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This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revol

This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.

grishka 1y ago
The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
- suspended_state 1y ago
  In the early days of the web, there wasn't much we could do with it other than making silly pages with blinking texts or under construction animated GIFs. You need to give it some time before judging a new technology.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    The internet predates the Web; people were playing Muds and chatting on message boards before the first browser was made at CERN.
    - suspended_state 1y ago
      Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone? I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
      - andrepd 1y ago
        As I pointed out in a different comment, the Internet at least was (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. But LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
        suspended_state 1y ago
        > [...] LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine. Is that a matter of opinion, or a fact (in which case you should be able to back it up)?
        andrepd 1y ago
        For real? x) Of course it's my opinion, what are your own comments about "silly gifs" and "useless early internet" if not an opinion?Seriously...
        suspended_state 1y ago
        That might be a lack of understanding from my part. I had the impression from your comment that you were implying that there was (and is) hope in internet development (ie. many people hold a positive opinion about it), but there cannot be any hope in LLMs (ie. nobody can build a positive opinion about it, because presumably some hard fact prevents it). As for what I said, I was just mimicking the comment of GP, which I'll quote here: > The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
  - Disposal8433 1y ago
    We don't remember the same internet. For the first time in our lives we could communicate by email with people from all over the world. Anyone could have a page to show what they were doing with pictures and text. We had access to photos and videos of art, museum, cities, lifestyles that we could not get anywhere else. And as a non-English guy I got access to millions of lines of written text and audio to actually improve my English. It was a whole new world that may have changed my life forever. ChatGPT is a shitty Google replacement in comparison, and it's a bad alternative due to being censored in its main instructions.
    - suspended_state 1y ago
      [dead]
  - grishka 1y ago
    In the early web, there already were forums. There were chats. There were news websites. There were online stores. There were company websites with useful information. Many of these were there pretty much from the beginning. In the 90s, no one questioned the utility of the internet. Some people were just too lazy to learn how to use a computer or couldn't afford one. LLMs in their current form have existed since what, 2021? That's 4 years already. They have hundreds of millions of active users. The only improvements we've seen so far were very much iterative ones — more of the same. Larger contexts, thinking tokens, multimodality, all that stuff. But the core concept is still the same, a very computationally expensive, very large neural network that predicts the next token of a text given a sequence of tokens. How much more time do we have to give this technology before we could judge it?
    - suspended_state 1y ago
      Perhaps enough time for you to build a good understanding of what it is capable of, and how it is evolving over time?
      - grishka 1y ago
        I have a good enough understanding of what it is capable of, and I remain unimpressed. See, AI systems, all of them, not just LLMs, are fundamentally bound by their training dataset. That's fine for data classification tasks, and AI does excel at that, I'm not denying it. But creative work like writing software or articles is unique. Don't know about you, but most of the things I do are something no one has ever done before, so they by definition could not have been included in the training dataset, and no AI could possibly assist me with any of this. If you do something that has been done so many times that even AI knows how to do it, what's even the point of your work?
        suspended_state 1y ago
        [dead]
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Delusional take. I’m not even heavily invested into AI, just a casual user, and it drastically cut amount of bullshit that I have to deal with in modern computing landscape. Search, summarization, automation. All of this drastically improved with the most superior interface of them all - natural text.
  - barrell 1y ago
    Not OP, but how much of the modern computing landscape bullshit that it cut was introduced in the last 5-10 years? I think if one were to graph the progress of technology on a graph, the trend line would look pretty linear — except for a massive dip around 2014-2022. Google searches got better and better until they suddenly started getting worse and worse. Websites started getting better and better until they suddenly got worse. Same goes for content, connection, services, developer experience, prices, etc. I struggle to see LLMs as a major revolution, or any sort of step function change, but very easily see them as a (temporary) (partial) reset to trendline.
rapnie 1y ago
While the "move fast and break things" rushed embrace of anything AI reminds me of young wild children, who are blissfully unaware of any danger while their responsible parents try to keep them safe. It is lovely if children can believe in magic, but part of growing up involves facing reality and making responsible choices.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Right, the same “responsible parents” who don’t know what to press so their phone plays YouTube video or don’t know how that “juicy milfs in your area” banner got in their internet explorer.
dns_snek 1y ago
No, your parents spoke out of ignorance and resistance towards any sort of change, I'm speaking from years of experience of both trying to use the technology productively, as well as spending a significant portion of my life in the digital world that has been impacted by it. I remember being mesmerized by GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even a thing. The only thing that has been revolutionized over the past few years is the amount of time I now waste looking at Cloudflare turnstile and dredging through the ocean of shit that has flooded the open web to find information that is actually reliable. 2 years ago I could still search for information (let's say plumbing-related), but we're now at a point where I'll end up on a bunch of professional and traditionally trustworthy sources, but after a few seconds I realize it's just LLM-generated slop that's regurgitating the same incorrect information that was already provided to me by an LLM a few minutes prior. It sounds reasonable, it sounds authoritative, most people would accept it but I know that it's wrong. Where do I go? Soon the answer is probably going to have to be "the library" again. All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  Personally, I have three use cases for AI: 1. Image upscaling. I am decorating my house and AI allowed me to get huge prints from tiny shitty pictures. It's not perfect, but it works. 2. Conversational partner. It's a different question whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I can spend hours talking to Claude about things in general. He's expensive though. 3. Learning basics of something. I'm trying to install LED strips and ChatGPT taught me basics of how that's supposed to work. Also, ChatGPT suggested me what plants might survive in my living room and how to take care of them (we'll see if that works though). And this is just my personal use case, I'm sure there are more. My point is, you're wrong. > All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites. Literally same shit my parents would say while I was cross-checking multiple websites for information and they were watching the only TV channel that our antenna would pick up.
andrepd 1y ago
The internet was at least (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
agentcoops 1y ago
Indeed — however it’s interesting that unlike the internet, computers or smartphones the older generation, like the younger, immediately found the use of GPT. This is reflected in the latest Mary Meeker report where it’s apparent that the /organic/ growth of AI use is unparalleled in the history of technology [1]. In my experience with my own parents’ use, GPT is the first time the older generation has found an intuitive interface to digital computers. I’m still stunned to wander into threads like this where all the same talking points of AI being “pushed” on people are parroted. Marcus et al can keep screaming into their echo chamber and it won’t change a thing. [1] https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelligence.pdf https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelli...
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > I’m still stunned to wander into threads like this where all the same talking points of AI being “pushed” on people are parroted. Where else would AI haters find an echo chamber that proves their point?
  - agentcoops 1y ago
    It's wild -- I've never seen such a persistent split in the Hacker News audience like this one. The skeptics read one set of AI articles, everyone else the others; a similar comment will be praised in one thread and down-voted to oblivion in another.
    - throwawayqqq11 1y ago
      IMO the split is between people understanding the heuristic nature of AI and people who dont and thus think of it as an all-knowing, all-solving oracle. Your elder parents having nice conversations with chatgpt is nice aslong it doesnt make big life changing decisions for them, which happens already today. You have to know the tools limits and usecases.
      - daveguy 1y ago
Lu2025 1y ago
Nah. It's just they are upselling us AI so aggressively it doesn't pass the sniff test anymore.

