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This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the
by hnlmorg 15d ago
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
- sfn42 15d agoIn my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs. They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
- oblio 15d agoI agree completely.
- kwarcode 15d ago[dead]
- vakk 15d agoI found this very funny until it made me very sad.
- oblio 15d agohttps://youtu.be/KHbzSif78qQ?si=xWprUIdcae2uo1jd https://youtu.be/KHbzSif78qQ?si=xWprUIdcae2uo1jd
- hiccuphippo 15d agoExactly the video I was expecting it to be. Same herd.
- oblio 15d agoYou've been here 8 years, so... you're just as much part of the same herd as me :-)
- sfn42 15d agoYeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We, as a species, know what we should be doing. But what we should be doing is not what we are doing, because what we are doing depends on the popularity contest that is politics, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with what we know we should be doing.
- oblio 14d ago> Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We're not going extinct, LOL. We're more resilient than cockroaches. As a species we will survive nuclear apocalypse, climate changes short of turning the planet into Venus and even the collapsing fertility rate.
- blargey 15d agoSuch a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold. Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
- sfn42 15d agoIf I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
- ryandrake 15d agoThis just sounds like an im14andthisisdeep rant. Everyone is stupid, except you, of course, who are enlightened and detached from "the herd."
- hyperhello 15d ago[flagged]
- its_ethan 15d agoand followed up with a classic "I know you are but what am I" by you lol this thread looks like it's folding in on itself
- hyperhello 15d agoI had to talk back, but if insults and down votes solved anything there would be no insults or down votes.
- wizzwizz4 15d agoWhy did you have to?
- hyperhello 15d agoWell, why did you?
- wizzwizz4 14d agoI felt you might benefit from the question. Feel free to answer it privately: there's little benefit in me hearing your answer.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- wredcoll 15d agoNobody has time to fact check every single fact we need to act on. Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
- sfn42 15d agoYeah, exactly. But many people vehemently believe vaccines are dangerous and so on. Similarly, a common talking point right now are data centers and their power and water usage. Just yesterday I was told that AI data centers pollute more than anything else. Yet when I took 10 seconds to Google it I found that data centers represented about 0,5% of power consumption and I know that electricity in general is less than half of all pollution so clearly data centers don't pollute that much. But people will parrot these types of "facts" without even taking 10 seconds to double check.
- basilikum 15d agoI don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego. But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657 I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever. I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
- phoghed 15d agoThey are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
- wat10000 15d agoHow do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
- zahlman 15d agoI've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now. There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it. Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.