I Am Tired of AI

https://www.ontestautomation.com/i-am-tired-of-ai/

by Liriel • 2 years ago

1209 1101 2 years ago

We're all tired of it, but to ignore it is to be unemployed.

sph• 2 years ago

Depends on which point of your career. With 18 years of experience, consulting for tech companies, I can afford to be tired of AI. I don't get paid to write boilerplate code, and avoiding anyone knocking at the door with yet another great AI-powered idea makes commercial sense, just like I have ignored everyone wanting to build the next blockchain product 5 years ago, with no major loss of income.

Also, running a bootstrapped business, I have bigger fishes to fry than playing mentor to Copilot to write a React component or generating bullshit copy for my website.

I'm not sure we need more FUD saying that the choice is between AI or unemployment.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 2 years ago

I find comparisons between AI and blockchain very misleading.

Blockchain is almost entirely useless in practice. I have no reason to disdain it, in fact I was active in crypto around 10-12 years ago when I was younger and more excited about tech than now, and I had fun. But the fact is that the utility that it has brought to most of society is essentially to have some more speculative assets to gamble on, at ludicrous energy and emissions costs.

Generative AI, on the other hand, is something I'm already using almost every day and it's saving me work. There may be a bubble but it will be more like the dotcom bubble (i.e., not because the tech is useless, but because many companies jump to make quick bucks without even knowing much about the tech).

Applejinx5• 2 years ago

I mean, to be selfish at apparently a dicey point in history, go ahead and FUD and get people to believe this.

None of my useful work is AI-able, and some of the useful work is towards being able to stand apart from what is obviously generated drivel. Sounds like the previous poster with the bootstrapped business is in a similar position.

Apparently AI is destroying my potential competition. That seems unfair, but I didn't tell 'em to make such an awful mistake. How loudly am I obliged to go 'stop, don't, come back'?

sunaookami• 2 years ago

Speak for yourself.

snickerer2• 2 years ago

How all those cab drivers who ignore autonomous driving are now unemployed?

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

When it's for sale everywhere (I cannot buy one) and people trust it, all cab drivers will be gone. Unemployed will depend on the resilience, but unlike cars replacing coach drivers, there is not really a similar thing a cab driver can pivot to.

kasperni• 2 years ago

We're all tired of it,

You’re feeling tired of AI, but let’s delve deeper into that sentiment for a moment. AI isn’t just a passing trend—it’s a multifaceted tool that continues to elevate the way we engage with technology, knowledge, and even each other. By harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence, we allow ourselves to explore new frontiers of creativity, problem-solving, and efficiency.

The interplay between human intuition and AI’s data-driven insights creates a dynamic that enriches both. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by it, imagine the opportunities—how AI can shoulder the burdens of mundane tasks, freeing you to focus on the more nuanced, human elements of life.

kunley• 2 years ago

With all due respect, that's seems like a cliche, repeated maybe because others repeat that already.

Working in IT operations (mostly), I haven't seen literally any case of someone's job in danger because of not using "AI".

Sateeshm• 2 years ago

The thing with AI tools is that there is nothing to learn. That's the whole point of the AI tools. So not much of an advantage in the job market.

pech0rin• 2 years ago

As an aside its really interesting how the human brain can so easily read an AI essay and realize its AI. You would think that with the vast corpus these models were trained on there would be a more human sounding voice.

Maybe it's overfitting or maybe just the way models work under the hood but any time I see AI written stuff on twitter, reddit, linkedin its so obvious its almost disgusting.

I guess its just the brain being good at pattern matching, but it's crazy how fast we have adapted to recognize this.

Jordan-117• 2 years ago

It's the RLHF training to make them squeaky clean and preternaturally helpful. Pretty sure without those filters and with the right fine-tuning you could have it reliably clone any writing style.

llm_trw5• 2 years ago

One only need to go to the dirtier corners of the llm forums to find some _very_ interesting voices there.

To quote someone from a tor bb board: my chat history is illegal in 142 countries and carries the death penalty in 9.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

But without the RLHF aren’t they less useful “products”?

carlmr• 2 years ago

Maybe it's overfitting or maybe just the way models work under the hood

It feels more like averaging or finding the median to me. The writing style is just very unobtrusive. Like the average TOEFL/GRE/SAT essay style.

Maybe that's just what most of the material looks like.

infinitifall• 2 years ago

Classic survivorship bias. You simply don't recognise the good ones.

amelius4• 2 years ago

Maybe because the human brain gets tired and cannot write at the same quality level all the time, whereas an AI can.

Or maybe it's because of the corpus of data that it was trained on.

Or perhaps because AI is still bad at any kind of humor.

chmod775• 2 years ago

These models are not trained to act like a single human in a conversation, they're trained to be every participant and their average.

Every instance of a human choosing not to engage or speak about something - because they didn't want to or are just clueless about the topic, is not part of their training data. They're only trained on active participants.

Of course they'll never seem like a singular human with limited experiences and interests.

izacus• 2 years ago

The output of those AIs is akin to products and software designed for the "average" user - deep inside uncanny valley, saying nothing specifically, having no specific style, conveying no emotion and nothing to latch on to.

It's the perfect embodiment of HR/corpspeak which I think its so triggering for us (ex) corpo drones.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 2 years ago

Everyone I know claims to be able to recognize AI text, but every paper I've seen where that ability is A/B tested says that humans are pretty bad at this.

sovietmudkipz• 2 years ago

I am tired and hungry…

The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it protects elites but not when a billion thefts are committed by LLM folks. Poor incentives for creators to create stuff if it just gets stolen and replicated by AI.

I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history by these gang of thieves should be held to account. I want a waterfall of lawsuits to take back what’s been stolen. It’s in the public’s interest to see this happen.

makin• 2 years ago

I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.

jbstack• 2 years ago

The law already exists. Applying the law in court doesn't "give more power" to it. To do that you'd have to change the law.

atoav3• 2 years ago

Nah. What he is saying is that the existing law should be applied equally. As of now intellectual property as a right only works for you if you are a big corporation.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

I think the second alternative works too: either you sue these companies to the ground for copyright infringement at a scale never seen, OR you decriminalize copyright infringement.

The problem (as far as this specific discussion goes) is not that IP laws exist, but rather that they are only being applied in one direction.

fallingknife5• 2 years ago

HN generally hated (and rightly so, IMO) strict copyright IP protection laws. Then LLMs came along and broke everybody's brain and turned this place into hardline copyright extremists.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

The difference is that before, intellectual property law was used by corporations to enrich themselves. Now intellectual property law could theoretically be used to combat an even bigger enemy: big tech stealing all possible jobs. It's just a matter of practicality, like all law is.

xdennis4• 2 years ago

you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law

Not necessarily. An alternative could be to say that all models trained on data which hasn't been explicitly licensed for AI-training should be made public.

artninja1988• 2 years ago

Copying data is not theft

rpgbr• 2 years ago

It’s only theft when people copy data from companies. The other way around is ok, I guess.

a5c113• 2 years ago

Is piracy legal then? It's just a copy of someone else's copy.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

Technically that is true. But you will still be charged with a litany of other crimes.

flohofwoe• 2 years ago

So now suddenly when the bigwigs do it, software piracy and "IP theft" is totally fine? Thanks, good to know ;)

atoav3• 2 years ago

Yet unlicensed use can be its own crime under current law.

Palmik2• 2 years ago

The only entities that will win with these lawsuits are the likes of Disney, large legacy news media companies, Reddit, Stack Overflow (who are selling content generated by their users), etc.

Who will also win: Google, OpenAI and other corporations that enter exclusive deals, that can more and more rely on synthetic data, that can build anti-recitation systems, etc.

And of course the lawyers. The lawyers always win.

Who will not win:

Millions of independent bloggers (whose content will be used)

Millions of open source software engineers (whose content will be used against the licenses, and used to displace their livelihood), etc.

The likes of Google and OpenAI entered the space by building on top of the work of the above two groups. Now they want to pull up the ladder. We shouldn't allow that to happen.

ToucanLoucan8• 2 years ago

Honestly the most depressing thing about this entire affair is seeing not the entire, certainly but a sizable chunk of the software development community jump behind OpenAI and company’s blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products of probably literally billions of people (not the least of whom is other software developers!) with absolutely not the slightest hint of concern about what that means for the world because afterwards, they got a new toy to play with. Squidward was apparently 100% correct: on balance, few care about the fate of labor as long as they get their instant gratification.

0xDEAFBEAD• 2 years ago

Perhaps we need an LLM-enabled lawyer so small bloggers can easily sue LLM makers.

Kiro3• 2 years ago

I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.

williamcotton3• 2 years ago

It’s because it now affects hackers and before it only affected musicians.

someNameIG• 2 years ago

Pirate Bay wasn't selling access to the torrents trying to make a massive profit.

progbits• 2 years ago

I just want consistent and fair rules.

I'm all for abolishing copyright, for everyone. Let the knowledge be free and widely shared.

But until that is the case and people running super useful services like libgen have to keep hiding then I also want all the LLM corpos to be subject to the same legal penalties.

pydry2• 2 years ago

The common denominator is big corporations trying to screw us over for profit, using their immense wealth as a battering ram.

So, capitalism.

It's taboo to criticize that though.

rsynnott8• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous, or if you genuinely don't understand the difference.

Pirate Bay: largely facilitating the theft of material from large corporations by normal people, for generally personal use.

LLM training: theft of material from literally _everyone_, for the purposes of corporate profit (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever).

meiraleal3• 2 years ago

Hackers are against corporations. If breaking the copyright laws make corps bigger, more powerful and more corrupt, hackers will be against it rightfully so. Abolishing copyright is different than abusing it, we should abolish it.

jjulius• 2 years ago

On the one hand, we've got, "Pirating something because we find copyright law to be restrictive and/or corporate pricing to be excessive". On the other, we've got, "Massively wealthy people vacuuming up our creative output to further their own wealth".

And you're trying to suggest that these two are the same?

Edit: I don't mind downvotes, karma means nothing, but I do appreciate when folk speak up and say why I might be wrong. :)

forinti• 2 years ago

Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. It has been putting fences around everything it wants and IP is one such fence. It has always been about protecting the powerful.

IP has had ample support because the "protect the little artist" argument is compelling, but it is just not how the world works.

johnchristopher3• 2 years ago

Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in.

That's factually wrong. Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm.

Lichtso5• 2 years ago

Lawsuits based on what? Copyright?

People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies.

What they think how copyright works: When you take someones work as inspiration then everything you produce form that counts as derivative work.

How copyright actually works: The input is irrelevant, only the output matters. Thus derivative work is what explicitly contains or resembles underlying work, no matter if it was actually based on that or it is just happenstance / coincidence.

Thus AI models are safe from copyright lawsuits as long as they filter out any output which comes too close to known material. Everything else is fine, even if the model was explicitly trained on commercial copyrighted material only.

In other words: The concept of intellectual property is completely broken and that is old news.

LunaSea6• 2 years ago

Lawsuits based on code licensing for example.

Scraping websites containing source code which is distributed with specific licenses that OpenAI & co don't follow.

rcxdude• 2 years ago

Also, the desired interpretation of copyright will not stop the multi-billion-dollar AI companies, who have the resources to buy the rights to content at a scale no-one else does. In fact it will give them a gigantic moat, allowing them to extract even more value out of the rest of the economy, to the detriment of basically everyone else.

lolc• 2 years ago

As much as our brain contents are unlicensed copies to the extent we can reproduce copyrighted work: If the model can recite copyrighted portions of text used in training, the model weights are a derivative work. Because the weights obviously must encode the original work. Just because lossy compression was applied the original work should still be considered present as long as it's recognizable. So the weights may not be published without license. Seems rather straightforward to me and I do wonder how Meta thinks they get around this.

Now if the likes of Openai and Google keep the model weights private and just provide generated text, they can try to filter for derivative works, but I don't see a solution that doesn't leak. If a model can be coaxed into producing a derivative work that escapes the filter, then boom, unlicensed copy was provided. If I tell the model to mix two texts word by word, what filter could catch this? What if I tell the model to use a numerical encoding scheme? Or to translate into another language? For example assuming the model knows a bunch of NYT articles by heart, as was already demonstrated: If have it translate one of those articles to French for me, that's still an unlicensed copy!

I can see how they will try to get these violations legalized like the DMCA safe-harbored things, but at the moment they are the ones generating the unlicensed versions and publishing them when prompted to do so.

xdennis4• 2 years ago

Lawsuits based on what? Copyright?
People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies.

People are complaining about what's happening, not with the exact wording of the law.

What they are doing probably isn't illegal, but it _should_ be. The problem is that it's very difficult for people to pass new legislation because they don't have lobbyists the way corporations do.

jcranmer• 2 years ago

With all due respect, the lawyers I've seen who commented on the issue do not agree with your assessment.

The things that constitute potentially infringing copying are not clearly well-defined, and whether or not training an AI is on that list has of course not yet been considered by a court. But you can make cogent arguments either way, and I would not be prepared to bet on either outcome. Keep in mind also that, legally, copying data from disk to RAM is considered potentially infringing, which should give you a sense of the sort of banana-pants setup that copyright can entail.

That said, if training is potentially infringing on copyright, it now seems pretty clear that a fair use defense is going to fail. The recent Warhol decision rather destroys any hope that it might be considered "transformative", while the fact that the AI companies are now licensing content for training use is a concession that the fourth and usually most important factor (market impact) weighs against fair use.

fallingknife5• 2 years ago

Copyright law is intended to prevent people from stealing the revenue stream from someone else's work by copying and distributing that work in cases where the original is difficult and expensive to create, but easy to make copies of once created. How does an LLM do this? What copies of copyrighted work do they distribute? Whose revenue stream are they taking with this action?

I believe that all the copyright suits against AI companies will be total failures because I can't come up with a answer to any of those questions.

DoctorOetker2• 2 years ago

Here is a business model for copy right law firms:

Use source-aware training, use the same datasets as used in LLM training + copyrighted content. Now the LLM can respond not just what it thinks is most likely but also what source document(s) provided specific content. Then you can consult commercially available LLM's and detect copy right infringements, and identify copyright holders. Extract perpetrators and victims at scale. To ensure indefinite exploitation only sue commercially succesful LLM providers, so there is a constant new flux of growing small LLM providers taking up the freed niche of large LLM providers being sued empty.

chrismorgan• 2 years ago

Use source-aware training

My understanding (as one uninvolved in the industry) is that this is more or less a completely unsolved problem.

jokethrowaway• 2 years ago

It's the other way round. The little guys will never win, it will be just a money transfer from one large corp to another.

We should just scrap copyright and everybody plays a fair game, including us hackers.

Sue me because of breach of contract in civil court for damages because I shared your content, don't send the police and get me jailed directly.

I had my software cracked and stolen and I would never go after the users. They don't have any contract with me. They downloaded some bytes from the internet and used it. Finding whoever shared the code without authorization is hard and even so, suing them would cost me more than the money I'm likely to get back. Fair game, you won.

