Festival crowd boos San Francisco techies over 'AI is a culture' video

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sxsw-crowd-boos-ai-promo-video-19034370.php

by c420 • 2 years ago

22 6 2 years ago

ShamelessC3• 2 years ago

As someone who has been working on generative AI since DALLE-1/CLIP came out, it amazes me how long backlash to AI is taking. I mean, we obviously have seen it from artists, actors, authors, etc. - anyone making intellectual property has a right to feel threatened by this stuff. Now, the general public is fully aware as well.

I probably would have joined in if I were there.

edit: I guess a moderator felt threatened by this post. Went from front page to ~fourth _real_ fast.

edit edit: Man, fuck this place sometimes. "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

Divver• 2 years ago

If it makes you feel better I saw this and I don’t know what a “front page on Hacker News” is because all HackerNews articles I see are from Facebook or Twitter (before I left Twitter) I don’t actually visit Hacker News website directly where ever that is.

So perhaps many others saw this as well.

ShamelessC3• 2 years ago

It does, thanks.

I’m curious though how do you have an account and make a comment without ever actually visiting the site?

dang• 2 years ago

Substantive critique is welcome, and HN gets a lot of it, but a festival crowd booing does not count as significant new information [1]. Since this is a major ongoing topic [2], standard mod practice would be to downweight such a post as a follow-up [3].

The intention isn't to stop discussion, it's to have discussion happen on a more solid foundation.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

ShamelessC3• 2 years ago

A little transparency upfront would have probably helped. I see this sort of backlash on down weighted or flagged posts sometimes. There was a satirical codebase posted here implementing basic semantic search, with the implied joke being that few of the many vector database startups have any sort of strategic advantage or moat. Down weighting stuff like that seems like a clear conflict of interest. At the very least, a brief explanation would probably help. Hell even just a [down weighted] marker would prevent it from looking like a quick attempt to avoid dealing with criticism as a community and group.

For what it’s worth, I work in deep learning and would have really appreciated discussions with the community here about what may be an inevitable backlash (given its premise of disrupting many professions). Silicon Valley leaders aren’t always known for having their finger on the pulse and this seemed like a good moment to have an early debate about that.

In any case, thanks for following up with an explanation.

jjj123• 2 years ago

I thought it was kind of novel, in that I wouldn’t expect the sxsw crowd to boo anything tech-pr related, since from my vantage point that’s all sxsw is.

It also felt novel that the promo video itself had an OpenAI bigwig say “AI actually makes us more human” which is very, very funny.

Festival crowd boos San Francisco techies over 'AI is a culture' video

Related Stories