4 ms·

I know I sound like a snob but I’ve had many moments with Gen AI tools over the years that made me wonder: I wonder what these tools are like for someone who do

by holtkam2 10mo ago

I know I sound like a snob but I’ve had many moments with Gen AI tools over the years that made me wonder: I wonder what these tools are like for someone who doesn’t know how LLMs work under the hood? It’s probably completely bizarre? Apps like Cursor or ChatGPT would be incomprehensible to me as a user, I feel.

Workaccount2 10mo ago
Using my parents as a reference, they just thought it was neat when I showed them GPT-4 years ago. My jaw was on the floor for weeks, but most regular folks I showed had a pretty "oh thats kinda neat" response. Technology is already so insane and advanced that most people just take it as magic inside boxes, so nothing is surprising anymore. It's all equally incomprehensible already.
- jacobedawson 10mo ago
  This mirrors my experience, the non-technical people in my life either shrugged and said 'oh yeah that's cool' or started pointing out gnarly edge cases where it didn't work perfectly. Meanwhile as a techie my mind was (and still is) spinning with the shock and joy of using natural human language to converse with a super-humanly adept machine.
  - throw310822 10mo ago
    I don't think the divide is between technical and non-technical people. HN is full of people that are weirdly, obstinately dismissive of LLMs (stochastic parrots, glorified autocompletes, AI slop, etc.). Personal anecdote: my father (85yo, humanistic culture) was astounded by the perfectly spot-on analysis Claude provided of a poetic text he had written. He was doubly astounded when, showing Claude's analysis to a close friend, he reacted with complete indifference as if it were normal for computers to competently discuss poetry.
- khafra 10mo ago
  LLMs are an especially tough case, because the field of AI had to spend sixty years telling people that real AI was nothing like what you saw in the comics and movies; and now we have real AI that presents pretty much exactly like what you used to see in the comics and movies.
  - xwolfi 10mo ago
    But it cannot think or mean anything, it's just a clever parrot so it's a bit weird. I guess uncanny is the word. I use it as google now, like just to search stuff that are hard to express with keywords.
    - LEDThereBeLight 10mo ago
      Try asking it a question you know has never been asked before. Is it parroting?
    - adventured 10mo ago
      99% of humans are mimics, they contribute essentially zero original thought across 75 years. Mimicry is more often an ideal optimization of nature (of which an LLM is part) rather than a flaw. Most of what you'll ever want an LLM to do is to be a highly effective parrot, not an original thinker. Origination as a process is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful (see: entrepreneurial failure rates). How often do you need original thought from an LLM versus parrot thought? The extreme majority of all use cases globally will only ever need a parrot.
    - robocat 10mo ago
      > clever parrot Is it irony that you duckspeak this term? Are you a stochastically clever monkey to avoid using the standard cliche? The thing I find most educating about AI is that it unfortunately mimics the standard of thinking of many humans...
- Agentlien 10mo ago
  My parents reacted in just the same way and the lackluster response really took me by surprise.
d-lisp 10mo ago
Most non tech people I talked with don't care at all about LLMs. They also are not impressed at all ("Okay, that's like google and internet").
- lostmsu 10mo ago
  Old people? I think it would be hard to find a lot of people under 20 who don't use ChatGPT daily. At least among ones that are still studying.
  - d-lisp 10mo ago
    People older than 25 or 30 maybe. It would be funny that in the end, the most use is made by student cheating at uni.
  - d-lisp 10mo ago
    I wanted to reflect a bit on this. I have hard time to imagine why non-tech people would find a use for LLMs, let's say nothing in your life forces you to produce information (be it textual, pictural or anything that can be related to information). Let's say your needs are focused on spending good times with friends or your family, eating nice dishes (home cooked or restaurant), spending your money on furnitures, rents, clothes, tools and etc. Why would you need an AI that produce information in an information-bloated world ? You probably met someone that "fell in love with woodworking" or idk, after having watched youtube videos (that person probably built a chair, a table or something akin). I don't think stuff like "Hi, I have these materials, what can I do with it" produce more interesting results than just nerding on the internet or in a library looking for references (on japaneese handcrafted furnitures, vintage ikea designs, old school woodworking, ...). (Or maybe the LLM will be able to give you a list of good reads, which is nice but somewhat of a limited and basic use). Agentic AI and more efficient/intelligent AIs are not very interesting for people like <wood lover> and are at best a proxy for otherly findable information. Of course, not everyone is like <wood lover>, the majority of people don't even need to invest time in a "creative" hobby and instead they will watch movies, invest time in sport, invest time in sociability, go to museums, read books; you could imagine having AIs that write books, invent films, invent artworks, talk with you, but I am pretty sure that there is something more than just "watch a movie" or "read a book" when performing these activities; as someone who likes reading or watching movies, what I enjoy is following the evolutions of the authors of the pieces, understanding their posture toward its ancestors, its era-mates, toward its own previous visions and whatnot. I enjoy to find a movie "weird" "goofy" "sublime" and whatnot, because I enjoy a small amount of parasociality with the authors and am finally brought to say things like "Ahah, Lynch was such a weirdo when he shot Blue Velvet" (okay, maybe not that type of bully judgement, but you may be understanding what I mean). I think I would find it uninspiring to read an AI written book, because I couldn't live this small parasocial experience. Maybe you could get me with music, but I still think there's a lot of activity in loving a song. I love Bach, but am pretty sure also I like Bach the character (from what I speculate from the songs I listen). I imagine that guy in front of his keyboard, having the chance to live a -weird- moment of extasy when he produces the best lines of the chaconne (if he was living in our times he would relisten to what he produced again and again and nodding to himself "man, that's sick"). What could I experience from an LLM ? "Here is the perfect novel I wrote specifically for you based on your tastes:". There would be no imaginary Bach that I would like to drink a beer with, no testimony of a human reaching the state of mind in which you produce an absolute (in fact highly relative, but you need to lie to yourself) "hit". All of this is highly personnal, but I would be curious to know what others think.