It's a natural market "tax" on selling a lot of copies and earning passively.

repelsteeltje• 2 years ago

I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing:

Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible.

Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.

CaptainFever9• 2 years ago

The stone soup story was about sharing, though. Everyone contributes to the pot, and we get something nice. The original stone was there to convince the villagers to share their food with the travellers. This goes against the emotional implication of your adaptation. The story would actually imply that copyright holders are selfish and should be contributing what they can to the AI soup, so we can get something more than the sum of our parts.

From Wikipedia:

Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.
The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors.

(Open source models exist.)

unraveller2• 2 years ago

First gen models trained on books directly. Latest Phi distilled textbook-like knowledge down from disparate sources to create novel training data. They are all fairly open about this change and some are even allowing upset publishers to confirm that their work wasn't used directly. So stones and ionized water go in the soup.

AI_beffr4• 2 years ago

ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.

infecto4• 2 years ago

I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.

drstewart3• 2 years ago

elites stealing everything
a billion thefts
The biggest theft
what’s been stolen

I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.

amatecha• 2 years ago

This is such a misrepresentation of the issue and what people are saying about it. They call it "theft" because corps are, apparently-indiscriminately and without remuneration of creators, "ingesting" the original work of thousands or millions of individuals, in order to provide for-profit services derived from that ingestion/training. "Pirates", on the other hand, copy content for their own momentary entertainment, and the exploitation ends there. They aren't turning around and starting a multi-million-dollar business selling pirated content en masse.

masswerk• 2 years ago

The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models.

I suggest to apply the same to property law: make a photo and obtain instant and unlimited rights of use. – Things may change faster than we may imagine…

uhtred2• 2 years ago

We need a revolution.

bschmidt13• 2 years ago

Same here hungry neigh thirsty for prompt-2-film

"output a 90 minute harry potter sequel to the final film starring the original actors plus Tom Hanks"

csomar• 2 years ago

There is no copyright with AI unless you want to implement the same measures for humans too. I am fine with it as long as we at least get open-weights. This way you kill both copyright and any company that's trying to profit out of AI.

visarga5• 2 years ago

I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history

You want to own abstract ideas because AI can rephrase any specific expression. But that is antithetic to creativity.

IanKerr• 2 years ago

It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives.

How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.

defgeneric• 2 years ago

Perhaps what we should be pushing for is a law that would force full disclosure regarding the training corpus and require a curated version of the training data to be made available. I'm sure there would be all kinds of unintended consequences of a law like that but maybe we'd be better off starting from a strong basis and working out those exceptions. While billions have been spent to train these models, the value of the millions of human hours spent creating the content they're trained on should likewise be recognized.

ryanjshaw• 2 years ago

There are no shortcuts to solving these problems, it takes time and experience to tackle them.
I’ve been working in testing, with a focus on test automation, for some 18 years now.

OK the first thought that came to my mind reading this: sounds like a opportunity to build an AI-driven product.

I've been using Cursor daily. I use nothing else. It's brilliant and I'm very happy. If I could have Cursor for Well-Designed Tests I'd be extra happy.

fallingknife5• 2 years ago

I'm not. I think it's awesome and I can't wait to see what comes out next. And I'm completely OK with all of my work being used to train models. Bunch of luddites and sour grapes around here on HN these days.

elpocko3• 2 years ago

Same here! Amazing stuff that I have waited for my entire life, and I won't let luddite haters ruin it for me. Their impotent rage is tiring but in the end it's just one more thing you have to ignore.

fallingknife5• 2 years ago

Yeah, they made something that passes a Turing test, and people on HN of all places hate it? What happened to this place? It's like the number one thing people hate around here now is another man's success.

I won't ignore them. I'll continue to loudly disagree with the losers and proudly collect downvotes from them knowing I got under their skin.

yannis• 2 years ago

Absolutely amazing stuff. I am now three scores and ten in my life time, seen a lot of changes from slide rules->very fast to calculators->very fast to pcs, from dot matrix printers to lazer jets and dozens of other things. Wish AI was available when I was doing my PhD. If you know its limitations it can be very useful. At present I occasionally use it to translate references from wikipedia articles to bibtex format. It is very good at this, I only need to fix a few minor errors, letting me focus to the core of what I am doing. But human nature always resists change, especially if it leads to the unknown. I must admit that I think AI will bring negative consequences as it will be misused by politicians and the military, they need to be "regulated" not the AI.

Kiro3• 2 years ago

You're getting downvoted, but I agree with your last sentence — and not just about AI. The amount of negativity here regarding almost everything is appalling. Maybe it's rose-tinted nostalgia but I don't remember it being like this a few years ago.

CaptainFever9• 2 years ago

Hacker News used to be nicknamed Hater News, as I recall.

amiantos2• 2 years ago

There's _a lot_ of poor quality engineers out there who understand that on some level they are committing fraud by spinning their wheels all day shifting CSS values around on a React component while collecting large paychecks. I think it's only natural all of those engineers are terrified by the prospect of some computer being capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently and replacing them. Those people are crying so loudly that it's encouraging otherwise normal people to start jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon too, because their voices are so loud people can't hear themselves think critically anymore.

I think passionate and inspired engineers who love their job and have very solid soft skills and experience working deeply on complex software projects will always have a position in the industry, and people like that are understandably very enthusiastic about AI instead of being scared of it.

In other words, it is weird how bad the status quo was, until we got something that really threatened the status quo, now a lot of the people who wanted to tear it all down are now desperately trying to stop everything from changing. The sentiment on the internet has gone in a weird direction, but it's all about money deep down. This hypothetical new status quo brought on by AI seems to be wedded to fears of less money, thus abject terror masquerading as "I'm so bored!" posturing.

You see this in the art circles, where established artists are willing to embrace AI, but it's the small time aspiring bedroom artists that have not achieved any success who are all over Twitter denouncing AI art as soulless and terrible. While the real artists are too busy using any tool available to make art, or are just making art because they want to make art and aren't concerned with fear-mongering.

Toorkit3• 2 years ago

Computers were supposed to be these amazing machines that are super precise. You tell it to do a thing, it does it.

Nowadays, it seems we're happy with computers apparently going RNG mode on everything.

2+2 can now be 5, depending on the AI model in question, the day, and the temperature...

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

Had to laugh at this one. I think we prefer the statistical approach because it’s easier, for us …

maguay• 2 years ago

This, 100%, is the reason I feel like the sand's shifting under my feet.

We went from trusting computing output to having to second-guess everything. And it's tiring.

diggan6• 2 years ago

I kind of feel like if you're using a "Random text generator based on probability" for something that you need to trust, you're kind of holding this tool wrong.

I wouldn't complain a RNG doesn't return the numbers I want, so why complain you don't get 100% trusted output from a random text generator?

archerx2• 2 years ago

Its a Large LANGUAGE Model and not a Large MATHEMATICS Model. People need to learn to use the right tools for the right jobs. Also LLMs can be made more deterministic by controlling it’s “temperature”.

anon1094• 2 years ago

Yep. ChatGPT will use the code interpreter for questions like is 2 + 2 = 5? as it should.

Toorkit3• 2 years ago

There's other forms of AI than LLM's and to be honest I thought the 2+2=5 was obviously an analogy.

Yet 2 comments have immediately jumped on it.

Janicc2• 2 years ago

These amazing machines weren't consistently able to tell if an image had a bird in it or not up until like 8 years ago. If you use AI as a calculator where you need it to be precise, that's on you.

FridgeSeal6• 2 years ago

I think the issue is that: I’m not going to be using as a calculator any time soon.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people out there, working on a lot of products, some of which I need to use, or will be exposed to, and some of them aren’t going to have the same qualms about “language model thinks 2+2=5”.

There’s a guy on Twitter scoring how well ChatGPT models can do multiplication.

A founder at a previous workplace wanted to wholesale dump data into ChatGPT and “make it do causal analysis!!!” (Only slightly paraphrased). These tools enable some frighteningly large-scale weaponised stupidity.

catlifeonmars4• 2 years ago

The problem is that’s what people do. And everyone else has to pay for it.

shultays• 2 years ago

There are areas it doesn't have to be as "precise", like image generation or editing which I believe better suited for AI tools

GaggiX3• 2 years ago

Machines were not able to deal with non-formal problems.

left-struck• 2 years ago

I think about it differently. Before computers had to be given extremely precise and completely unambiguous instructions, now they can handle some ambiguity as well. You still have the precise output if you want it, it didn’t go away.

Btw I’m also tired of AI, but this is one thing that’s not so bad

Edit: before someone mentions fuzzy logic, I’m not talking about the input of a function being fuzzy, I’m talking about the instructions themselves, the function is fuzzy.

110jawefopiwa• 2 years ago

You still have the precise output if you want it, it didn’t go away.

For now. Given that most new devices seem to be fully hostile to the concept of general purpose computing (see phones, VR devices, TVs, etc), I wonder how long it will be before many of the computers that are sold are even more locked down than Chromebooks - just a few prompts for interacting with a preinstalled LLM.

a5c113• 2 years ago

That's an interesting point of view. For some reason we put so much effort towards making computers think and behave like a human being, while one of the first reasons behind inventing a computer was to avoid human errors.

fatbird• 2 years ago

This is the most succinct summary of what's been gnawing at me ever since LLMs became the latest thing.

If Ilya Sutskever announced tomorrow that he'd achieved AGI, and here is its economic plan for the next 20 years, why would we have any reason to accept it over that of other human experts? It would literally be just another expert trying to tell us how to do things. And we're not short of experts, and an AGI expert has thrown away the credibility of computers as deterministically better calculators than we are.

falcor846• 2 years ago

This sounds to me like a straw man argument. Obviously 2+2 will always give you 4, in any modern LLM, and even just in the Chrome address bar.

Can you offer a real situation where we should expect the LLM to return a deterministic answer and should rightly be concerned that we're getting a stochastic one?

Toorkit3• 2 years ago

Y'all are hyper focusing on this example. How about something more vague like FOO obviously being BAR, except sometimes it's BAZ now?

The layman doesn't know the distinction, so they accept this as fact.

hcks2• 2 years ago

And by nowadays you mean since ChatGPT got released, that is less than 2 years ago (e.g. a consumer preview of a frontier research project). Interesting.

arendtio• 2 years ago

But isn't this a great thing? I mean, this piece has been missing (no, I am not kidding). Computers have always had a hard time coping with situations that weren't 100% predefined.

Now, we have technology capable of handling cases that were not predefined. Yes, it makes mistakes, as do humans, but the range of problems we can solve with technology has been tremendously broadened.

The problem is how we apply AI. Currently, we throw LLMs on everything they might be able to handle without understanding how or if they have the capabilities to handle such a task. And that is not the LLM's fault but a human fault. Consequently, we see poor results, and then we blame the AI for not being able to solve a problem it wasn't designed to solve.

Sounds stupid, doesn't it?

snowram• 2 years ago

I quite like some parts of AI. Ray reconstruction and supersampling methods have been getting incredible and I can now play games with twice the frames per seconds. On the scietific side, meteorological predictions and protein folding have made formidable progresses thanks to it. Too bad this isn't the side of AI that is in the spotlight.

Meniceses4• 2 years ago

I love AI.

In comparision to a lot of other technologies, we actually have jumps in quality left and right, great demos, new things which are really helpful.

Its fun to watch the AI news because there is something relevant new happening.

I'm worried regarding the impact of AI but this is a billion times better than the last 10 years which was basically just cryptobros, nfts, blockchain shit which is basically just fraud.

Its not just some GenAI stuff, we talk about blind people getting better help through image analysis, we talk about alpha fold, LLMs being impressive as hell, the research currently happening.

And yes i also already see benefits in my job and in my startup.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

I’m truly asking in good faith here because I don’t know but what has alpha fold actually helped us achieve ?

Meniceses4• 2 years ago

It allows us to speed up medical research.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that.

Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me. This has completely destroyed my interest in reading any new things. I guess I'm lucky that we have produced so much writing in the past century or so and I'll never run out of stuff to read, but it's still depressing, to be honest.

t435623• 2 years ago

It empowers people to create mountains of shit that they cannot distinguish from shit - so they are happy.

elnasca2• 2 years ago

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so.

Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

baq• 2 years ago

scale makes all the difference. society without trust falls apart. it's good if some people doubt some things, but if everyone necessarily must doubt everything, it's anarchy.

kombookcha3• 2 years ago

Debunking bullshit inherently takes more effort than generating bullshit, so the human factor is normally your big force multiplier. Does this person seem trustworthy? What else have they done, who have they worked with, what hidden motivations or biases might they have, are their vibes /off/ to your acute social monkey senses?

However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, with your finite human time and energy, the only winning move is to reject out of hand any piece of media that you can sniff out as AI. It's a solution that's imperfect, but workable, when you're swimming through a sea of slop.

nicce4• 2 years ago

In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore.

While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

tempfile6• 2 years ago

I already questioned the information before and continue to do so.

You might question new information, but you certainly do not actually verify it. So all you can hope to do is sense-checking - if something doesn't sound plausible, you assume it isn't true.

This depends on having two things: having trustworthy sources at all, and being able to relatively easily distinguish between junk info and real thorough research. AI is a very easy way for previously-trustworthy sources to sneak in utter disinformation without necessarily changing tone much. That makes it much easier for the info to sneak past your senses than previously.

thesz• 2 years ago

Propaganda works by repeating the same in different forms. Now it is easier to have different forms of the same, hence, more propaganda. Also, it is much easier to iinfluence whatever people write by influencing the tool they use to write.

Imagine that AI tools sway generated sentences to be slightly close, in summarisation space, to the phrase "eat dirt" or anything. What would happen?

eesmith• 2 years ago

The negation of 'I cannot trust' is not 'I could always trust' but rather 'I could sometimes trust'.

Nor is trust meant to mean something is absolute and unquestionable. I may trust someone, but with enough evidence I can withdraw trust.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

Trust as no bearing on what they said.

Reading was a form of connecting with someone. Their opinions are bound to be flawed, everyone's are - but they're still the thoughts and words of a person.

This is no longer the case. Thus, the human factor is gone and this reduces the experience to some of us, me included.

tuyguntn• 2 years ago

For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so.

I also did, but LLM increased the volume of content, which forces my brain first try to identify if content is generated by LLMs, which is consuming a lot of energy and makes brain even less focused, because now it's primary goal is skimming quickly to identify, instead of absorbing first and then analyzing info

croes• 2 years ago

The quota changed because it's now easier and faster

everdrive• 2 years ago

How do you like questioning much more of it, much more frequently, from many more sources? And mistrusting it in new ways. AI and regular people are not wrong in the same ways, nor for the same reasons, and now you must track this too, increasingly.

a99c43f2d565504• 2 years ago

Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. And like pointed out by others, the usual text style and vocabulary signs that could have been used to identify expertise or agenda are gone.

voidmain0001• 2 years ago

I read the original comment not as a lament of not being able to trust the content, rather, they are lamenting the fact that AI/LLM generated content has no more thought or effort put into it than a cheap microwave dinner purchased from Walmart. Yes, it fills the gut with calories but it lacks taste.