grishka 1y ago

The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.

suspended_state 1y ago
In the early days of the web, there wasn't much we could do with it other than making silly pages with blinking texts or under construction animated GIFs. You need to give it some time before judging a new technology.
- andrepd 1y ago
  The internet predates the Web; people were playing Muds and chatting on message boards before the first browser was made at CERN.
  - suspended_state 1y ago
    Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone? I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
    - andrepd 1y ago
      As I pointed out in a different comment, the Internet at least was (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. But LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
      - suspended_state 1y ago
        > [...] LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine. Is that a matter of opinion, or a fact (in which case you should be able to back it up)?
        andrepd 1y ago
        For real? x) Of course it's my opinion, what are your own comments about "silly gifs" and "useless early internet" if not an opinion?Seriously...
        suspended_state 1y ago
        That might be a lack of understanding from my part. I had the impression from your comment that you were implying that there was (and is) hope in internet development (ie. many people hold a positive opinion about it), but there cannot be any hope in LLMs (ie. nobody can build a positive opinion about it, because presumably some hard fact prevents it). As for what I said, I was just mimicking the comment of GP, which I'll quote here: > The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  We don't remember the same internet. For the first time in our lives we could communicate by email with people from all over the world. Anyone could have a page to show what they were doing with pictures and text. We had access to photos and videos of art, museum, cities, lifestyles that we could not get anywhere else. And as a non-English guy I got access to millions of lines of written text and audio to actually improve my English. It was a whole new world that may have changed my life forever. ChatGPT is a shitty Google replacement in comparison, and it's a bad alternative due to being censored in its main instructions.
  - suspended_state 1y ago
    [dead]
- grishka 1y ago
  In the early web, there already were forums. There were chats. There were news websites. There were online stores. There were company websites with useful information. Many of these were there pretty much from the beginning. In the 90s, no one questioned the utility of the internet. Some people were just too lazy to learn how to use a computer or couldn't afford one. LLMs in their current form have existed since what, 2021? That's 4 years already. They have hundreds of millions of active users. The only improvements we've seen so far were very much iterative ones — more of the same. Larger contexts, thinking tokens, multimodality, all that stuff. But the core concept is still the same, a very computationally expensive, very large neural network that predicts the next token of a text given a sequence of tokens. How much more time do we have to give this technology before we could judge it?
  - suspended_state 1y ago
    Perhaps enough time for you to build a good understanding of what it is capable of, and how it is evolving over time?
    - grishka 1y ago
      I have a good enough understanding of what it is capable of, and I remain unimpressed. See, AI systems, all of them, not just LLMs, are fundamentally bound by their training dataset. That's fine for data classification tasks, and AI does excel at that, I'm not denying it. But creative work like writing software or articles is unique. Don't know about you, but most of the things I do are something no one has ever done before, so they by definition could not have been included in the training dataset, and no AI could possibly assist me with any of this. If you do something that has been done so many times that even AI knows how to do it, what's even the point of your work?
      - suspended_state 1y ago
        [dead]
wiseowise 1y ago
Delusional take. I’m not even heavily invested into AI, just a casual user, and it drastically cut amount of bullshit that I have to deal with in modern computing landscape. Search, summarization, automation. All of this drastically improved with the most superior interface of them all - natural text.
- barrell 1y ago
  Not OP, but how much of the modern computing landscape bullshit that it cut was introduced in the last 5-10 years? I think if one were to graph the progress of technology on a graph, the trend line would look pretty linear — except for a massive dip around 2014-2022. Google searches got better and better until they suddenly started getting worse and worse. Websites started getting better and better until they suddenly got worse. Same goes for content, connection, services, developer experience, prices, etc. I struggle to see LLMs as a major revolution, or any sort of step function change, but very easily see them as a (temporary) (partial) reset to trendline.

