dust in the wind.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  The things that were revolutionary in the past all eventually become common place and boring. It's happened to almost everything and continues to happen to anything new that comes out. LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.
  - this15testingg 1y ago
    ahead of what curve? intrinsically human endeavors are drowned in noise. what is the point? if even drawing/writing/singing are not worth doing anymore both because effort and the experience itself is worthless, I might as well step in front of a tesla taxi so I can escape this world. human ingenuity is amazing, but this whole mess is embarrassing
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Most human endeavor is drowned in the noise of other human endeavors. It was like this before AI. And with AI the noise becomes even larger. Noise is what I mean by "curve". Basically most of it is all noise but eventually something blows ahead of the curve and shines for a couple of seconds before the curve/wave catches up and engulfs it again. Most of what "goes" ahead of the "curve" is achievements of other people. You, I, and most other people are just watching other exceptional or lucky individuals shine for a couple of seconds. We are all watchers. There's no difference from our perspective if the people we are watching are humans or AI. It's not us anyway. If you are an exceptional genius who regularly achieves things that go past the "curve" then you will be affected. You will watch AI achieve things faster than you, do better than you, etc. In this case you are affected. Keep in mind that this "curve" I talk about is both global and has many many localized instances. Like a superstar at a start up is a localized example of an individual blowing past a localized curve, and Einstein is a global example of an individual excelling past a global curve.
raincole 1y ago
People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better. It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.
- zwnow 1y ago
  My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Your point is very valid. It is the luddite argument. And that is valid. But the problem is never the technology itself but, as you point out, the loss of livelihood and meaning and especially the shifts in power from the many to the few. We need to learn to make technology truly benefit the many. Also in terms of power.
    - zwnow 1y ago
      Yes, fully agree. Can't believe we live in a timeline in which big tech companies steal data from the many, use this data to train models, sell this data while also convincing technological illiterate people their propaganda machines (social media) is useful to them... Now they want to buy nuclear power plants too. Im sure nothing will go wrong there.
      - worldsayshi 1y ago
ako 1y ago
Agreed, it'll be a big problem if we don't keep our skills and rely on AI too much. Same with outsourcing manufacturing, at some point you loose the skill to produce products completely and are dependent on other countries. With the WWW we thought everyone having access to all information would enlighten them, but without knowledge people do not recognize the right information, and are more likely to trust (mis)information that they think they understand. What if LLMs give us all the answers that we need to solve all problems, but we are too uninformed and unskilled to recognize these answers? People will turn away from AI, and return to information that they can understand and trust, even if it's false. Anyway, nothing new actually, we've seen this with science for some time now. It's too advanced for most people to understand and validate, so people distrust it and turn to other sources of information.
- uh_uh 1y ago
  What other sources of information will people turn to? Kids are growing up asking ChatGPT in school. I just can't see a mass exodus happening.
  - ako 1y ago
    Misinformation, lies and populism, see for example discussions around vaccines where people no longer bother to understand the science, climate change, or religion where people randomly choose 1 out of 3000 available gods and then pretend like their choice is the only correct one.
autumnstwilight 1y ago
I learned Japanese by painstakingly translating interviews and blog posts from my favorite artist 15+ years ago, dictionary in hand. I also live and work in Japan now. Today I can click a button under the artist's tweets and get an instant translation that looks coherent (and often is, though it can also be quite wrong maybe 1/10 times). In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvement, but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?
- franciscop 1y ago
  I am learning Japanese (again) now and it's such a stark improvement vs when I first tried. When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well, and with a bit of prompting they give me the right practice bits I need for my level. For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in Japanese. It's still private-ish/only for myself, but I generated all of this with LLMs and using it to learn (I'm around N4~N3) : - Grammar: https://practice.cards/grammar https://practice.cards/grammar - Stories, with audio (takes a bit to load): https://practice.cards/stories https://practice.cards/stories It's true though that you still need the motivation, but there are 2 sides of AI here and just wanted to give the other side.
  - jops 1y ago
    Exactly this. LLMs make learning faster and easier for those who _want_ to learn, but conversely make it harder for those who don’t.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    > When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well But my man, how do you know if it explains perfectly well or is just generating plausible-sounding slop? You're learning, so by definition you don't know!
    - franciscop 1y ago
ninetyninenine 1y ago
age-ism will disappear.
worldsayshi 1y ago
> I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come. This should be comparable to how much fewer people in the west today know how to work a farm or build machinery. Each technological shift comes at a cost of population competence. I do have a feeling that this time it could be different. Because this shift has this meta-quality to it. It has never been easier to acquire, at least theoretical, knowledge. But the incentives for learning are shifting in strange directions.
ramon156 1y ago
