We are adjusting, we talk about things. I hope we will keep doing that.
It isn't. People are beginning to wake up now from their propaganda-induced sleep during the first three years. It is always the same. People are trusting and initially believe the con artists.
Programming hasn't been ruined, at least for me. I'm building more than ever.
The military had way more collateral damage pre-AI, so I don't see why you're blaming AI and not the people who used it.
I think it's going great so far, tbh.
But no, we have to replace entire companies with it. All the problems of LLMs stem from inexperienced people using it (by inexperienced I mean not skilled in the domain in which the LLM is being applied).
I think of inexperienced people using power tools. Power tools theoretically make your life easier, but beginners will strip screws or snap bolts right and left. Or with ikea furniture the screw threads in the "wood" get pulled right out.
With screws or LLMs, craftsmen can speed up and do the finer details by hand.
We can say that, it's very easy and history has proven this many times.
There are two[1] problems. One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.
The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs. These users were producing good to passable work for years before LLM slop started flooding the world.
It's because their jobs - their bosses - can't (or don't care to) tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage. If the computer said it's ok, ship it.
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[1] These two problems are not an exhaustive list by any means.
> One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.
> The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs ... bosses can't tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage.
I'm familiar with a firm that does government required safety inspections for clients - big factories and the like. There is a huge push inside the company to use AI to write the reports. I don't want to tell you how many times the LLM fills in the report with the most common string "everything is fine" even though the specific future report checkbox has been left unchecked. Only a single engineer is fighting this within the company, and fears for her job because of it.
Yes, history.
History reveals time and again that dislodging the powerful via lawlessness is not a sweet prelude to a better world. To be precise, even in the best case, at least a generation goes through hell before things stabilize.
I am not a big fan of "solutions" that dramatically introduce much bigger deeper problems.
Corruption is generally solved with more order. Not more disorder.
Cynicism borne out of frustration is not our friend.
An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work.
People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.
But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that she's ultimately still responsible for the creative direction and result, this seems like something AI is greatly help for.
Example hate video and comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495VOuAnCJM
I'm surprised you're surprised.
Giant corpos steal work from millions of independent artists and the State ruled that IP laws didn't apply to them, only to us common mortals.
You are then allowed to use AI with a prescription.
People seem to think generating art from stolen pieces by typing 4 sentences in a prompt window is equal to this. It isn't. It is not true expression as it takes humanity out of the piece.
What one does with the learning seems to be the issue. If a human exactly reproduced anothers' artwork, that'd be copying.
Yes, we, humans, generally believe that.
We’ve reinvented Java Applets. I mean, I do like the idea behind that sort of stuff, it’s just that all sorts of little things break along the way. For example, I asked Claude to put together a specific recipe, it could do that, I got my Artifact/cooking widget/whatever. It even let me switch between metric and imperial (and didn’t save that preference) and let me change the quantity and updated the ingredient amounts (except the phone going to sleep led to it all resetting).
Sometimes I feel like we are very much stuck in being able to produce things but they simply aren’t high enough quality (which might take years or decades more of model training and efficiency improvements) and also that maybe we’re doing things a decade too soon. Imagine trying to build AI data centres with 2010 or 2000 hardware and how limited the models you’d be able to run would be. Maybe that’s also why the current outcomes are sometimes shitty. The other theory is that there’s simply not enough high quality data to train truly good models and we’ll plateau and model collapse in training will be common.
The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage" is the worst.
I believe the main value of AI comes not from its productivity gains but because AI will increasingly become a tool for evading responsibility and accountability for actions in economic, social and worse even military functions.
I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. OTOOH quit social media and try to address some of the issues you have. It’s very hard to know where the balance between sympathetic arm-round-the-shoulder and tough-love-develop-some-grit should lie.
There are many systemic problems in society, but it’s rarely your direct employer’s fault.
So not the reason in this case.
And I personally know another company that seems similar.