rapnie 1y ago

While the "move fast and break things" rushed embrace of anything AI reminds me of young wild children, who are blissfully unaware of any danger while their responsible parents try to keep them safe. It is lovely if children can believe in magic, but part of growing up involves facing reality and making responsible choices.

wiseowise 1y ago
Right, the same “responsible parents” who don’t know what to press so their phone plays YouTube video or don’t know how that “juicy milfs in your area” banner got in their internet explorer.

dns_snek 1y ago

No, your parents spoke out of ignorance and resistance towards any sort of change, I'm speaking from years of experience of both trying to use the technology productively, as well as spending a significant portion of my life in the digital world that has been impacted by it. I remember being mesmerized by GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even a thing. The only thing that has been revolutionized over the past few years is the amount of time I now waste looking at Cloudflare turnstile and dredging through the ocean of shit that has flooded the open web to find information that is actually reliable. 2 years ago I could still search for information (let's say plumbing-related), but we're now at a point where I'll end up on a bunch of professional and traditionally trustworthy sources, but after a few seconds I realize it's just LLM-generated slop that's regurgitating the same incorrect information that was already provided to me by an LLM a few minutes prior. It sounds reasonable, it sounds authoritative, most people would accept it but I know that it's wrong. Where do I go? Soon the answer is probably going to have to be "the library" again. All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites.

anal_reactor 1y ago
Personally, I have three use cases for AI: 1. Image upscaling. I am decorating my house and AI allowed me to get huge prints from tiny shitty pictures. It's not perfect, but it works. 2. Conversational partner. It's a different question whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I can spend hours talking to Claude about things in general. He's expensive though. 3. Learning basics of something. I'm trying to install LED strips and ChatGPT taught me basics of how that's supposed to work. Also, ChatGPT suggested me what plants might survive in my living room and how to take care of them (we'll see if that works though). And this is just my personal use case, I'm sure there are more. My point is, you're wrong. > All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites. Literally same shit my parents would say while I was cross-checking multiple websites for information and they were watching the only TV channel that our antenna would pick up.

andrepd 1y ago

The internet was at least (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.

agentcoops 1y ago

Indeed — however it’s interesting that unlike the internet, computers or smartphones the older generation, like the younger, immediately found the use of GPT. This is reflected in the latest Mary Meeker report where it’s apparent that the /organic/ growth of AI use is unparalleled in the history of technology [1]. In my experience with my own parents’ use, GPT is the first time the older generation has found an intuitive interface to digital computers. I’m still stunned to wander into threads like this where all the same talking points of AI being “pushed” on people are parroted. Marcus et al can keep screaming into their echo chamber and it won’t change a thing. [1] https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelligence.pdf https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelli...

wiseowise 1y ago
> I’m still stunned to wander into threads like this where all the same talking points of AI being “pushed” on people are parroted. Where else would AI haters find an echo chamber that proves their point?
- agentcoops 1y ago
  It's wild -- I've never seen such a persistent split in the Hacker News audience like this one. The skeptics read one set of AI articles, everyone else the others; a similar comment will be praised in one thread and down-voted to oblivion in another.
  - throwawayqqq11 1y ago
    IMO the split is between people understanding the heuristic nature of AI and people who dont and thus think of it as an all-knowing, all-solving oracle. Your elder parents having nice conversations with chatgpt is nice aslong it doesnt make big life changing decisions for them, which happens already today. You have to know the tools limits and usecases.
    - daveguy 1y ago

Lu2025 1y ago

Nah. It's just they are upselling us AI so aggressively it doesn't pass the sniff test anymore.