My friend actually went to "yeah well I don't like it enough to hobby program in my free time, otherwise I might lose the enjoyment" 2 years later and he thought of a project he really wanted to make. He didn't succeed, but its very clear he changes his mind
PeterStuer 1y ago
The first time I had the "beginner" reflex was when I got an always on computer with an editor and storage. Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare. Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger! I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper". Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless. A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed. Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good. Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed. It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.
safety1st 1y ago
I don't DISAGREE with anything he said, particularly. But personally, I don't feel as upset over all this as he does. It seems that all my tech curmudgeonliness over the years is paying off these days, in spades. Humbly, I suggest that he and many others simply need to disconnect more from The Current Thing or The Popular Thing. Let's look at what he complains about: * Bitcoin. Massive hype, never went anywhere. He's totally right. That's why I never used it and barely even read about it. I have no complaints because I don't care. I told myself I'd care if someone ever built something useful with Bitcoin. 10 years later they haven't. I'm going back to bed. * Windows. Man I'm glad I dodged that bullet and became a Linux user almost 15 years ago. Just do it. Stuff will irk you either way but Linux irks don't make you feel like your dignity as a human being is being violated. Again, he's right that Windows sucks; I just don't have to care, because I walked away. * Bluesky, Twitter, various dumb things being said on social media. Those bother him too. Fortunately, these products are optional. I haven't logged into my Twitter account for three years. I'll certainly never create a Bluesky one. On some of my devices I straight up block many of these crapo social sites like Reddit etc. in /etc/hosts. I follow some RSS feeds of a few blogs, one of the local timeline for a Mastodon instance. Takes ten minutes and then I go READ BOOKS in my spare time. That's it. He is yet again right, social media sucks, it's the place where you hear about all this dumb stuff like Bitcoin; I just am not reading it. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here it's just that when you disconnect from all the trash, you never look back, and the frustrations of people who haven't seem a little silly. You can just turn all of this stuff off. Why don't you? Is it an addiction? Treat it like one if so. I used to spend 6 hours a day on my phone and now it's 1 hour, mainly at lunch, because the rest of the time it's on silent, in a bag, or turned off, just like a meth addict trying to quit shouldn't leave meth lying around. Listen to Stallman. Listen to Doctorow. These guys are right. They were always right. The free alternatives that respect you exist. Just make the leap and use them.
liendolucas 1y ago
I absolutely agree with you, it is like having human beings fed constantly whatever their want into their minds for free, effortlessly, without knowing nothing at all. Getting the whatevers ready for consumption. Perhaps this will lead to a new generation where everyone is the "expert novice". It's killing the accumulative and progressive way of learning that rewards who tries and fail many times before getting it right. The "learning" is effectively starting to being killed. I just wonder what would happen to a person after many years using "AI" and suddenly not having access to it. My guess is that you become useless and with a highly diminished capacity to perform even the most basic things by yourself. This is one of many reasons why I'm so against all the hype that's going on in the "AI" space. I keep doing things the old school way because I fully comprehend the value of reading real books, trying, failing and repeating the process again and again. There's no other way to truly learn anything. Does this generation understand the value of it? Will the next one?
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Charles Stross' Accelerando's 3rd chapter (2002) has a fascinating take on it by exploring what happens when someone's 'exocortex' is stolen : https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html#Tourist https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Also to the thief that tries to wear it. Set a few years from now.
guicen 1y ago
Maybe the point isn’t whether LLMs replace skills, but whether they help more people reach those skills. Lifting the floor is not the same as lowering the ceiling.
lloeki 1y ago
> You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. > up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle. https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685 https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685 Exactly. Only putting the work is going to get anyone places. And yes it takes _time_, like, tons, and there's no shortcut. And I can explain in excruciating detail how to do an ollie or a kickflip even and from a physics point of view you would totally get it but to land the damn thing you simply have to put a shitload of time on the board and fail over and over and over again. We come from a place where we've been trained as engineers or whatever to do this or that and - somewhat - critically think about things. Instead picture yourself in the shoes of a beginner: how would you, a beginner who has not built their own mental model of discipline $foo, even begin to be critical of AI output? But we're being advertised magic powder and sweating overalls and whathaveyou that makes you lose weight a) instantly† and b) without going to the gym and well putting in the effort††. LLMs are the speed diet of the mind. † comparatively †† not that putting any arbitrary amount of effort is going to get you places, there _is_ a thing such as wasteful effort; but NOT putting the effort is a solid guarantee that you won't.
pier25 1y ago
Something rather new in the history of civilization is the gamification of everything. It has created the expectation of receiving (fake) constant results for very little effort.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
The transformation is to aesthetic awareness over raw technical facility, and to "freshness" over skillful adherence to norms. The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's. Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"