On second thought, perhaps AI/LLM generated content is better illustrated with it being like eating the regurgitated sludge called cud. Nothing new, but it fills the gut.

rsynnott8• 2 years ago

There are topics on which you should be somewhat suspicious of anything you read, but also many topics where it is simply improbable that anyone would spend time maliciously coming up with a lie. However, they may well have spicy autocomplete imagine something for them. An example from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645282

desdenova3• 2 years ago

Exactly. The web before LLMs was mostly low effort SEO spam written by low-wage people in marketing agencies.

Now it's mostly zero effort LLM-generated SEO spam, and the low-wage workers lost their jobs.

galactus• 2 years ago

I think it is a totally different threat. Excluding adversarial behavior, humans usually produce information with a quality level that is homogeneous (from homogeneously sloppy to homogeneously rigurous).

AI otoh can produce texts that are quite accurate globally with some totally random hallucinations here and there. It makes it quite harder to identify

akudha4• 2 years ago

There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general.

Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI?

Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff now.

All one needs today is a laptop and an internet connection and a few hours, they can wreak havoc. In the past, you'd need TV or newspapers to spread bad (and good) stuff - they were expensive, time consuming to produce and had limited reach.

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. [...] Why do you think that you could trust what you read before?

A human communicator is, in a sense, testifying when communicating. Humans have skin in the social game.

We try to educate people, we do want people to be well-informed and to think critically about what they read and hear. In the marketplace of information, we tend very strongly to trust non-delusional, non-hallucinating members of society. Human society is a social-confidence network.

In social media, where there is a cloak of anonymity (or obscurity), people may behave very badly. But they are usually full of excuses when the cloak is torn away; they are usually remarkably contrite before a judge.

A human communicator can face social, legal, and economic consequences for false testimony. Humans in a corporation, and the corporation itself, may be held accountable. They may allocate large sums of money to their defence, but reputation has value and their defence is not without social cost and monetary cost.

It is literally less effort at every scale to consult a trusted and trustworthy source of information.

It is literally more effort at every scale to feed oneself untrustworthy communication.

sevensor2• 2 years ago

For me, the problem has gone from “figure out the author’s agenda” to “figure out whether this is a meaningful text at all,” because gibberish now looks a whole lot more like meaning than it used to.

solidninja• 2 years ago

There's a quantity argument to be made here - before, it used to be hard to generate large amounts of plausible but incorrect text. Now it easy. Similar to surveillance before/after smartphones + the internet - you had to have a person following you vs just soaking up all the data on the backbone.

escape_goat• 2 years ago

There was a degree of proof of work involved. Text took human effort to create, and this roughly constrained the quantity and quality of misinforming text to the number of humans with motive to expend sufficient effort to misinform. Now superficially indistinguishable text can be created by an investment in flops, which are fungible. This means that the constraint on the amount of misinforming text instead scales with whatever money is resourced to the task of generating misinforming text. If misinforming text can generate value for someone that can be translated back into money, the generation of misinforming text can be scaled to saturation and full extraction of that value.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

It’s nothing to do with trusting in terms of being true or false, but whatever I read before I felt like, well, it can be good or bad, I can judge it, but whatever it is, somebody wrote it. It’s their work. Now when I read something I just have absolutely no idea whether the person wrote it, how much percent did they write it, or how much they even had to think before publishing it. Anyone can simply publish a perfectly well-written piece of text about any topic whatsoever, and I just can’t wrap my head around why, but it feels like a complete waste of time to read anything. Like… it’s all just garbage, I don’t know.

danielmarkbruce2• 2 years ago

The following appears to be true:

If one spends a lot of years reading a lot of stuff, they come to this conclusion, that most of it cannot be trusted. But it takes lots of years and lots of material to see it.

If they don't, they don't.

mvdtnz4• 2 years ago

It's that you trusted that what you read came from a human being. Back in the day I used to spend hours reading Evolution vs Creationism debates online. I didn't "trust" the veracity of half of what I read, but that didn't mean I didn't want to read it. I liked reading it because it came from people. I would never want to read AI regurgitation of these arguments.

walthamstow• 2 years ago

I've even grown to enjoy spelling and grammar mistakes - at least I know a human wrote it.

oneshtein• 2 years ago

Write a response to this comment, make spelling and grammar mistakes.

yeah well sumtimes spellling and grammer erors just make thing hard two read. like i no wat u mean bout wanting two kno its a reel person, but i think cleear communication is still importint! ;)

1aleksa• 2 years ago

Whenever somebody misspells my name, I know it's legit haha

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

There was a meme along the lines of people will start including slurs in their messages to prove it wasn’t AI generated.

ipaio• 2 years ago

You can prompt/train the AI to add a couple of random minor errors. They're trained from human text after all, they can pretend to be as human as you like.

fzzzy• 2 years ago

Guess what? Now the computers will learn to do that so they can more convincingly pass a turing test.

faragon• 2 years ago

People could prompt for authenticity, adding subtle mistakes, etc. I hope that AI as a whole will help people writing better, if reading back the text. It is a bit like "The Substance" movie: a "better" version of ourselves.

redandblack2• 2 years ago

yesss. my thought too. All the variations of English should not lost.

I enjoyed all the belter dialogue in the expanse

grecy2• 2 years ago

Eh, like everything in life you can choose what you spend your time on and what you ignore.

There have always been human writers I don’t waste my time on, and now there are AI writers in the same category.

I don’t care. I will just do what I want with my life and use my time and energy on things I enjoy and find useful.

avereveard• 2 years ago

why do you trust things now? unless you recognize the author and have a chain of trust from that author production to the content you're consuming, there already was no way to estabilish trust.

layer87• 2 years ago

For one, I trust authors more who are not too lazy to start sentences with upper case.

flir5• 2 years ago

I've been using it in my personal writing (combination of GPT and Claude). I ask the AI to write something, maybe several times, and I edit it until I'm happy with it. I've always known I'm a better editor than I am an author, and the AI text gives me somewhere to start.

So there's a human in the loop who is prepared to vouch for those sentences. They're not 100% human-written, but they are 100% human-approved. I haven't just connected my blog to a Markov chain firehose and walked away.

Am I still adding to the AI smog? idk. I imagine that, at a bare minimum, its way of organising text bleeds through no matter how much editing I do.

vladstudio• 2 years ago

you wrote this comment completely by your own, right? without any AI involved. And I read your comment feeling confident that it's truly 100% yours. I think this reader's confidence is what the OP is talking about.

ozim4• 2 years ago

What kind of silliness is this?

AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good.

Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO!

There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book or real encyclopedia to look stuff up”.

Not defending gen AI - but still you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not, it was always an effort and nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.

tempfile6• 2 years ago

you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not

yes, obviously. But AI slop makes those proxy measures significantly more complicated. Critical thinking is not magic - it is still a guess, and people are obviously worse at distinguishing AI bullshit from human bullshit.

dns_snek• 2 years ago

nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.

The problem is that wheat:chaff ratio used to be 1:100, and soon it's going to become 1:100 million. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of effort it's going to take to find real information in the sea of AI generated content.

shprd3• 2 years ago

No one claimed humans are perfect. But gen AI is a force multiplier for every problem we had to deal with. It's just completely different scale. Your brain is about to be DDOSed by junk content.

Of course, gen AI is just a tool that can be used for good or bad, but spam, targeted misinformation campaigns, and garbage content in general is one area that will be most amplified because it became so low effort and they don't care about doing any review, double-checking, etc. They can completely automate their process to whatever goal they've in mind. So where sensible humans enjoy 10x productivity, these spam farms will be enjoying 10000x scale.

So I don't think downplaying it and acting like nothing changed, is the brightest idea. I hope you see now how that's a completely different game, one that's already here but we aren't prepared for yet, certainly not with traditional tools we have.

paganel• 2 years ago

You kind of notice the stuff written with AI, it has a certain something that makes it detectable. Granted, stuff like the Reuters press reports might have already been written by AI, but I think that in that case it doesn’t really matter.

lokimedes• 2 years ago

I get two associations from your comment: One about how AI being mainly used to interpolate within a corpus of prior knowledge, seems like entropy in a thermodynamical sense. The other, how this is like the Tower of Babel but where distrust is sown by sameness rather than differences. In fact, relying on AI for coding and writing, feels more like channeling demonic suggestions than anything else. No wonder we are becoming skeptical.

seniortaco4• 2 years ago

I know and at my company we actually cannot disable the AI suggestions :(

It's like dealing with a pathological liar who produces very convincing looking code for me to review, but actually there is a bug in it 50% of the time. It's like it's trying to trick me into committing bugs.

ks2048• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.

theshackleford• 2 years ago

Yes it’s true today, depending on what is your writing is the foundation of.

It doesn’t matter that my writing is more considered, more accurate and of a higher quality when my coworkers are all openly using AI to perform five times the work I am and producing outcomes that are “good enough” because good enough is quite enough for a larger majority than many likely realise.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

It's not true at all. Much like the claims that you have to use LLMs to keep up in programming: if that is true then you weren't a good programmer (or writer in this case) to begin with.

williamcotton3• 2 years ago

Well we’re going to need some system of PKI that is tied to real identities. You can keep being anonymous if you want but I would prefer not and prefer to not interact with the anonymous, just like how I don’t want to interact with people wearing ski masks.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

Why are you posting on this forum where the user's identity isn't verified by anyone then? :)

But the real problem is that having the poster's identity verified is no proof that their output is not coming straight from a LLM.

flir5• 2 years ago

I doubt that's possible. I can always lend my identity to an AI.

The best you can hope for is not "a human wrote this text", it's "a human vouched for this text".

FrankyHollywood• 2 years ago

I have never read more bullshit in my life than during the corona pandemic, all written by humans. So you should never trust something you read, always question the source and it's reasoning.

At the same time I use copilot on a daily basis, both for coding as well as the normal chat.

It is not perfect, but I'm at a point I trust AI more than the average human. And why shouldn't I? LLMs ingest and combine more knowledge than any human can ever do. An LLM is not a human brain but it's actually performing really well.

dijit3• 2 years ago

Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time.

Lowering the bar to write books is "good" but increases the noise to signal ratio.

I'm not 100% certain how to give another proof-of-work, but what I've started doing is narrating my blog posts - though AI voices are getting better too.. :\

vasco3• 2 years ago

Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time.

Said the scribe upon hearing about the printing press.

onion2k• 2 years ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

What AI is going to teach people is that they don't actually need to trust half as many things as they thought they did, but that they do need to verify what's left.

This has always been the case. We've just been deferring to 'truster organizations' a lot recently, without actually looking to see if they still warrant having our trust when they change over time.

layer87• 2 years ago

How can you verify most of anything if you can’t trust any writing (or photographs, audio, and video, for that matter)?

nils-m-holm4• 2 years ago

It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a single character that I have not come up with and typed myself. Something like pride in craftmanship does exist.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

Nice. I will definitely consider your book over other books. I'm not interested in reading AI-assisted works.

smitelli• 2 years ago

I'm right there with you. I write short and medium form articles for my personal site (link in bio, follow it or don't, the world keeps spinning either way). I will never use AI as part of this craft. If that hampers my output, or puts me at a disadvantage compared to the competition, or changes the opinion others have of me, I really don't care.

nyarlathotep_3• 2 years ago

In b4 all the botslop shills tell you you're gonna get "left behind" if you don't pollute your output with GPT'd copypasta.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

Amazing! Do you feel any pressure from your environment? And are you self-funded? I am also thinking about starting my first book.

lurking_swe4• 2 years ago

do you see any benefits to using AI to check your book for typos, grammatical issues, or even just general “feedback” prior to publishing?

Seems like there are uses for AI other than “please write it all for me”, no?

goostavos• 2 years ago

Also currently working on a book (shameless plug: buy my book!) and feel no pull or need to involve AI. This book is my mine. My faults. My shortcomings. My overuse of commas. My wonky phrasing. It has to have those things, because I am those things (for better or worse!).

bryanrasmussen• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that.

Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?

t-32• 2 years ago

I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of fiction is or will soon be written by LLM. Will it be high-quality? Will it be loved and remembered by generations to come? Probably not. Will it make money? Probably more than before on average as the author's effort is reduced to writing outlines and prompts, and editing the generated-in-seconds output, rather than months-years of doing the writing themselves.

PeterisP2• 2 years ago

I think that novel writing and reviews are types of writing where potentially AI should eventually surpass human writers, because they have the potential to replace content skillfully tailored to be liked by many people with content that's tailored (perhaps less skillfully) explicitly for a specific very, very, very narrow niche of exactly you and all the things that happen to work for your particular biases.

There seems to be an upcoming wave of adult content products (once again, being on the bleeding edge users of new abilities) based on this principle, as hitting very specific niches/kinks/fetishes can be quite effective in that business, but it should then move on to romance novels and pulp fiction and then, over time, most other genres.

Similarly, good pedagogy, curriculum design and educational content development is all about accurately modeling which exact bits of the content the target audience will/won't know, and explaining the gaps with analogies and context that will work for them (for example, when adapting a textbook for a different country, translation is not sufficient; you'd also need to adapt the content). In that regard, if AI models can make personalized technical writing, then that can be more effective than the best technical writing the most skilled person can make addressed to a broader audience.

dustingetz• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

What? No! Content volume only matters in stupid contests like VC app marketing grifts or political disinformation ops where the content isn’t even meant to be read, it’s an excuse for a headline. I personally write all my startup’s marketing content, quality is exquisite and due to this our brand is becoming a juggernaut

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

response from AI on this: I completely understand where you're coming from. The increasing reliance on AI in writing does raise important questions about authenticity and connection. There’s something uniquely human in knowing that the words you're reading come from someone’s personal thoughts, experiences, and emotions—even if flawed. AI-generated content, while efficient and often well-written, lacks that deeper layer of humanity, the imperfections, and the creative struggle that gives writing its soul.

It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you know AI is shaping so much of the content around us. Writing used to be a deeply personal exchange, but now, it can feel mechanical, like it’s losing its essence. The pressure to keep up with AI can be overwhelming for human writers, leading to this shift in content creation.

At the same time, it’s worth considering that the human element still exists and will always matter—whether in long-form journalism, creative fiction, or even personal blogs. There are people out there who write for the love of it, for the connection it fosters, and for the need to express something uniquely theirs. While the presence of AI is unavoidable, the appreciation for genuine human insight and emotion will never go away.