Workaccount2 10mo ago

Using my parents as a reference, they just thought it was neat when I showed them GPT-4 years ago. My jaw was on the floor for weeks, but most regular folks I showed had a pretty "oh thats kinda neat" response. Technology is already so insane and advanced that most people just take it as magic inside boxes, so nothing is surprising anymore. It's all equally incomprehensible already.

jacobedawson 10mo ago
This mirrors my experience, the non-technical people in my life either shrugged and said 'oh yeah that's cool' or started pointing out gnarly edge cases where it didn't work perfectly. Meanwhile as a techie my mind was (and still is) spinning with the shock and joy of using natural human language to converse with a super-humanly adept machine.
- throw310822 10mo ago
  I don't think the divide is between technical and non-technical people. HN is full of people that are weirdly, obstinately dismissive of LLMs (stochastic parrots, glorified autocompletes, AI slop, etc.). Personal anecdote: my father (85yo, humanistic culture) was astounded by the perfectly spot-on analysis Claude provided of a poetic text he had written. He was doubly astounded when, showing Claude's analysis to a close friend, he reacted with complete indifference as if it were normal for computers to competently discuss poetry.
khafra 10mo ago
LLMs are an especially tough case, because the field of AI had to spend sixty years telling people that real AI was nothing like what you saw in the comics and movies; and now we have real AI that presents pretty much exactly like what you used to see in the comics and movies.
- xwolfi 10mo ago
  But it cannot think or mean anything, it's just a clever parrot so it's a bit weird. I guess uncanny is the word. I use it as google now, like just to search stuff that are hard to express with keywords.
  - LEDThereBeLight 10mo ago
    Try asking it a question you know has never been asked before. Is it parroting?
  - adventured 10mo ago
    99% of humans are mimics, they contribute essentially zero original thought across 75 years. Mimicry is more often an ideal optimization of nature (of which an LLM is part) rather than a flaw. Most of what you'll ever want an LLM to do is to be a highly effective parrot, not an original thinker. Origination as a process is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful (see: entrepreneurial failure rates). How often do you need original thought from an LLM versus parrot thought? The extreme majority of all use cases globally will only ever need a parrot.
  - robocat 10mo ago
    > clever parrot Is it irony that you duckspeak this term? Are you a stochastically clever monkey to avoid using the standard cliche? The thing I find most educating about AI is that it unfortunately mimics the standard of thinking of many humans...
Agentlien 10mo ago
My parents reacted in just the same way and the lackluster response really took me by surprise.

d-lisp 10mo ago

Most non tech people I talked with don't care at all about LLMs. They also are not impressed at all ("Okay, that's like google and internet").

lostmsu 10mo ago
Old people? I think it would be hard to find a lot of people under 20 who don't use ChatGPT daily. At least among ones that are still studying.
- d-lisp 10mo ago
  People older than 25 or 30 maybe. It would be funny that in the end, the most use is made by student cheating at uni.
- d-lisp 10mo ago
  I wanted to reflect a bit on this. I have hard time to imagine why non-tech people would find a use for LLMs, let's say nothing in your life forces you to produce information (be it textual, pictural or anything that can be related to information). Let's say your needs are focused on spending good times with friends or your family, eating nice dishes (home cooked or restaurant), spending your money on furnitures, rents, clothes, tools and etc. Why would you need an AI that produce information in an information-bloated world ? You probably met someone that "fell in love with woodworking" or idk, after having watched youtube videos (that person probably built a chair, a table or something akin). I don't think stuff like "Hi, I have these materials, what can I do with it" produce more interesting results than just nerding on the internet or in a library looking for references (on japaneese handcrafted furnitures, vintage ikea designs, old school woodworking, ...). (Or maybe the LLM will be able to give you a list of good reads, which is nice but somewhat of a limited and basic use). Agentic AI and more efficient/intelligent AIs are not very interesting for people like <wood lover> and are at best a proxy for otherly findable information. Of course, not everyone is like <wood lover>, the majority of people don't even need to invest time in a "creative" hobby and instead they will watch movies, invest time in sport, invest time in sociability, go to museums, read books; you could imagine having AIs that write books, invent films, invent artworks, talk with you, but I am pretty sure that there is something more than just "watch a movie" or "read a book" when performing these activities; as someone who likes reading or watching movies, what I enjoy is following the evolutions of the authors of the pieces, understanding their posture toward its ancestors, its era-mates, toward its own previous visions and whatnot. I enjoy to find a movie "weird" "goofy" "sublime" and whatnot, because I enjoy a small amount of parasociality with the authors and am finally brought to say things like "Ahah, Lynch was such a weirdo when he shot Blue Velvet" (okay, maybe not that type of bully judgement, but you may be understanding what I mean). I think I would find it uninspiring to read an AI written book, because I couldn't live this small parasocial experience. Maybe you could get me with music, but I still think there's a lot of activity in loving a song. I love Bach, but am pretty sure also I like Bach the character (from what I speculate from the songs I listen). I imagine that guy in front of his keyboard, having the chance to live a -weird- moment of extasy when he produces the best lines of the chaconne (if he was living in our times he would relisten to what he produced again and again and nodding to himself "man, that's sick"). What could I experience from an LLM ? "Here is the perfect novel I wrote specifically for you based on your tastes:". There would be no imaginary Bach that I would like to drink a beer with, no testimony of a human reaching the state of mind in which you produce an absolute (in fact highly relative, but you need to lie to yourself) "hit". All of this is highly personnal, but I would be curious to know what others think.