by gyomu 1y ago

maegul 1y ago

Agreed! The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline. Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value. Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.

bruce511 1y ago
To be fair, LLMs are just the most recent step in a long road of doing the same thing. At any point of progress in history you can look backwards and forwards and the world is different. Before tractors a man with an ox could plough x field in y time. After tractors he can plough much larger areas. The nature of farming changes. (Fewer people needed to farm more land. ) The car arrives, horses leave. Computers arrive, the typing pool goes away. Typing was a skill, now everyone does it and spell checkers hide imperfections. So yeah LLMs make "drawing easier". Which means just that. Is that good or bad? Well I can't draw the old fashioned way so for me, good. Cooking used to be hard. Today cooking is easy, and very accessible. More importantly good food (cooked at home or elsewhere) is accessible to a much higher % of the population. Preparing the evening meal no longer starts with "pluck 2 chickens" and grinding a kilo of dried corn. So yeah, LLMs are here. And yes things will change. Some old jobs will become obsolete. Some new ones will appear. This is normal, it's been happening forever.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thankyoufriend 1y ago
  The difference between GenAI and your examples is a theft component. They stole our data - your data - and used it to build a machine that diverts wealth to the rich. The only equitable way for GenAI to move forward is if we all own a share of it, since it would not exist in its current form without our data. GenAI should be a Universal Basic Asset.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    I appreciate the idealism but your argument has some flaws. Firstly the "theft component" isn't exactly new. There have always been rich and poor. Secondly everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. The Beatles were influenced by the works of others. Paul and John learned to write by mimicking other writers. That code you right is the pinicle of endless work dine by others. By Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing and Brian Kernigan and Denis Ritchie and Doug Englebart and thousands and thousands more. By your logic the entire output of all industries for all foreseeable generations should be universally owned. [1] But that's not the direction we have built society on. Rather society has evolved in the US to reward those who create value out of the common space. The oil in Texas doesn't belong to all Texans, it doesn't belong to the pump maker, it belongs to the company that pumps the oil. Equally there's no such thing as 'your data'. It's your choice to publish or not. Information cannot be 'owned'. Works can be copyrighted, but frankly you have a bigger argument on that front going after Google (and Google Books, not to mention the Internet Archive) than AI. AI may train on data you produced, but it does not copy it. [1] I'm actually for a basic income model, we don't need everyone working all day like it's 1900 anymore. That means more taxes on companies and the ultra wealthy. Apparently voters disagree as they continue to vote for people who prefer the opposite.

pjc50 1y ago

More fundamental question: if everyone can generate an album in an afternoon, why would anyone else listen to any of those? It turns into dust in the long tail.

dvaun 1y ago
All we are is dust in the wind.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
The things that were revolutionary in the past all eventually become common place and boring. It's happened to almost everything and continues to happen to anything new that comes out. LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.
- this15testingg 1y ago
  ahead of what curve? intrinsically human endeavors are drowned in noise. what is the point? if even drawing/writing/singing are not worth doing anymore both because effort and the experience itself is worthless, I might as well step in front of a tesla taxi so I can escape this world. human ingenuity is amazing, but this whole mess is embarrassing
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Most human endeavor is drowned in the noise of other human endeavors. It was like this before AI. And with AI the noise becomes even larger. Noise is what I mean by "curve". Basically most of it is all noise but eventually something blows ahead of the curve and shines for a couple of seconds before the curve/wave catches up and engulfs it again. Most of what "goes" ahead of the "curve" is achievements of other people. You, I, and most other people are just watching other exceptional or lucky individuals shine for a couple of seconds. We are all watchers. There's no difference from our perspective if the people we are watching are humans or AI. It's not us anyway. If you are an exceptional genius who regularly achieves things that go past the "curve" then you will be affected. You will watch AI achieve things faster than you, do better than you, etc. In this case you are affected. Keep in mind that this "curve" I talk about is both global and has many many localized instances. Like a superstar at a start up is a localized example of an individual blowing past a localized curve, and Einstein is a global example of an individual excelling past a global curve.