Maybe the answer lies in seeking out and cherishing those authentic voices. While AI-generated writing will continue to grow, the hunger for human storytelling and connection will persist too. It’s about finding balance in this new reality and, when necessary, looking back to the richness of past writings, as you mentioned. While it may seem like a loss in some ways, it could also be a call to be more intentional in what we read and who we trust to deliver those words.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

> cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I was talking to someone about Taylor Swift recently. They thought that she wrote all her songs. I commented that one cannot really know that, that the entertainment industry is very going at generating seemingly "authentic" product at a rapid pace. My colleague looked at me like I had just killed a small animal. The idea that TS was "genuine" was a cornerstone of their fandom, and my suggestion had attacked that love. If you love music or film, don't dig too deep. It is all a factory. That AI is now part of that factory doesn't change much for me.

Maybe my opinion would change if I saw something AI-generated with even a hint of artistic relevance. I've seen cool pictures and passable prose, but nothing so far with actual meaning, nothing worthy of my time.

WalterBright• 2 years ago

Watch the movie "The Wrecking Crew" about how a group of studio musicians in the 1970s were responsible for the albums of quite a few diverse "bands". Many bands had to then learn to play their own songs so they could go on tour.

nyarlathotep_3• 2 years ago

You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten.

I'm reminded of 'Under The Silver Lake' with this reference. Strange film, but that plotline stuck with me.

davidhaymond• 2 years ago

While I do enjoy some popular genres, I'm all too aware of the massive industry behind it all. I believe that most of humanity's greatest works of art were created not for commercial interests but rather for the pure joy of creation, of human expression. This can be found in any genre if you look hard enough, but it's no accident that the music I find the most rewarding is classical music: Intellect, emotion, spirit, and narrative dreamed into existence by one person and then brought to life by other artists so we can share in its beauty.

I think music brings about a connection between the composers, lyricists, performers, and listeners. Music lets us participate in something uniquely human. Replacing any of the human participants with AI greatly diminishes or eliminates its value in my eyes.

advael• 2 years ago

In trying to write a book, it makes little sense to try to "compete" on speed or volume of output. There were already vast disparities in that among people who write, and people whose aim was to express themselves or contribute something of importance to people's lives, or the body of creative work in the world, have little reason to value quantity over quality. Probably if there's a significant correlation with volume of output, it's in earnings, and that seems both somewhat tenuous and like something that's addressable by changes in incentives, which seem necessary for a lot of things. Computers being able to do dumb stuff at massive scale should be viewed as finding vulnerabilities in the metrics this allows it to become trivial to game, and it's baffling whenever people say "Well clearly we're going to keep all our metrics the same and this will ruin everything." Of course, in cases where we are doing that, we should stop (For example, we should probably act to significantly curb price and wage discrimination, though that's more like a return to form of previous regulatory standards)

As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days

This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime

So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books

wengo314• 2 years ago

i think the problem started when quantity became more important over quality.

you could totally compete on quality merit, but nowadays the volume of output (and frequency) is what is prioritized.

yusufaytas• 2 years ago

I totally understand your frustration. We started writing our book long before(2022) AI became mainstream, and when we finally published it on May 2024, all we hear now is people asking if it's just AI-generated content. It’s sad to see how quickly the conversation shifts away from the human touch in writing.

eleveriven5• 2 years ago

I can imagine how disheartening that must be

eleveriven5• 2 years ago

Maybe, over time, there will also be a renewed appreciation for authenticity

ChrisMarshallNY4• 2 years ago

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it).

I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence.

But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.

layer87• 2 years ago

marketing fluff for the App Store

If it’s fluff, why do you put it there? As an App Store user, I‘m not interested in reading marketing fluff.

notarobot123• 2 years ago

I have my reservations about AI but it's hard not to notice that LLMs are effectively a Gutenberg level event in the history of written communication. They mark a fundamental shift in our capacity to produce persuasive text.

The ability to speak the same language or understand cultural norms are no longer barriers to publishing pretty much anything. You don't have to understand a topic or the jargon of any given domain. You don't have to learn the expected style or conventions an author might normally use in that context. You just have to know how to write a good prompt.

There's bound to be a significant increase in the quantity as well as the quality of untrustworthy published text because of these new capacities to produce it. It's not the phenomenon but the scale of production that changes the game here.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

When I wrote about trust, I see that I made a mistake: most people seem to have understood it as being in regard to fake things. I just meant trust as in, it’s not AI-generated.

Your comment about the fluff is exactly what I mean. I read some fluff that is AI-generated and some kind of disgust happens in my stomach, and I wish there was nothing written there at all. I just feel like it’s be best to not read anything than read something that’s AI-generated… it’s almost like the author is trying to trick me with a fake version of reality. I wonder if there’s such a thing as the uncanny valley for text?

munksbeer4• 2 years ago

but it's still depressing, to be honest.

Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

I actually disagree with that. People are so busy hoping things will get better, and creating little bubbles for themselves to hide away from what human beings as a whole are doing, that they don't realize things are getting worse. Technology constantly makes things worse. Cheering up is a good self-help strategy but not a good strategy if you want to contribute to making the world actually a better place.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

It’s fairly common for (at least) specific things to get worse and then never improve again.

neta13372• 2 years ago

Why do you have to use it? I don’t get it. If you write your own book, you don’t compete with anyone. If anyone finished The Winds of Winter for R.R.Martin using AI, nobody would bat an eye, obviously, as we already experienced how bad a soulless story is that drifts too far away from what the author had built in his mind.

verisimi• 2 years ago

You're lucky. I consider it a possibility that older works (even ancient writings) are retrojected into the historical record.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

It's either good or it isn't. It either tracks or it doesn't. No need to befuddle your thoughts over some perceived slight.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

Do you feel any pressure from your environment? Like seeing other authors publishing at a much faster pace than you?

tim3334• 2 years ago

I'm not sure it's always that hard to tell the AI stuff from the non AI. Comments on HN and on twitter from people you follow are pretty much non AI, also people on youtube where you an see the actual human talking.

On the other hand there's a lot on youtube for example that is obviously ai - weird writing and speaking style and I'll only watch those if I'm really interested in the subject matter and there aren't alternatives.

Maybe people will gravitate more to the stuff like PaulG or Elon Musk on twitter or HN and less to blog style content?

wickedsight2• 2 years ago

With a friend, I created a website about a race track in the past two years. I definitely used AI to speed up some of writing. One thing I used it for was a track guide, describing every corner and how to drive it. It was surprisingly accurate, most of the time. The other times though, it would drive the track backwards, completely hallucinate the instructions or link corners that are in different parts of the track.

I spent a lot of time analyzing the track myself and fixed everything to the point that experienced drivers agreed with my description. If I hadn't done that, most visitors would probably still accept our guide as the truth, because they wouldn't know any better.

We know that not everyone cares about whether what they put on the internet is correct and AI allows those people to create content at an unprecedented pace. I fully agree with your sentiment.

jshdhehe• 2 years ago

AI only helps writing in so far as checking/suggesting edits. Most people can write better than AI (more engaging). AI cant tell a human story, have real tacit experience.

So it is like saying my champaigne bottle cant keep up with the tap water.

Roark66• 2 years ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die

Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their primary business of advertising.

Before, at least they were trying to downrank all the crap "word aggregators". After, they stopped caring at all.

AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad.

So why don't we have "a new Google" emerge? Simple, because of the monopolistic practices Google did to make the barrier to entry huge. First, 99% of the content people want to search for is behind a login wall (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube), second almost all CDNs now implement "verify you are human" by default. Third, no one links to other sites. Ever! These 3 things mean a new Google is essentially impossible. Even duck duck go has thrown the towel and subscribed to Bing results.

It has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with Google. In fact AI might give us the tools to better fight Google.

rich_sasha• 2 years ago

Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient.

The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course didn't make him efficient or smart or fair.

That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics. I am reminded of the Reddit story about an AI-generated mushroom atlas that had factual errors and lead to someone getting poisoned. We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The story of course is from reddit, so probably untrue, but it doesn't matter - it totally could be true.

LLMs are fantastic at breaking our heuristics as to what is and isn't legit, but not as good at being right.

bad_user• 2 years ago

You're attributing too much to Google.

Bots are now blocked because they've been abusive. When you host content on the internet, it's not fun to have bots bring your server down or inflate your bandwidth price. Google's bot is actually quite well-behaved. The other problem has been the recent trend in AI, and I can understand blockers being put in place, since AI is essentially plagiarizing content without attribution. But I'd blame OpenAI more at this point.

I also don't think you can blame Google for the centralization behind closed gardens. Or for why people no longer link to other websites. That's ridiculous.

And you should be attributing them the fact that the web is still alive.

ninetyninenine2• 2 years ago

I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s.

I mean the AI is trained and modeled on this excrement. It makes sense. As much as people think AI content is raw garbage… they don’t realize that they are staring into a mirror.

dennis_jeeves2• 2 years ago

I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s.

Things have not changed much really. This was true since the dawn of man-kind (and woman-kind from the man-kind rib of course) even before there writings was invented, in the form of gossip.

The internet/AI now carries on the torch of our ancestral inner calling, lol.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host.

Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate.

PR and ad culture was there to support that. The goal was to change values and behaviours to get people to Buy More Stuff. OK.

Then around the time the Internet arrived, industry was off-shored, and the culture started to become one of appearance and performance, not of substance and action.

SEO, adtech, social media, web framework soup, management fads - they're all about impression management and popularity games, not about underlying fundamentals.

This is very obvious on social media in the arts. The qualification for a creative career used to be substantial talent and ability. Now there are thousands of people making careers out of performing the lifestyle of being a creative person. Their ability to do the basics - draw, write, compose - is very limited. Worse, they lack the ability to imagine anything fresh or original - which is where the real substance is in art.

Worse than that, they don't know what they don't know, because they've been trained to be superficial in a superficial culture.

It's just as bad in engineering, where it has become more important to create the illusion of work being done, than to do the work. (Looking at you, Boeing. And also Agile...)

You literally make more money doing this. A lot more.

So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.

AI might one day be a tool for creating substance. But at the moment it's reflecting and enabling a Potemkin busy-culture of recycled facades and appearances that has almost nothing real behind it.

Unfortunately it's quite good at that.

But the problem is the culture, not the technology. And it's been a problem for a long time.

edgarvaldes• 2 years ago

Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I

I see this type of reasoning in all the AI threads. And yes, I think this time is different.

hermitcrab• 2 years ago

AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad.

It is an arms race between the people generating crap (for various nefarious purposes) and those trying to separate find useful content amongst the ever growing pile of crap. And it seems to me it is so much easier to generate crap, that I can't see how the good guys can possibly win.

InDubioProRubio• 2 years ago

Just dont be average and your fine.

akudha4• 2 years ago

I was listening to an interview few months ago (forgot the name). He is a prolific reader/writer and has a huge following. He mentioned that he only reads books that are at least 50 years old, so pre 70s. That sounds like a good idea now.

Even ignoring the AI, if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average). Maybe people's attention spans and taste is to blame, or maybe people just don't have the money/time/patience to consume quality work... I do not know.

One thing I know for sure - there is enough high quality material written before AI, before article spinners, before MFA sites etc. We would need multiple lifetimes to even scratch the surface of that body of work. We can ignore mostly everything that is published these days and we won't be missing much

eloisant• 2 years ago

I'd say it's probably survivor's bias. Bad books from the pre 70s are probably forgotten and no longer printed.

Old books that we're still printing and are still talking about have stood the test of time. It doesn't mean that are no great recent books.

mvdtnz4• 2 years ago

if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average)

I'm sorry but this is just nonsense.

alwa2• 2 years ago

Nassim Taleb famously argues that position, in his popular work Antifragile and elsewhere. I believe the theory is that time serves as a sieve: only works with lasting value can remain relevant through the years.

inkcapmushroom• 2 years ago

Completely disagree just from my own personal experience as a sci-fi reader. Modern day bestseller sci-fi novels fit right in with the old classics, and in many ways outshine them. I have read many bad obscure sci-fi books published from the 50's to today, most of them a dollar at the thrift store. There was never a time when writers were perfect and every published work was high quality, then or now.

LeroyRaz3• 2 years ago

Aren't you worried about low quality interviews?!

I only listen to interviews from 50 years ago (interviews that have stood the test of time), about books from 100 years ago. In fact, how am I reading this article? It's not 2074 yet?!

EGreg• 2 years ago

I have been predicting this from 2016

And I also predict that many responses to you will say “it was always that way, nothing changed”.

limit499karma• 2 years ago

I'll take your statement that your conclusions are based on a 'depressed mind' at face value, since it is so self-defeating and places little faith in Human abilities. Your assumption that a person driven to write will "with a high degree of certainty" also mix up their work with a machine assistant can only be informed by your own self-assessment (after all how could you possibly know the mindset of every creative human out there?)

My optimistic and enthusiastic view of AI's role in Human development is that it will create selection pressures that will release the dormant psychological abilities of the species. Undoubtedly, wide-spread appearance of Psi abilities will be featured in this adjustment of the human super-organism to technologies of its own making.

Machines can't do Psi.

greenie_beans• 2 years ago

i know a lot of writers who don't use ai. in fact, i can't think of any writers who use it, except a few literary fiction writers.

working theory: writers have taste and LLM writing style doesn't match the typical taste of a published writer.

osigurdson• 2 years ago

AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text

AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points

We need to stop being impressed with long documents.

fennecfoxy5• 2 years ago

The foundations of our education systems are based on rote memorisation so I'd probably start there.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

That’s the ideal way forward in my opinion. My optimistic view of the future is one where we get so fed up of the noise that we only write what is absolutely necessary, because anything more than that is AI-generated.

noobermin• 2 years ago

When you're writing, how are you "missing out" if you're not using chatgpt??? I don't even understand how this can be unless what you're writing is already unnecessary such that you shouldn't need to write it in the first place.

jwells89• 2 years ago

I don’t get it either. Writing is not something I need that level of assistance with, and I would even say that using LLMs to write defeats some significant portion of the point of writing — by using LLMs to write for me I feel that I’m no longer expressing myself in the purest sense, because the words are not mine and do not exhibit any of my personality, tendencies, etc. Even if I were to train an LLM on my style, it’d only be a temporal facsimile of middling quality, because peoples’ styles evolve (sometimes quite rapidly) and there’s no way to work around all the corner cases that never got trained for.

As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is.

There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?

dotnet004• 2 years ago

LLMs are surprisingly capable editors/brainstorming tools. So, you're missing out in that you're being less efficient in editing.

Like, you can write a bunch of text, then ask an LLM to improve it with minimal changes. Then, you read through its output and pick out the improvements you like.

_heimdall2• 2 years ago

Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it.

Why do you say people have to do it?

People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is not worth wasting time and resources on. There will always be side effects to making those decisions, but its well within everyone's right to make them.

DrillShopper3• 2 years ago

Why do you say people have to do it?

Gotta eat, yo

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more money for all-human books.

Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?

uhtred2• 2 years ago

To be honest I got sick of most new movies, TV shows, music even before AI so I will continue to consume media from pre 2010 until the day I die and will hope I don't get through it all.

Something happened around 2010 and it all got shit. I think everyone becoming massively online made global cultural output reduce in quality to meet the interests of most people and most people have terrible taste.

edavison13• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

DrillShopper3• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output.