This is .. not quiet, but extremely noisy, quitting of the bargain by the management/authority class.
This is how we get the low trust dystopia where all the remaining human workers have to put up with a camera watching them at all times (backed by AI, of course) doing Taylorism on their eye movements.
What was the first instinct of the venerable business leaders (spoken a bit too publicly)? Great, we can get rid of labor. Do they need any excuse or reason beyond maximizing profit? They don’t. It’s just incentives.
[1] And some workers can genuinely benefit from doing more than that, even as wage workers. “Some people have jobs; others have careers” as Chris Rock paraphrasedly said.
The earth is rotting from us leeching from it, there is no future for these juniors, and we're on the verge of more war and destruction, fascism, et cetera.
There is nothing for them to build towards, other than the typical House, wife and kids, which will be in the same boat.
Knowing this, if someone comes up to you and says "yeah, well, you should just accept it", obviously people are not going to support this
- no serious plan for mass unemployment
- the risk of an underemployed middle class leading to violent outcomes as it has in the past
- (many) humans wanting to be useful, to have purpose in life and a place to put their natural ambition
- concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of people, from a couple of countries making up 20% of the world population
Luddism came from a place of genuine suffering and fear, which was not misplaced - the industrial revolution lead to amazing new jobs, but not for the Luddites themselves. With AI it's not even clear if those new jobs will come - it seems like the goal is a world where humans will not need to worry about thinking anymore.
So is wanting this to slow down really such a ridiculous notion?
People that have negative opinions about technological progress at least have the will to form an opinion backed by arguments. Contrast that with the faith order of dismissing negative opinions simply because they are negative about tech. Are technologist tech professionals? Or tech priests? (No wait, priests have to have a theological education where they are taught to make arguments. So can’t be that either.)
It takes much more bravery—and much more than bravery—to first figure out which datacenters are actually hosting Gemini (or Claude, or ChatGPT, etc), then travel across the country or across the world to where they are, break into what's likely a guarded building, and finally...I guess blow them up? With explosives that are almost certainly illegal just to possess, in contrast to the tools that could be used to break the looms.
And even if they were able to succeed in all this, that would be one datacenter. For one LLM. And its owners would simply be able to route around the damage, and (at least from the sounds of things) there'd be three new datacenters to replace it already scheduled to finish the next week.
So tell us about how much "bravery" it should require to deserve the title of Neo-Luddite.
Now, there is not an ounce of decency between our SV overlords and I have zero trust they will choose to amplify the right things. On the contrary, their apparent ideal state is a vast swath of technoserfs force fed ever more content and ads and more content, getting by on Uber-for-everything, where you spend what little money you have saved up being a delivery boy on things you don't own. We will stumble about in barren apartments, living a fake life through VR goggles, watering virtual plants with virtual water, all of which we pay for of course. All the while Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel are tucked away on the moon, their vile hands clinging to a last hope of immortality, just as hopeless as the people below.
If there's anything to blame, it's the various cultural revolutions, but even them are byproducts of the theater produced by the 8.3 BILLION (United States: 348,920,101; https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/world-popu...) people currently inhabiting the planet
In his commencement speech that got booed by the audience, Eric Schmidt says, "When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. [...] Find a way to say yes."
That's the billionaire class telling you where your place is in their plan for the world. Nobody asks if you even want to leave the planet, figuratively speaking.
The last sentence in particular shows the contempt he has for the students in the audience, and is reminiscent of another (alleged) incident:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/tried-to-convince-me-i-...
The part of the speech I quoted is not in the video linked in the article, but you can watch it here:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91544842/ai-slop-facebook-conten...
I don't know about AI, but I think the main problem nowadays is that a growing number of people can only deal with binary categories, either it's godly or it's trash.
To conclude, anything that is not written with a stone tablet is garbage.
This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.
Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.
cannot be outsourced to someone prompting an AI / LLM / whatever the next technology is / from Guntur or Wajir.
Very few people are irreplaceable.