raincole 1y ago

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better. It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

zwnow 1y ago
My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Your point is very valid. It is the luddite argument. And that is valid. But the problem is never the technology itself but, as you point out, the loss of livelihood and meaning and especially the shifts in power from the many to the few. We need to learn to make technology truly benefit the many. Also in terms of power.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    Yes, fully agree. Can't believe we live in a timeline in which big tech companies steal data from the many, use this data to train models, sell this data while also convincing technological illiterate people their propaganda machines (social media) is useful to them... Now they want to buy nuclear power plants too. Im sure nothing will go wrong there.
    - worldsayshi 1y ago

ako 1y ago

Agreed, it'll be a big problem if we don't keep our skills and rely on AI too much. Same with outsourcing manufacturing, at some point you loose the skill to produce products completely and are dependent on other countries. With the WWW we thought everyone having access to all information would enlighten them, but without knowledge people do not recognize the right information, and are more likely to trust (mis)information that they think they understand. What if LLMs give us all the answers that we need to solve all problems, but we are too uninformed and unskilled to recognize these answers? People will turn away from AI, and return to information that they can understand and trust, even if it's false. Anyway, nothing new actually, we've seen this with science for some time now. It's too advanced for most people to understand and validate, so people distrust it and turn to other sources of information.

uh_uh 1y ago
What other sources of information will people turn to? Kids are growing up asking ChatGPT in school. I just can't see a mass exodus happening.
- ako 1y ago
  Misinformation, lies and populism, see for example discussions around vaccines where people no longer bother to understand the science, climate change, or religion where people randomly choose 1 out of 3000 available gods and then pretend like their choice is the only correct one.

autumnstwilight 1y ago

I learned Japanese by painstakingly translating interviews and blog posts from my favorite artist 15+ years ago, dictionary in hand. I also live and work in Japan now. Today I can click a button under the artist's tweets and get an instant translation that looks coherent (and often is, though it can also be quite wrong maybe 1/10 times). In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvement, but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

franciscop 1y ago
I am learning Japanese (again) now and it's such a stark improvement vs when I first tried. When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well, and with a bit of prompting they give me the right practice bits I need for my level. For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in Japanese. It's still private-ish/only for myself, but I generated all of this with LLMs and using it to learn (I'm around N4~N3) : - Grammar: https://practice.cards/grammar https://practice.cards/grammar - Stories, with audio (takes a bit to load): https://practice.cards/stories https://practice.cards/stories It's true though that you still need the motivation, but there are 2 sides of AI here and just wanted to give the other side.
- jops 1y ago
  Exactly this. LLMs make learning faster and easier for those who _want_ to learn, but conversely make it harder for those who don’t.
- andrepd 1y ago
  > When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well But my man, how do you know if it explains perfectly well or is just generating plausible-sounding slop? You're learning, so by definition you don't know!
  - franciscop 1y ago

ninetyninenine 1y ago

age-ism will disappear.

worldsayshi 1y ago

> I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come. This should be comparable to how much fewer people in the west today know how to work a farm or build machinery. Each technological shift comes at a cost of population competence. I do have a feeling that this time it could be different. Because this shift has this meta-quality to it. It has never been easier to acquire, at least theoretical, knowledge. But the incentives for learning are shifting in strange directions.

ramon156 1y ago

My friend actually went to "yeah well I don't like it enough to hobby program in my free time, otherwise I might lose the enjoyment" 2 years later and he thought of a project he really wanted to make. He didn't succeed, but its very clear he changes his mind

PeterStuer 1y ago

The first time I had the "beginner" reflex was when I got an always on computer with an editor and storage. Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare. Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger! I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper". Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless. A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed. Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

> When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good. Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed. It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.