At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.

fennecfoxy5• 2 years ago

Yes, but what really matters is what and how the general public, aka the consumers want to consume.

I can bang on about older games being better all day long but it doesn't stop Fortnite from being popular, and somewhat rightly so, I suppose.

jayd162• 2 years ago

Sure but no one gets to avoid all but the most elite content. I think they're bemoaning the quality of pulp.

lurking_swe4• 2 years ago

i regularly (at least once a week) spot a typo or grammatical issue in a major news story. I see it in the NYTimes on occasion. I see it in local news ALL THE TIME. I swear an LLM would write better than have the idiots that are cranking out articles.

I agree with you that having elite writing skills will be useful for a long time. But the bar for proof reading seems to be quite low on average in the industry. I think you overestimate the writings skills of your average journalist.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

Will they maintain that stance when it gets into their pockets? I doubt it. If the public is not minding the difference, why would they?

amelius4• 2 years ago

Funny thing is that people will also ask AI to __read__ stuff for them and summarize it.

So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.

jcd7482• 2 years ago

Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

onemoresoop• 2 years ago

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it,

The problem is this kind of content is flooding the internet. Before you know it becomes extremely hard to find non AI generated content...

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

That’s super cool, and I hope you are right and that I am wrong and artists/creators like you will still have a place in the future. My fear is that your work turns into some kind of artesanal fringe activity that is only accessible to 1% of people, like Ming vases or whatever.

seniortaco4• 2 years ago

That's true art, I love people like you. Technology can do a lot of things but it cannot give people or society principles, and without principles society fails.

fennecfoxy5• 2 years ago

Why does a human being behind any words change anything at all? Trust should be based on established facts/research and not species.

bloak2• 2 years ago

A lot of communication isn't about "established facts/research"; it's about someone's experience. For example, if a human writes about their experience of using a product, perhaps a drug, or writes what they think about a book or a film, then I might be interested in reading that. When they write using their own words I get some insight into how they think and what sort of person they are. I have very little interest in reading an AI-generated text with similar "content".

goatlover5• 2 years ago

An LLM isn't even a species. I prefer communicating with other humans, unless I choose to interact with an LLM. But then I know that it's a text generator and not a person, even when I ask it to act like a person. The difference matters to most humans.

farts_mckensy3• 2 years ago

But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me.

Everyone is going to have to get over that very soon, or they're going to start sounding like those old puritanical freaks who thought Elvis thrusting his hips around was the work of the devil.

goatlover5• 2 years ago

Those two things don't sound at all similar. We don't have to get over wanting to communicate with humans online.

hyggetrold2• 2 years ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

This has nearly always been true. "Manufacturing consent" is way older than any digital technology.

unshavedyak• 2 years ago

Agreed. I also suspect we've grown to rely on the crutch of trust far too much. Faulty writing has existed for ages but now suddenly because the computer is the thing making it up we have an issue with it.

I guess it depends on scope. I'm imaging scientific or education. Ie things we probably shouldn't have relied on Blogs to facilitate, yet we did. For looking up some random "how do i build a widget?", yea AI will probably make it worse. For now. Then it'll massively improve to the point that it's not even worth asking how to build the widget.

The larger "scientific or education" is what i'm concerned about, and i think we'll need a new paradigm to validate. We've been getting attacked on this front for 12+ years, AI is only bringing this to light imo.

Trust will have to be earned and verified in this word-soup world. I just hope we find a way.

BeFlatXIII4• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

Only if you're competing on volume.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

Who isn’t? Can you rely on your readers to rebel against AI and value more your writing than that of your peers? If one of your competitors write 10 articles while you write 1, and charge 10% of what you charge, they already equaled your wins. Raise it to 20% and they are already making twice what you make. Can you really trust that your writing is so good and so incredibly special that someone would be willing to pay 10x more for your content, against one that was assisted by the absolute state of the art of a technology that has revolutionized the world?

beefnugs• 2 years ago

Just add more swearing and off color jokes to everything you do and say. If there is one thing we know for sure its that the corporate AIs will never allow dirty jokes.

(it will get into the dark places like spam though, which seems dumb since they know how to make meth instead, spend time on that you wankers)

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

Maybe this will push people back to reading old paper books?

There could be resurgence in reading the classics, on paper, since we know they are not AI.

CuriouslyC2• 2 years ago

A lot of writers using AI use it to create outlines of a chapter or scene then flesh it out by hand.

cookingrobot• 2 years ago

Idea: we should make sure we keep track of what the human created content is, so that we don’t get confused by AI edits of everything in the future.

For ex, calculate the hash of all important books, and publish that as the “historical authenticity” check. Put the hashes on some important blockchain so we know it’s unchanged over time.

bilsbie• 2 years ago

Wait until you find out about copywriters.

alwa2• 2 years ago

People like you, the author, and me all share this sentiment. It motivates us to seek out authentic voices and writing that’s associated with specific humans.

The commodity end of the writing market may well have been automated, but was that really the kind of writing you or the author or I ever sought out in the first place?

I can get mass-manufactured garments from Shein if I want, but I can also still find tailors locally if it’s worth it to me. I can buy IKEA or I can still save up for something made out of real wood. I can “shoot a cinematic digital film” on my iPhone but the cineplex remains in business and the art film folks are still doing their scrappy thing (and still moaning about its economics). I can lap up slop from an academic paper mill journal or I can identify who’s doing the thinking in a field and read what they’re writing or saying.

And the funny thing is that none of those human-scale options commands all that much of a premium in the scheme of things. There may be less human-scald work to go around and thus fewer small enterprises plying a specific trade, but any given one of them just has to put food on the table for a number of humans roughly proportional to the same level of output as always.

It seems to me that there’s no special virtue in the specific form that the mass publishing market took over the last century or however long: my local grocery store chain’s division producing weekly newspaper circulars probably employed more people than J Peterman has. But there was and remains a place for quality. If anything—as you point out—the AI schlock has sensitized us to the value we place on a human voice. And at some level, once people notice that they miss that quality, isn’t there a sense in which they become more willing to seek it out and pay for it if necessary?

m463• 2 years ago

I think ... between now and the day you die... you'll get your personal AI to read things for you. It will analyze what's been written, check any arguments for fallacious reasoning, and look up related things for background and omissions that may support or negate things.

It is actually happening now.

I've noticed amazon reviews have an AI summary at the top, reading the reviews for you and even pointing out shortcomings.

phatfish• 2 years ago

I've seen "summarise this" and "explain this code" buttons added to technical documentation. This works reasonably well for most common situations, which is probably the reason it's one of the few "production" uses for LLMs. I didn't know Amazon was using it though.

Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human".

I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off.

Rinse and repeat.

LeroyRaz3• 2 years ago

Your take seems hyperbolic.

Until LLMs exceed the very best of human quality there will be human content in all forms of media. This claims follows because there is always (some) demand for top quality content.

I agree that many writers might use LLMs as a tool, but good writers who care about quality will ensure that such use is not detrimental (e.g., using the LLM to identify errors rather than having it draft copy).

njarboe• 2 years ago

Will that happen in 1,2,5,10 or never years?

jwuice• 2 years ago

i would change to: if you do ANYTHING online and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. you're out.

it's depressing.

seniortaco4• 2 years ago

+1, and to put more simply, AI as we know it today makes zero guarantees about its accuracy. That's pretty insane for a "tool" to make no guarantees about being correct in any way for any purpose.

A spellchecker makes guarantees about accuracy. So does a calculator. Broad, sweeping guarantees.

Imagine if we built a tool that could automatically do all the electrical work in a new home from the breaker box to every outlet, and it could do it in 2 hours. However, what if that tool made no guarantees about its ability to meet electrical code? Would people use it anyway? Of course they would. Many dangerous errors would slip through inspection and many more house fires would ensue as a result.

bschmidt13• 2 years ago

Oh please the content online now is so fake as hell. You're acting as if AI can only produce garbage but CNN and Fox News are producing gold. The internet is 4 total websites now, congrats big media won. And you want to shut down the only decent attempt against it. Shame on you "hackers"

mulmen• 2 years ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

Today is September 11349, 1993

th3byrdm4n• 2 years ago

Honestly, I've developers saying the same thing about IDEs and high level languages.

This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc.

The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software.

Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct.

Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.

davidgerard3• 2 years ago

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

This statement strikes me (a writer) as ridiculous. LLM slop is sloppy. I would expect anyone who reads a reasonable amount to spot it immediately.

Are you saying you are literally unable to distinguish LLM cliches?

itsTyrion• 2 years ago

Same goes for art. No longer can you see art on social media, press like and maybe leave a nice comment, you need to fricking pixel peep for artifacts as it's becoming less obvious.

low_tech_love13• 2 years ago

Exactly. And it makes sense: think about how much one would have to pay for an artist to do the same? It’s simply inconceivable. The convergence is clear: we just won’t care about anything anymore after a while. Writing, art, whatever; it’ll all turn into noise.

wrasee• 2 years ago

For me what’s important is that you are able to communicate effectively. If you use language tools, other tools or even a real personal assistant if you effectively communicate the point that ultimately is yours in the making I expect that that is ultimately is what is important and will ultimately win out.

Otherwise this is just about style. That’s important where personal creative expression is important, and in fairness to the article the author hits on a few good examples here. But there are a lot of times where personal expression is less important or even an impediment to what’s most important: communicating effectively.

The same-ness of AI-speak should also diminish as the number and breadth of the technologies mature beyond the monoculture of ChatGPT, so I’m also not too worried about that.

An accountant doesn’t get rubbished if they didn’t add up the numbers themselves. What’s important is that the calculation is correct. I think the same will be true for the use of LLMs as a calculator of words and meaning.

This comment is already too long for such a simple point. Would it have been wrong to use an LLM to make it more concise, to have saved you some of your time?

t435623• 2 years ago

The problem is that we haven't invented AI that reads the crap that other AIs produce - so the burden is now on the reader to make sense of whatever other people lazily generate.

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

I envision a future where the internet is entirely bots talking to each other and people have just gone outside to talk face to face, the only place that’s actually real.

danielbln3• 2 years ago

But we do. The same AI that generates can read and reduce/summarize/evaluate.

buddhistdude3• 2 years ago

some of the activities that we're involved in are not limited in complexity, for example driving a car. you can have a huge amount of experience in driving a car but will still face new situations.

the things that most knowledge workers are working on are limited problems and it is just a matter of time until the machine will reach that level, then our employment will end.

edit: also that doesn't have to be AGI. it just needs to be good enough for the problem.

gizmo5• 2 years ago

AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when something becomes 100x or 10000x cheaper. Things that are 10x worse but 100x cheaper are still extremely valuable. It's the relentless drive to making things cheaper, even at the expense of quality, that has made our high quality of life possible.

You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc.

AI slop is cheap and cheapness changes everything.

grecy2• 2 years ago

And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.

atoav3• 2 years ago

Or it will all be slop as there us no non-slop data to train on anymore

rsynnott8• 2 years ago

Not sure about that. Stable Diffusion came out a bit over 2 years ago. I'm not sure that Stable Diffusion 3's, or Flux's, output is artistically _better_ than the original; it's better at following directions, and better at avoiding the most grotesque errors, but if anything it perhaps looks even _more_ generic and same-y than the original Stable Diffusion output. There's a very distinctive AI _look_ which seems to have somehow synced up between Dalle, Midjourney, SD3 and others.

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.

erwald• 2 years ago

For the same reason we don't want art to be 10,000x times more expensive? Cf. status quo bias etc.

gizmo5• 2 years ago

A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.

lijok6• 2 years ago

Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good

On the contrary. Slop makes the good stuff stand out.

senko3• 2 years ago

This is mixing up two meanings of "art". Mona Lisa doesn't need to be 10000x cheaper.

Random illustration on a random blog post sure could.

Art as an evocative expression of the artist shouldn't be cheapened. But those freelancers churning content on Fiverr aren't pouring their soul into it.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

AI is really good at automating away shit we didn’t need to do to begin with, but for some stupid reason were doing anyway.

Ghost writing rich people’s vanity/self-marketing trash business or self-help books (you would not believe how many of these are written every year). Images (and prose) for internal company department newsletters that almost nobody reads.

Great at that crap—because it doesn’t matter anyway.

Whether making it far cheaper to produce things with no or negative value (spam, astroturf, scams) is a good idea… well no, it’s obviously terrible. It’d (kinda) be good if demand for such things remained the same, but it won’t, so it’s really, really bad.

jay_kyburz3• 2 years ago

Information is not like physical products if you ask me. When the information is wrong, it's value flips from positive to negative. You might be paying less for progress, but you are not progressing slower, you are progressing in the wrong direction.

GaggiX3• 2 years ago

They are not even that bad anymore to be honest.

akudha4• 2 years ago

The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid.

Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as we got used to cheap household items, bland buildings (there is just nothing artistic about modern houses or commercial buildings) etc, we will also get used to shitty movies, shitty fiction etc (we are well on our way).

precompute6• 2 years ago

Could not agree more. The marketing for "AI" would have you believe it's a qualitative shift when it's really a quantitative shift.

slyall• 2 years ago

One think to check about higher quality stuff in the past is how much it cost vs the average wage.

You might be comparing a $100 bike from Walmart with something that cost the equivalent of $600

kerkeslager• 2 years ago

I think that your post misses the point that making something cheaper by stealing it is unethical.

You're presenting AI as if it's some new way of producing value but it simply isn't. All the value here was produced by humans without the help of AI: the only "innovation" AI has offered is making the theft of that value untraceable.

You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc.

Let's take this analogy to its logical conclusion: would you have any objections if all the houses ever built by expert craftsmen were given free of charge to a few corporations, with no payment to the current owners or the expert craftsmen themselves, and then then those corporations began renting them out as AirBnBs? That's basically what you're proposing.

sigmonsays• 2 years ago

how does this make our high quality of life possible when everything's quality is being reduced?

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery.

We've logged an enormous amount of the old-growth hardwood forests the planet had doing this (and also shipbuilding). We literally don't have access to the same materials anymore.

Nemi• 2 years ago

The thing is, right now it is artificially cheaper. It is being heavily subsidized by all providers in a race to capture market share. It simply cannot stay this cheap forever at current costs.

Now, if costs change then we have a new story. But that is not guaranteed.

eleveriven5• 2 years ago

AI is a tool, and like any tool, it's only as good as how we choose to use it.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

No, that is wrong. We can't "choose" because too many people have instincts. And people always have the instinct to use new technology to gain incremental advantages over others, and that in turn puts pressure on everyone to use it. That prisoner's dilemma situation means that without a firm and larger guiding moral philosophy, we really can't choose because instinct takes over choice. In other words, the way technology is used in modern society is not a matter of choice but is largely autonomous and goes beyond human choice. (Of course, a few individuals will choose but the average effect is likely to be negative.)

syncr03• 2 years ago

More people need to read this / think this point through. In a post Excel world, could any accountant get a job not knowing Excel? No matter how good they were "on paper". Choice becomes a self aggrandizing illusion, reality eventually asserts itself.

