4 ms·

We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence". It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but ple

by bflesch 4mo ago

We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence". It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else. The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ianm218 4mo ago
Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.
- bflesch 4mo ago
  A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears. At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it. It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction. I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    >A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. We'll in humans we call this an education and it takes quite a long time to get one.
    - bflesch 4mo ago
      Not a good comparison. Education is the part where they train on all digital content they can get their hands at, no matter the copyrights. You get your education, you can replace google as a query-response interface to all digital content. But then they use system prompts to simulate a fake persona and a user interface such as female voices or chat conversation in order to suggest that one is interacting with a real human being. This is clearly aimed at exploiting vulnerable cohorts of people, because the knowledge base part of this innovative technology is already solved. Like casinos and social media companies, they know the profit is in the "whales" who can be psychologically manipulated to spend their time and money against their own interests.
      - pixl97 4mo ago
        This is oddly conspiracy theory oriented. How would you program a LLM so it gives useful information to people with the least amount of people bitching about it? At the end of the day the LLM does not have a native persona. It has countless numbers of them. It can act like an autistic man, a flirty woman, a kid from some country you've never heard of. Bringing forth an agreeable persona from the myriad is a bad thing?
  - ianm218 4mo ago
    To get more concrete are you using coding agents like Claude Code/ Codex/ opencode etc? What kind of work are you doing specifically? If you are doing the kind of median enterprise tech work these tools are just good enough to do it at a relatively high level or atleast heavily augment people doing it. Examples would be like adding routine CRUD features to APIs/ improving observability/ adding tests or accessibility features to codebases etc.

by bflesch 4mo ago

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago

Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

ianm218 4mo ago

Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.

bflesch 4mo ago
A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears. At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it. It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction. I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. We'll in humans we call this an education and it takes quite a long time to get one.
  - bflesch 4mo ago
    Not a good comparison. Education is the part where they train on all digital content they can get their hands at, no matter the copyrights. You get your education, you can replace google as a query-response interface to all digital content. But then they use system prompts to simulate a fake persona and a user interface such as female voices or chat conversation in order to suggest that one is interacting with a real human being. This is clearly aimed at exploiting vulnerable cohorts of people, because the knowledge base part of this innovative technology is already solved. Like casinos and social media companies, they know the profit is in the "whales" who can be psychologically manipulated to spend their time and money against their own interests.
    - pixl97 4mo ago
      This is oddly conspiracy theory oriented. How would you program a LLM so it gives useful information to people with the least amount of people bitching about it? At the end of the day the LLM does not have a native persona. It has countless numbers of them. It can act like an autistic man, a flirty woman, a kid from some country you've never heard of. Bringing forth an agreeable persona from the myriad is a bad thing?
- ianm218 4mo ago
  To get more concrete are you using coding agents like Claude Code/ Codex/ opencode etc? What kind of work are you doing specifically? If you are doing the kind of median enterprise tech work these tools are just good enough to do it at a relatively high level or atleast heavily augment people doing it. Examples would be like adding routine CRUD features to APIs/ improving observability/ adding tests or accessibility features to codebases etc.