safety1st 1y ago

I don't DISAGREE with anything he said, particularly. But personally, I don't feel as upset over all this as he does. It seems that all my tech curmudgeonliness over the years is paying off these days, in spades. Humbly, I suggest that he and many others simply need to disconnect more from The Current Thing or The Popular Thing. Let's look at what he complains about: * Bitcoin. Massive hype, never went anywhere. He's totally right. That's why I never used it and barely even read about it. I have no complaints because I don't care. I told myself I'd care if someone ever built something useful with Bitcoin. 10 years later they haven't. I'm going back to bed. * Windows. Man I'm glad I dodged that bullet and became a Linux user almost 15 years ago. Just do it. Stuff will irk you either way but Linux irks don't make you feel like your dignity as a human being is being violated. Again, he's right that Windows sucks; I just don't have to care, because I walked away. * Bluesky, Twitter, various dumb things being said on social media. Those bother him too. Fortunately, these products are optional. I haven't logged into my Twitter account for three years. I'll certainly never create a Bluesky one. On some of my devices I straight up block many of these crapo social sites like Reddit etc. in /etc/hosts. I follow some RSS feeds of a few blogs, one of the local timeline for a Mastodon instance. Takes ten minutes and then I go READ BOOKS in my spare time. That's it. He is yet again right, social media sucks, it's the place where you hear about all this dumb stuff like Bitcoin; I just am not reading it. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here it's just that when you disconnect from all the trash, you never look back, and the frustrations of people who haven't seem a little silly. You can just turn all of this stuff off. Why don't you? Is it an addiction? Treat it like one if so. I used to spend 6 hours a day on my phone and now it's 1 hour, mainly at lunch, because the rest of the time it's on silent, in a bag, or turned off, just like a meth addict trying to quit shouldn't leave meth lying around. Listen to Stallman. Listen to Doctorow. These guys are right. They were always right. The free alternatives that respect you exist. Just make the leap and use them.

liendolucas 1y ago

I absolutely agree with you, it is like having human beings fed constantly whatever their want into their minds for free, effortlessly, without knowing nothing at all. Getting the whatevers ready for consumption. Perhaps this will lead to a new generation where everyone is the "expert novice". It's killing the accumulative and progressive way of learning that rewards who tries and fail many times before getting it right. The "learning" is effectively starting to being killed. I just wonder what would happen to a person after many years using "AI" and suddenly not having access to it. My guess is that you become useless and with a highly diminished capacity to perform even the most basic things by yourself. This is one of many reasons why I'm so against all the hype that's going on in the "AI" space. I keep doing things the old school way because I fully comprehend the value of reading real books, trying, failing and repeating the process again and again. There's no other way to truly learn anything. Does this generation understand the value of it? Will the next one?

BlueTemplar 1y ago
Charles Stross' Accelerando's 3rd chapter (2002) has a fascinating take on it by exploring what happens when someone's 'exocortex' is stolen : https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html#Tourist https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Also to the thief that tries to wear it. Set a few years from now.

guicen 1y ago

Maybe the point isn’t whether LLMs replace skills, but whether they help more people reach those skills. Lifting the floor is not the same as lowering the ceiling.

lloeki 1y ago

> You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. > up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle. https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685 https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685 Exactly. Only putting the work is going to get anyone places. And yes it takes _time_, like, tons, and there's no shortcut. And I can explain in excruciating detail how to do an ollie or a kickflip even and from a physics point of view you would totally get it but to land the damn thing you simply have to put a shitload of time on the board and fail over and over and over again. We come from a place where we've been trained as engineers or whatever to do this or that and - somewhat - critically think about things. Instead picture yourself in the shoes of a beginner: how would you, a beginner who has not built their own mental model of discipline $foo, even begin to be critical of AI output? But we're being advertised magic powder and sweating overalls and whathaveyou that makes you lose weight a) instantly† and b) without going to the gym and well putting in the effort††. LLMs are the speed diet of the mind. † comparatively †† not that putting any arbitrary amount of effort is going to get you places, there _is_ a thing such as wasteful effort; but NOT putting the effort is a solid guarantee that you won't.

pier25 1y ago

Something rather new in the history of civilization is the gamification of everything. It has created the expectation of receiving (fake) constant results for very little effort.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

The transformation is to aesthetic awareness over raw technical facility, and to "freshness" over skillful adherence to norms. The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's. Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"