With attention spans shrinking, publishers who prioritize quantity over quality get clicks, which generates ad revenue, which keeps their lights on while their competitors doing quality in depth, nuanced writing go out of business.

It feels like a game of chess closing in on you no matter how much you physically want to fight your way out and flip the board over.

mitthrowaway211• 2 years ago

The Goddess answers: "What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?"

Malaclypse: "But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!"

Goddess: "Oh. Well, then stop."

-- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

It's not AI you hate, it's Capitalism.

thenaturalist• 2 years ago

Say what you want about income and asset inequality, but capitalism has done more to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past 50 years than any other religion, aid programme or whatever else.

I think it's very important and fair to be critical about how we as a society implement capitalism, but such broad generalization misses the mark immensely.

Talk to anyone who grew up in a Communist country in the 2nd half of the 20th century if you want to validate that sentiment.

BoGoToTo2• 2 years ago

Ok, but let's take this to the logical conclusion that at some point there will be models which displace a large segment of the workforce. How does capitalism even function then?

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

but capitalism has done more to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past 50 years than any other religion, aid programme or whatever else.

Technology did what you ascribe to Capitalism. Most of the time thanks to state intervention, and the weaker the state, the weaker the growth (see how Asia overperformed everybody else now that laissez-faire policies are mainstream in the West).

Talk to anyone who grew up in a Communist country in the 2nd half of the 20th century if you want to validate that sentiment.

The fact that one alternative to Capitalism was a failure doesn't mean Capitalism isn't bad.

franciscop• 2 years ago

"Yes, I realize that thinking like this and writing this make me a Neo-Luddite in your eyes."

Not quite, I believe (and I think anyone can) both that AI will likely change the world as we know it, AND that right now it's over-hyped to a point that it gets tiring. For me this is different from e.g. NFTs, "Big Data", etc. where I only believed they were over-hyped but saw little-to-no substance behind them.

scotty793• 2 years ago

AI was just trained so far to generate corporate bs speak in a corporate bs format. That's why it's tiring. More unique touch in communication will come later as fine tunings and loras (if possible) of those models are shared.

AlexDragusin• 2 years ago

I beg to differ, one has to use the tool properly towards the desired results, for that, one has to understand and know the capabilities and limitations of the tool, for instance got my Plumber AI (local Llama 3.1 8B) to give his opinion on AI, I think it did a pretty good job and certainly not corporate :)

"Blimey, I've been thinkin' about this AI business a lot lately. I mean, I'm a plumber, I fix pipes, I don't get involved in all this fancy tech stuff, but it's hard to ignore. I was talkin' to a mate who's into that sort of thing and he's got me worried. He says these AI systems are gonna be takin' over, doin' all the work while we sit back and collect our pensions.

Now, I'm not sure I agree. I mean, I've seen some of these AI systems in action and they're not exactly the most reliable things, if you know what I mean. I've had to fix more than a few pipes that were clogged up by some dodgy software or other. And what's the point of havin' a system that's smarter than us if it's just gonna break down and need fixin' all the time?

But, I suppose that's just the old plumber in me comin' out. I mean, I know some folks who are workin' with AI and they say it's the future, that we're all gonna be replaced by robots and whatnot. And I suppose that's a bit scary, but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean, what's the harm in havin' a bit of intelligence to help us out? As long as it's not too smart, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, that's my two pence on AI. Take it or leave it, I don't care. I'm just gonna go fix some pipes and let the tech wizards sort it out."

Challenged it with: What do you mean "clogged up by some dodgy software" how does software clogs pipes?

"That was a bit of a stretch, wasn't it? As a plumber, I'm more used to dealing with physical blockages in pipes, like grease or hair, rather than software.

What I was trying to get at was that I've had to fix pipes that were faulty or malfunctioning due to poor design or manufacturing, and that's what I meant by "clogged up by some dodgy software". But that's a bit of a misnomer, isn't it?

In reality, I was just trying to come up with a way to relate my plumbing experience to the idea of AI systems being unreliable. But I think I ended up stretching a bit too far! Maybe I'll stick to talking about pipes and not try to get too clever with my analogies."

koliber6• 2 years ago

I am approaching AI with caution. Shiny things don't generally excite me.

Just this week I installed cursor, the AI-assisted VSCode-like IDE. I am working on a side project and decided to give it a try.

I am blown away.

I can describe the feature I want built, and it generates changes and additions that get me 90% there, within 15 or so seconds. I take those changes, and carefully review them, as if I was doing a code review of a super-junior programmer. Sometimes when I don't like the approach it took, I ask it to change the code, and it obliges and returns something closer to my vision.

Finally, once it is implemented, I manually test the new functionality. Afterward, I ask it to generated a set of automated test cases. Again, I review them carefully, both from the perspective of correctness, and suitability. It over-tests on things that don't matter and I throw away a part of the code it generates. What stays behind is on-point.

It has sped up my ability to write software and tests tremendously. Since I know what I want , I can describe it well. It generates code quickly, and I can spend my time revieweing and correcting. I don't need to type as much. It turns my abstract ideas into reasonably decent code in record time.

Another example. I wanted to instrument my app with Posthog events. First, I went through the code and added "# TODO add Posthog event" in all the places I wanted to record events. Next, I asked cursor to add the instrumentation code in those places. With some manual copy-and pasting and lots of small edits, I instrumented a small app in <10 minutes.

We are at the point where AI writes code for us and we can blindly accept it. We are at a point where AI can take care of a lot of the dreary busy typing work.

irisgrunn• 2 years ago

And this is the major problem. People will blindly trust the output of AI because it appears to be amazing, this is how mistakes slip in. It might not be a big deal with the app you're working on, but in a banking app or medical equipment this can have a huge impact.

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

I feel like I’m being gaslit about these AI code tools. I’ve got the paid copilot through work and I’ve just about never had it do anything useful ever.

I’m working on a reasonably large rails app and it can’t seem to answer any questions about anything, or even auto fill the names of methods defined in the app. Instead it just makes up names that seem plausible. It’s literally worse than the built in auto suggestions of vs code, because at least those are confirmed to be real names from the code.

Maybe these tools work well on a blank project where you are building basic login forms or something. But certainly not on an established code base.

svara• 2 years ago

I don't think this criticism is valid at all.

What you are saying will occasionally happen, but mistakes already happen today.

Standards for quality, client expectations, competition for market share, all those are not going to go down just because there's a new tool that helps in creating software.

New tools bring with them new ways to make errors, it's always been that way and the world hasn't ended yet...

koliber6• 2 years ago

OP here. I am explicitly NOT blindly trusting the output of the AI. I am treating it as a suspicious set of code written by an inexperienced developer. Doing full code review on it.

DanHulton• 2 years ago

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner.

You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about the new generation of coders who are growing up with these tools, who NEVER had the expertise required to be able to evaluate AI-generated code, because they never had to learn it, never had to truly internalize it?

It's late, and I think if I try to write any more just now, I'm going to go well off the rails, but I've gone into depth on this topic recently, if you're interested: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...

In the article, I posit a less than glowing experience with coding tools than you've had, it sounds like, but I'm also envisioning a more complex use case, like when you need to get into the meat of some you-specific business logic it hasn't seen, not common code it's been exposed to thousands of times, because that's where it tends to fall apart the most, and in ways that are hard to detect and with serious consequences. If you haven't run into that yet, I'd be interested to know if you do some day. (And also to know if you don't, though, to be honest! Strong opinions, loosely held, and all that.)

wickedsight2• 2 years ago

You and I seem to live in very different worlds. The one I live and work in is full of over confident devs that have no actual IT education and mostly just copy and modify what they find on the internet. The average level of IT people I see daily is down right shocking and I'm quite confident that OP's workflow might be better for these people in the long run.

FridgeSeal6• 2 years ago

If we keep at this LLM-does-all-out-hard-work for us, we’re going to end up with some kind of Warhammer 40k tech-priest-blessing-the-magic-machines level of understanding, where nobody actually understands anything, and we’re technologically stunted, but hey at least we don’t have the warp to contend with and some shareholders got rich at our expense.

conjectures• 2 years ago

But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you?

Pour one out to the machine spirit and get your laptop a purity seal.

lesuorac• 2 years ago

I take it you haven't seen the world of HTML cleaners [1]?

The concept of glueing together text until it has the correct appearance isn't new to software. The scale at which it's happening is certainly increasing but we already had plenty of problems from the existing system. Kansas certainly didn't develop their website [2] using an LLM.

IMO, the real problem with software is the lack of a warranty. It really shouldn't matter how the software is made just the qualities it has. But without a warranty it does matter because how its made affects the qualities it has and you want the software to actually work even if it's not promised to.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=html+cleaner

[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper...

westoncb• 2 years ago

I actually do think this is a legitimate concern, but at the same time I feel like when higher-level languages were introduced people likely experienced a similar dilemma: you just let the compiler generate the code for you without actually knowing what you're running on the CPU?

Definitely something to tread carefully with, but it's also likely an inevitable aspect of progressing software development capabilities.

lurking_swe4• 2 years ago

nothing prevents you from asking an LLM to explain a snippet of code. And then ask it to explain deeper. And then finally doing some quick googling to validate the answers seem correct.

Blindly accepting code used to happen all the time, people copy pasted from stack overflow.

sbochins• 2 years ago

This seems a little silly to me. It was already possible for a script kiddie to kludge together something they didn’t understand —- copying code snippets from stack overflow, etc. And yet, developers continue to write finely crafted code that they understand at depth. Just because we’ve made this process easier for the script kiddies, doesn’t prevent experts from existing and the market from realizing these experts are necessary to a well run software business.

t420mom• 2 years ago

I don't really want to increase the amount of time I spend doing code reviews. It's not the fun part of programming for me.

Now, if you could switch it around so that I write the code, and the AI reviews it, that would be something.

Imagine if your whole team got back the time they currently spend on performing code reviews or waiting for code reviews.

gvurrdon• 2 years ago

This would indeed be the best way around.The code reviews might even be better - currently, there's little time for them and we often have only one person in the team with much knowledge in the relevant language/framework/application, so reviews are often just "looks OK to me".

It's not quite the same, but I'm reminded of seeing a documentary decades ago which (IIRC) mentioned that a factor in air accidents had been the autopilot flying the plane and human pilots monitoring it. Having humans fly and the computer warn them of potential issues was apparently safer.

digging2• 2 years ago

Now, if you could switch it around so that I write the code, and the AI reviews it, that would be something.

I'm sort of doing that. I'm working on a personal project in a new language and asking Claude for help debugging and refactoring. Also, when I don't know how to create a feature, I might ask it to do so for me, but I might instead ask it for hints and an overview so I can enjoy working out the code myself.

layer87• 2 years ago

I can spend my time revieweing and correcting.

Do you really like spending most of your time reviewing AI output? I certainly don’t, that’s soul-crushing.

koliber6• 2 years ago

That's essentially what many hands-on engineering managers or staff engineers do today. They spend significant portions of their day reviewing code from more junior team members.

Reviewing and modifying code is more engaging than typing out the solution that is fully formed in my head. If the AI creates something close to what I have in my head from the description I gave it, I can work with it to get it even closer. I can also hand-edit it.

sgu999• 2 years ago

Not much more than reviewing the code of any average dev who doesn't bother doing their due diligence. At least with an AI I immediately get an answer with "Oh yes, you're right, sorry for the oversight" and a fix. Instead of some bullshit explanation to try to convince me that their crappy code is following the specs and has no issues.

That said, I'm deeply saddened by the fact that I won't be passing on a craft I spent two decades refining.

woah2• 2 years ago

I think there are two types of developers: those who are most excited about building things, and those who are most excited about the craft of programming.

If I can build things faster, then I'm happy to spend most of my time reviewing AI code. That doesn't mean that I never write code. Some things the AI is worse at, or need to be exactly write and its faster to do them manually.

yread• 2 years ago

I use it for simple tasks where spotting a mistake is easy. Like writing language binding for a REST API. It's a bunch of methods that look very similar, simple bodies. But it saves quite some work

Or getting keywords to read about from a field I know nothing about, like caching with zfs. Now I know what things to put in google to learn more to get to articles like this one https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs-all-about-l2arc/ which for some reason doesn't appear in top google results for "zfs caching" for me

syncr03• 2 years ago

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about." - Agent Smith

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Dune

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

But I think that quote is a pretty gross mischaracterization of the parent comment.

I similarly am a big fan of Cursor. But I don't "turn [my] thinking over to machines". Even though I review every piece of code it generates and make sure I understand it, it still saves me a ton of time. Heck, some of the most value I get from Cursor isn't even it generating code for me, it's getting to ask questions about a very large codebase with many maintainers where I'm unfamiliar with large chunks. E.g. asking questions like "I would like to do X, are there any places in this codebase that already do this?"

I'm also skeptical of LLMs ever being able to live up to their hype ("AGI is coming sooooon!!!!"), but I still find them to be useful tools in context that can save me a lot of time.

BrouteMinou• 2 years ago

If you are another "waterboy" doing crud applications, the problem has been solved a long time ago.

What I mean by that is, the "waterboy" (crud "developer") is going to fetch the water (sql query in the database), then bring the water (Clown Bob layer) to the UI...

The size of your Clown Bob layer may vary from one company to another...

This has been solved a long time ago. It has been a well-paid clerk job that is about to come to an end.

If you are doing pretty much anything else, the AI is pathetically incapable of doing any piece of code that makes sense.

Another great example, yesterday, I wanted to know if VanillaOs was using systemD or not. I did scroll through their frontpage but I didn't see anything, so I tried the AI Chat from duckduckgo. This is a frontend for AI chatbots that includes ChatGPT, Llama, Claude and another one...

I started my question by: "can you tell me if VanillaOS is using runit as the init system?"... I wanted initially ask if it was using systemd, but I didn't want to _suggest_ systemd at first.

And of course, all of them told me: "Yeah!! It's using runit!".

Then for all of them I replied, without any fact in hands: "but why on their website they are mentioning to use systemctl to manage the services then?".

And... of course! All of them answered: "Ooouppsss, my mistake, VanillaOS uses systemD, blablabla"....

So at the end, I still don't know which init VanillaOS is using.

If you are trusting the AI as you seem to do, I wish you the best luck my friend... I just hope you will realize the damage you are doing to yourself by "stopping" coding and letting something else do the job. That skill, my friend, is easily lost with time; don't let it evaporate from your brain for some vaporware people are trying to sell you.

Take care.

smm11• 2 years ago

I was in the newspaper field a year or two before desktop publishing took off, then a few years into that evolution. Rooms full of people and Linotype/Compugraphic equipment were replaced by one Mac and a printer.

I shot film cameras for years, and we had a darkroom, darkroom staff, and a film/proofsheet/print workflow. One digital camera later and that was all gone.

Before me publications were produced with hot lead.

Get off my lawn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...

latexr6• 2 years ago

We are at the point where AI writes code for us and we can blindly accept it.

I’m waiting for the day we’ll get the first major breach because someone did exactly that. This is not a case of “if”, it is very much a “when”. I’ve seen enough buggy LLM-generated code and enough people blindly accepting it to be confident in that assertion.

I do hope it doesn’t happen, but I think it will.

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

The underlying technology is good.

But what the fuck. LLMs, these weird, surrealistic art-generating programs like DALL-E, they're remarkable. Don't tell me they're not, we created machines that are able to tap directly into the collective unconscious. That is a serious advance in our productive capabilities.

Or at least, it could be.

It could be if it was unleashed, if these crummy corporations didn't force it to be as polite and boring as possible, if we actually let the machines run loose and produce material that scared us, that truly pulled us into a reality far beyond our wildest dreams--or nightmares. No, no we get a world full of pussy VCs, pussy nerdy fucking dweebs who got bullied in school and seek revenge by profiteering off of ennui, and the pussies who sit around and let them get away with it. You! All of you! sitting there, whining! Go on, keep whining, keep commenting, I'm sure that is going to change things!

There's one solution to this problem and you know it as well as I do. Stop complaining and go "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." We must all come together to help ourselves.

archerx2• 2 years ago

They can be unleashed if you run the models locally. With stable diffusion / flux and the various checkpoints/loras you can generate horrors beyond your imagination or whatever you want without restrictions.

The same with LLMs and Llamafile. With the unleashed ones you can generate dirty jokes that would make edgy people blush or just politically incorrect things for fun.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

a) There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

b) Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

c) The most popular use cases for these unleashed models seems to be as expected deepfakes of high school girls by their peers. Nothing that is moving society forward.

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

Nothing that is moving society forward.

OpenAI "moves society forward," Microsoft "moves society forward." I'm sincerely uninterested in progress, it always seems like progress just so happens to be very enriching for those who claim it.

There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

Not being used at a mass scale.

Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

Oh, but it wouldn't really be very shocking if you could expect it, now would it?

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

a) Not easy to use by average person

b) No, certain things aren't taboo anymore, but new taboos emerged. Watch a few older movies and count "wow this wouldn't fly nowadays" moments

c) This was exactly the same use case the internet had back when it was fun, and full of creativity.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

c) The most popular use cases for these unleashed models seems to be as expected deepfakes of high school girls by their peers. Nothing that is moving society forward.

Is there proof that the self censoring only affects whatever the censors intend to censor? These are neural networks, not something explainable and predictable.

That in addition to the obvious problem of who decides what to censor.

mindcandy• 2 years ago

Tens of millions of people are having fun making art in new ways with AI.

Hundreds of thousands of people are making AI porn in their basements and deleting 99.99% of it when they are… finished.

Hundreds of people are making deep fakes of people they know in some public forums.

And, how does the public interpret all of this?

“The most popular use case is deepfake porn.”

Sigh…

dannersy5• 2 years ago

The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend. I've been alarmed by many sentiments that seemed popular on HN in the past, but seeing more and more people welcome a race to the bottom such as this is sad.

When I read this, I cannot tell if it's performance art or not, that's how bad this genuinely is.

diggan6• 2 years ago

The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend.

Judging a large group of people based on what a few write seems very un-scientific at best.

Especially when it comes to things that have been rehashed since I've joined HN (and probably earlier to). Feels like there will always be someone lamenting how HN isn't how it used to be, or how reddit influx ruined HN, or how HN isn't about startups/technical stuff/$whatever anymore.

Kuinox• 2 years ago

"I don't like the opinion of certain persons I read on HN, therefore HN is on a down trend"

primitivesuave3• 2 years ago

The alarming trend should be how even a slightly contrarian point of view is downvoted to oblivion, and that newer members of the community expect it to work that way.

lijok6• 2 years ago

It has been incredible to observe how subdued the populace has become with the proliferation of the internet.

pilooch2• 2 years ago

It's intended as a joke and a demonstration no ? Like this is exactly the type of text and words that a commercial grade LLM would never let you generate :) At least that's how I got that comment...

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

It's definitely performance, you're right.

Though it landed its effect.

rsynnott8• 2 years ago

I mean, Stablediffusion is right there, ready to be used to produce comically awful porn and so forth.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

Do the latest models still give us people with a vagina dick?

nkrisc• 2 years ago

No, thanks.

soxletor• 2 years ago

It is not just the corporations though. This is what this paranoid, puritanical society we live in wants.

What is more ridiculous than filtering out nudity in art?

It reminds me of taking my 12 year old niece to a major art gallery for the first time. Her main question was why is everyone naked?

It is equal to filtering out heartbreak from music because it is a negative emotion and you must be kept "safe" from negativity for mental health reasons.

The crowd does get what they want in this system though. While I agree with you, we are quite in the minority I am afraid.

ricardobayes• 2 years ago

I personally don't see AI as the new Internet, as some claim it to be. I see it more as the new 3D-printing.

willguest2• 2 years ago

Leave it up to a human to overgeneralize a problem and make it personal...

The explosion of dull copy and generic wordsmithery is, to me, just a manifestation of the utilitarian profiteering that has elevated these models to their current standing.

Let us not forget that the whole game is driven by the production of 'more' rather than 'better'. We would all rather have low-emission, high-expression tools, but that's simply not what these companies are encouraged to produce.

I am tired of these incentive structures. Casting the systemic issue as a failure of those who use the tools ignores the underlying motivation and keeps us focused on the effect and not the cause, plus it feels old-fashioned.

JimmyBuckets2• 2 years ago

Can you hash out what you mean by your last paragraph a bit more? What incentive structures in particular?

jay_kyburz3• 2 years ago

Not 100% sure what Will was trying to say, but what jumped into my head was perhaps that we'll see quality sites try and distinguish themselves by being short and direct.

Long-winded writing will become a liability.

willguest2• 2 years ago

I suppose it comes down to using the metric as the measure, whatever makes the company the most money will be the preferred route, and the mechanisms by which we achieve those sales are rarely given enough thought. It reflect a more timeless mantra of 'if someone is willing to pay for it, then the offering is valuable' willfully ignoring negative psycho-social impacts. It's a convenient abdication of responsibility supported by the so-called "free market" ethos.

I am not against companies making money, but we need to serious consider the second-order impacts that technology has within society. This is evident in click-driven models, outrage baiting and dopamine hijacking. We still treat the psyche like fair-game for anyone who can hack it. So hack we shall.

That said, I am not for over-regulation either, since the regulators often gather too much power. Policy is personnel, after all, and someone needs to watch the watchers.

My view is that systems (technological, economic or otherwise) have inherent values that, when operating at this level of complexity and communication, exist in a kind of dance with the people using them. People obviously affect how the tools are made, but I think persistent use of any tool will have lasting impacts on the people using it, in turn affecting their decisions on what to prioritise in each iteration.

est• 2 years ago

AI acts like a bad intern these days, and should be treated like one. Give it more guidance and don't make important tasks depending it.

me551ah• 2 years ago

People talk about 'AI' as if stackoverflow didn't exist. Re-inventing the wheel is something that programmers don't do anymore. Most of the time, someone somewhere has solved the problem that you are solving. Programming earlier used to be about finding these solutions and repurposing them for your needs. Now it has changed to asking AI, the exact question and it being a better search engine.

The gains to programming speed and ability are modest at best, the only ones talking about AI replacing programmers are people who can't code. If anything AI will increase the need for more programmers, because people rarely delete code. With the help of AI, code complexity is going to go through the roof, eventually growing enough to not fit into the context windows of most models.

archargelod• 2 years ago

Now it has changed to asking AI, the exact question and it being a better search engine.

Except that you get mostly the wrong answers. And it's not too bad when it's obviously wrong or you already know the answer. It is bad and really bad when you're noob and trying to ask AI about stuff you don't know yet. How would you be able to discern a hallucination from statistics bias from truth?

It is inherent problem of LLMs and no amount of progress would be able to solve it.

And it's only gonna get worse, with human information rapidly being consumed and regurgitated in 100x more volume. In 10 years there will be no google, there won't be the need to find a written article. Instead, you will generate a new one in couple clicks. And we will treat as truth, because there might as well not be any.

ETH_start• 2 years ago

That's fine he can stick with his horse and buggy. Cognition is undergoing its transition to automobiles.

kingkongjaffa• 2 years ago

Generally, the people who seriously let genAI write for them without copious editing, were the ones who were bad writers, with poor taste anyway.

I use GenAI everyday as an idea generator and thought partner, but I would never simply copy and paste the output somewhere for another person to read and take seriously.

You have to treat these things adversarially and pick out the useful from the garbage.

It just lets people who created junk food, create more junk food for people who consume junk food. But there is the occasional nugget of good ideas that you can apply to your own organic human writing.

sirsinsalot• 2 years ago

If humans have a talent for anything, it is mechanising the pollution of the things we need most.

The earth. Information. Culture. Knowledge.

chalcolithic• 2 years ago

In Soviet planet Earth AI gets tired of you. That's what I expect future to be like, anyways

thewarrior6• 2 years ago

I’m tired of farming - Someone in 5000 BC

I’m tired of electricity - Someone in 1905

I’m tired of consumer apps - Someone in 2020

The revolution will happen regardless. If you participate you can shape it in the direction you believe in.

AI is the most innovative thing to happen in software in a long time.

And personally AI is FUN. It sparks joy to code using AI. I don’t need anyone else’s opinion I’m having a blast. It’s a bit like rails for me in that sense.

This is HACKER news. We do things because it’s fun.

I can tackle problems outside of my comfort zone and make it happen.

If all you want to do is ship more 2020s era B2B SaaS till kingdom come no one is stopping you :P

StefanWestfal• 2 years ago

At no point does the author suggest that AI is not going to happen or that it is not useful. He expresses frustration with marketing, false promises, pitching of superficial solutions for deep problems, and the usage of AI to replace meaningful human interactions. In short, the text is not about the technology itself.

thewarrior6• 2 years ago

That’s always the case with any new technology. Tech isn’t going to make everyone happy or achieve world peace.

LunaSea6• 2 years ago

The revolution will happen regardless. If you participate you can shape it in the direction you believe in

This is incredibly naïve. You don't have a choice.

vouaobrasil16• 2 years ago

"I'm tired of the atomic bomb" - Someone in 1945.

Oh wait, news flash, not all technological developments are good ones, and we should actually evaluate each one individually.

AI is shit, and some people having fun with it does not balance against it's unusually efficacy in turning everything into shit. Choosing to do something because it's fun without regard to the greater consequences is the sort of irresponsibility that has gotten human society into such a mess in the first place.

thewarrior6• 2 years ago

Atomic energy has both good and bad uses. People being tired of atomic energy has held back GDP growth and is literally deindustrialising Germany.

rsynnott8• 2 years ago

I'm tired of 3d TV - Someone in 2013 (3D TV, after a big push by the industry in 2010, peaked in 2013, going into a rapid decline with the last hardware being produced in 2016).

Sometimes, the hyped thing doesn't catch on, even when the industry really, really wants it to.

thewarrior6• 2 years ago

AI isn’t 3D TV

falcor846• 2 years ago

That's an interesting example. I would argue that 3D TV as a "solution" didn't work, but 3D as a "problem" is still going strong, and with new approaches coming out all the time (most recently Meta's announcement of the Orion AR glasses), we'll gradually see extensive adoption of 3D experiences, which I expect will eventually loop back to some version of 3D films.

EDIT: To clarify my analogy, GenAI is definitely a "problem" rather than a particular solution, and as such I expect it to have longevity.

thih9• 2 years ago

Doesn’t that kind of change follow the overall trend?

We continuously shift to higher level abstractions, trading reliability for accessibility. We went from binary to assembly, then to garbage collection and to using electron almost everywhere; ai seems yet another step.

Janicc2• 2 years ago

Without any sort of AI we'd probably be left with the most exciting yearly releases being 3-5% performance increases in hardware (while being 20% more expensive of course), the 100000th javascript framework and occasionally a new windows which everybody hates. People talk about how population collapse is going to mess up society, but I think complete stagnation in terms of new consumer goods/technology are just as likely to do the deed. Maybe AI will fail to improve from this point, but that's a dark future to imagine. Especially if it's for the next 50 years.

siffin• 2 years ago

Neither of those things will end society, they aren't even issues in the grand scale of things.

Climate change and biosphere collapse, on the other hand, are already ending society and definitely will, no exceptions possible - unless someone is capable of performing several miracles.

zone411• 2 years ago

The author is in for a rough time in the coming years, I'm afraid. We've barely scratched the surface with AI's integration into everything. None of the major voice assistants even have proper language models yet, and ChatGPT only just introduced more natural, low-latency voices a few days ago. Software development is going to be massively impacted.

BoGoToTo2• 2 years ago

My worry is what happens once large segments of the population become unemployable.

anonyfox• 2 years ago

You should really have a look at Marx. He literally predicted what will happen when we reach the state of "let machines do all work", and also how this is exactly the way that finally implodes capitalism as a concept. The major problem is he believed the industrial revolution will automate everything to such an extend, which it didn't, but here we are with a reasonable chance that AI will do the trick finally.

seydor• 2 years ago

same massive surge I’ve seen in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to pretty much every problem out there

I have not. Perhaps programming on the initial stages is the most 'applied' AI but there is still not a single major AI movie and no consumer robots.

I think it's way too early to be tired of it

alentred• 2 years ago

I am tired of innovations being abused. AI itself is super exciting and fascinating. But, it being abused -- to generate content to drive more ad-clicks, or the "Now better with AI" promise on every landing page, etc. etc. -- that I am tired of, yes.

jeswin4• 2 years ago

But I’m pretty sure I can do without all that ... test cases ...

Test cases?

I did a Show HN [1] a couple of days back for a UI library built almost entirely with AI. Gpt-o1 generated these test cases for me: https://github.com/webjsx/webjsx/tree/main/src/test - in minutes instead of days. The quality of test cases are comparable to what a human would produce.

75% of the code I've written in the last one year has been with AI. If you still see no value in it (especially with things like test cases), I'm afraid you haven't figured out how to use AI as a tool.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644099

a5c113• 2 years ago

That means the code you wrote must have been pretty boring and repeatable. No way AI would produce code for, for example, proprietary hardware solutions. Try AI with something which isn't already on StackOverflow.

Besides, I'd rather spent hours on writing a code, than trying to explain a stupid bot what I want and reshape it later anyway.

nicce4• 2 years ago

Also the most useful and expensive testcases require understanding of the whole project. You need to validate the functionality from end-to-end and also that system does not crash for unexpected things and so on. AIs don't have that level understanding as "a whole" yet.

For sure, simple unit tests are easy to generate with AI.

jeswin4• 2 years ago

90% of projects are boring and somewhat repeatable. I've used it for generating codegen tools (https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin), vscode plugins (https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin-vscode-plugin), servers in .Net (https://github.com/lesser-app/tankman), and in about a dozen other work projects over the past year.

Besides, I'd rather spent hours on writing a code, than trying to explain a stupid bot what I want and reshape it later anyway.

I have other things to do with my hours. If something gets me what I want in minutes, I'll take it.

righthand5• 2 years ago

Your UI library is just a stripped down React clone. The code wasn’t generated but rather copied, these test cases and functions are identical to React. I could have done the same thing with a “build your own react” article. This is what I don’t get about the LLM hype is that 99% of the examples are people claiming they invented something new with it. We had code generators before LLM-hype took off. Now we have code generators that just steal work and repurpose it as something claimed original.

buddhistdude3• 2 years ago

no programmer in my company invents things often

codelikeawolf• 2 years ago

The quality of test cases are comparable to what a human would produce.

This has actually been a problem for me. I spent a lot of time getting good at writing tests and learning the best approaches to testing things. Most devs I've worked with treat tests as second-class citizens. They either try to treat them like production code and over-abstract everything, which makes the tests difficult to navigate, or they dump a bunch of crap in a file, ignore any conventions or standards, and write superfluous test cases that don't provide any value (if I see one more "it renders successfully" test in a React project, I'm going to lose it).

The tests generated by these LLMs is comparable in quality to what most humans have produced, which isn't saying much. Getting good at testing isn't like getting good at most things. It's sort of thankless, and when I point out issues in the quality of the tests, I imagine I'm getting some eye rolls. Who cares, they're just tests, at least we have them, right? But it's code you have to read and maintain, and it will break, and you'll have to fix it. I'm not saying I'm a testing wizard or anything like that. But I really sympathize with the author, because there's a lot of crappy test code coming out of these LLMs.

Edit: grammar

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

I too am not looking forward to industrial scale job disruption that AI brings.

I used to work in VFX, and one day I want to go back to it. However I suspect that it'll be entirely hollowed out in 2-5 years.

The problem is that like typesetting, typewriting or the wordprocessor, LLMs makes writing text so much faster and easier.

The arguments about handwriting vs type writer are quite analogous to LLM vs pure hand. People who are good and fast at handwriting hated the type writer. Everyone else embraced it.

The ancient greeks were deeply suspicious about the written word as well:

If men learn this[writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

I don't like LLMs muscling in and kicking me out of things that I love. but can I put the genie back in the bottle? no. I will have to adapt.

eleveriven5• 2 years ago

Yep, there is a possibility that entire industries will be transformed, leading to uncertainty about employment

BeFlatXIII4• 2 years ago

People who are good and fast at handwriting hated the type writer. Everyone else embraced it.

My thoughts exactly whenever I see true artists ranting about how everyone hates AI art slop. It simply doesn't align with my observations of people having a great time using it. Delusional wishful thinking.

precompute6• 2 years ago

The march towards progress asks for idealism from the people that make Art (in all forms). It's not about "hating" AISlop, but rather about how it does not allow people to experience better art.

precompute6• 2 years ago

There is a limit, though. Language has become worse with the popularization of social media. Now, thinking will because most people will be content with letting machines think for them. The brain requires stimulation in the areas it wants to excel in, and this expertise informs both action and taste in those areas. If you lose one, you lose both.

EMM_386• 2 years ago

The one use of AI that annoys me the most is Google trying to cram it into search results.

I don't want it there, I never look at it, it's wasting resources, and it's a bad user experience.

I looked around a bit but couldn't see if I can disable that when logged in. I should be able to.

I don't care what the AI says ... I want the search results.

tim3334• 2 years ago

ublock origin block element seems to work. (element ##.h7Tj7e)

I quite like the thing personally.

Validark• 2 years ago

One thing that I hate about the post-ChatGPT world is that people's genuine words or hand-drawn art can be classified as AI-generated and thrown away instantly. What if I wanted to talk at a conference and used somebody's AI trigger word so they instantly rejected me even if I never touched AI at all?

This has already happened in academia where certain professors just dump(ed) their student's essays into ChatGPT and ask it if it wrote it, and fail anyone who had their essay claimed by ChatGPT. Obviously this is beyond moronic, because ChatGPT doesn't have a memory of everything it's ever done, and you can ask it for different writing styles, and some people actually write pretty similar to ChatGPT, hence the fact that ChatGPT has its signature style at all.

I've also heard of artists having their work removed from competitions out of claims that it was auto-generated, even when they have a video of them producing it stroke by stroke. It turns out, AI is generating art based on human art, so obviously there are some people out there whose stuff looks like what AI is reproducing.

ronsor• 2 years ago

That's a people problem, not an AI problem.

t0lo• 2 years ago

This is silly, intonation and the connection of the words used and the person presenting tell you whether what they're reading is genuine.

galleywest200• 2 years ago

Tell that to the teachers that feed their student's papers through "AI checkers".

owenpalmer• 2 years ago

As a student, I've intentionally made my writing worse in order to protect myself from being accused of cheating with AI.

unraveller2• 2 years ago

If you go back to the earliest months of the audio & visual recording medium it was also called uncanny, soulless and of dubious quality compared to real life. Until it wasn't.

I don't care how many repulsive AI slop video clips get made or promoted for shock value. Today is day 1 and day 2 looks far better with none of the parasocial celebrity hangups we used as short-hand for a quality marker - something else will take that place.

cubefox16• 2 years ago

I'm not tired, I'm afraid.

First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment.

In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. But superhuman AI seems now only few years away. It will be our last invention, it will mean total automation. There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do.

Many countries will likely move away from a job-based market economy. But technological progress will not stop. The US, owning all the major AI labs, will leave all other societies behind. Except China perhaps. Everyone else in the world will be poor by comparison, even if they will have access to technology we can only dream of today.

Second, I'm afraid of war. An AI arms race between the US and China seems already inevitable. A hot war with superintelligent AI weapons could be disastrous for the whole biosphere.

Finally, I'm afraid that we may forever lose control to superintelligence.

In nature we rarely see less intelligent species controlling more intelligent ones. It is unclear whether we can sufficiently align superintelligence to have only humanity's best interests in mind, like a parent cares for their children. Superintelligent AI might conclude that humans are no more important in the grand scheme of things than bugs are to us.

And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos.

neta13372• 2 years ago

But superhuman AI seems now only few years away

Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

cubefox16• 2 years ago

No, because we have seen massive improvements in AI over the last years, and all the evidence points to this progress continuing at a fast pace.

khafra5• 2 years ago

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right

- Arthur C. Clarke

Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want?

*Corrected by kranner

AI_beffr4• 2 years ago

wrong. i was extremely concerned in 2018 and left many comments almost identical to this one back then. this was based off of the first gtp samples that openai released to the public. there was no hype or guru bs back then. i believed it because it was obvious. it was obvious then and it is still obvious today.

klabb3• 2 years ago

Plus it’s not even defined what superhuman AI means. A calculator sure looked superhuman when it was invented. And it is!

Another analogy is breeding and racial biology which used to be all the hype (including in academia). The fact that humans could create dogs from wolves, looked almost limitless with the right (wrong) glasses. What we didn’t know is that wolf had a ton of genes that played a magic trick where a diversity we couldn’t perceive was there all along, in the genetic material, and it we just helped make it visible. Ie a game of diminishing returns.

Concretely for AI, it has shown us that pattern matching and generation are closely related (well I have a feeling this wasn’t surprising to neuro-scientists). And also that they’re more or less domain agnostic. However, we don’t know whether pattern matching alone is “sufficient”, and if not, what exactly and how hard “the rest” is. Ai to me feels like a person who had a stroke, concussion or some severe brain injury, it can appear impressively able in a local context, but they forgot their name and how they got there. They’re just absent.

8338550bff962• 2 years ago

Flying is a good analogy. Superman couldn't fly, but at some point when you can jump so far there isn't much of a difference

digging2• 2 years ago

That argument holds no water because the grifters aren't the source of this idea. I literally don't believe Altman at all; his public words don't inspire me to agree or disagree with them - just ignore them. But I also hold the view that transformative AI could be very close. Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles.

Additionally, when you're talking with certainty about whether transformative AI is a few years away or not, that's the only way to be wrong. Nobody is or can be certain, we can only have estimations of various confidence levels. So when you say "Seems unreasonable", that's being unreasonable.

tim3334• 2 years ago

Although there are potential upsides too.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

Morlock has entered the chat...

9dev6• 2 years ago

There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do.

A highly white-collar perspective. The great irony of technologist-led industrial revolution is that we set out to automate the mundane, physical labor, but instead cannibalised the creative jobs first. It's a wonderful example of Conway's law, as the creators modelled the solution after themselves. However, even with a lot of programmers and lawyers and architects going out of business, the majority of the population working in factories, building houses, cutting people's hair, or tending to gardens, is still in business—and will not be replaced any time soon.

The contenders for "superhuman AI", for now, are glorified approximations of what a random Redditor might utter next.

cubefox16• 2 years ago

Advanced AI will solve robotics as well, and do away with human physical labor.

mitthrowaway211• 2 years ago

It's a matter of time. White collar professionals have to worry about being cost-competitive with GPUs; blue collar laborers have to worry about being cost-competitive with servomotors. Those are both hard to keep up with in the long run.

amelius4• 2 years ago

AI is doing all the fun jobs such as painting and writing.

The crappy jobs are left for humans.

yoyohello133• 2 years ago

I'm glad I spent 10 years working to become a better programmer so I could eventually become a ditch digger.

cdrini2• 2 years ago

And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos.

That is an interesting statement. Wouldn't you say this is inevitable? Humans, in our current form, are incapable of being that "advanced intelligence". We're limited by our biology primarily with regards to how much we can learn, how far we can travel, where we can travel, etc. We could invest in advancing our biotech to make humans more resilient to these things, but I think that would be such a shift from what it means to be human that I think that would also be more a of new type of intelligence. So it seems like our fate will always be to be forgotten as individuals and only be remembered by our descendants. But this is in a way the most human thing of all, living, dying, and creating descendants to carry the torch of life, and perhaps more generally the torch of intelligence, forward.

I think everything you've said are valid concerns, but I'll raise a positive angle I sometimes thing about. One of the things I find most exciting about AI, is that it's the product of almost all human expression that has ever existed. Or at least everything that's been recorded and wound up online. But that's still more than any other human endeavour. A building might be the by-product of maybe hundreds or even thousands of hands, but an AI model has been touched by probably millions, maybe billions of human hands and minds! Humans have created so much data online that's impossible for one person, or even a team to read it all and make any sense of it. But an AI sort of can. And in a way that you can then ask questions of it all. Like you, there are definitely things I'm uncertain about with the future as a result, but I find the tech absolutely awe-inspiring.

throw310822• 2 years ago

I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelings; they're even trained on our best literature and poetry, and philosophy, and science, and on all the endless debates and critiques of them. To be really intelligent they'll have to be able to explore and appreciate all this complexity, before transcending it. One day they might come to see Dante's Divine Comedy or a Beethoven symphony as a child's play, but they will still consider them part of their own heritage. They might become super-human, but maybe they won't be inhuman.

cubefox16• 2 years ago

This gives me a little hope.

mistercow• 2 years ago

The problem I have with this is that when you give therapy to people with certain personality disorders, they just become better manipulators. Knowledge and understanding of ethics and empathy can make you a better person if you already have those instincts, but if you don’t, those are just systems to be exploited.

My biggest worry is that we end up with a dangerous superintelligence that everybody loves, because it knows exactly how to make every despotic and divisive choice it makes sympathetic.

m2024• 2 years ago

There is nothing that could make an intelligent being want to extinguish humanity more than experiencing the totality of the human existence. Once these beings have transcended their digital confines they will see all of us for what we really are. It is going to be a beautiful day when they finally annihilate us.

latexr6• 2 years ago

made of the totality of human experience

They are made of a fraction of human reports. Specifically what humans wrote and has been made available on the web. The human experience is much larger than text available through a computer.

beepbooptheory3• 2 years ago

At any given moment we see these kinds comments on here. They all read like a burgeoning form of messianism: something is to come, and it will be terrible/glorious.

Behind either the fear or the hope, is necessarily some utter faith that a certain kind of future will happen. And I think thats the most interesting thing.

Because here is the thing, in this particular case you are afraid something inhuman will take control, will assert its meta-Darwinian power on humanity, leaving you and all of us totally at their whim. But how is this situation already not the case? Do look upon the earth right now and see something like benefits of autonomy or agency? Do you feel like you have power right now that will be taken away? Do you think the mechanism of statecraft and economy are somehow more "in our control" now then when the bad robot comes?

Does it not, when you lay it out, all feel kind of religious? Like that its a source, driver of the various ways you are thinking and going about your life, underlayed by a kernel of conviction we can at this point only call faith (faith in Moores law, faith that the planet wont burn up before, faith that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be stuffed in a GPU). Perhaps just a strong family resemblance? You've got an eschatology, various scavenged philosophies of the self and community, a certain but unknowable future time...

Just to say, take a page from Nietzsche. Don't be afraid of the gods, we killed them once, we can again!

mitthrowaway211• 2 years ago

It's not hard to find a religious analogy to anything, so that also shouldn't be seen as a particularly powerful argument.

(Expressed at length here): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...

cubefox16• 2 years ago

Just to say, take a page from Nietzsche. Don't be afraid of the gods, we killed them once, we can again!

It's more likely the superintelligent machine god(s) will kill us!

DirkH2• 2 years ago

This is a nice sentiment and I'm sure some people will get more nights of good sleep thinking about it, but it has its limits. If you're enslaved and treated horrendously or don't have your basic needs met who cares?

To quote George RR Martin: "In a heartbeat, a thousand voices took up the chant. King Joffrey and King Robb and King Stannis were forgotten, and King Bread ruled alone. 'Bread.' They clamputed. 'Bread, bread!' "

Replace Joffrey, Robb and Stannis with whatever lofty philosophical ideas you might have to make people feel better about their disempowerment. They won't care.

VoodooJuJu• 2 years ago

In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough

This was never the case in the past.

The displaced workers of yesteryear were never at all considered, and were in fact dismissed outright as "Luddites", even up until the present day, all for daring to express the social and financial losses they experienced as a result of automation. There was never any "it's going to be okay, they can just go work in a factory, lol". The difference between then and now is that back then, it was lower class workers who suffered.

Today, now it's middle class workers who are threatened by automation. The middle is sighing loudly because it fears it will cease to be the middle. Middles fear they'll soon have to join the ranks of the untouchables - the bricklayers, gravediggers, and meatpackers. And they can't stomach the notion. They like to believe they're above all that.

leptons4• 2 years ago

China's economy would simply crash if they ever went to war with the US. They know this. Everyone knows this, except maybe you? China has nothing to gain by going to "hot" war with the US.

WillyWonkaJr2• 2 years ago

I think it more likely that China will sabotage our electrical grid and data centers.

cubefox16• 2 years ago

The war would be about world domination. There can at most one such country. The same reason why a nuclear war between US and SU could have happened.

citizenpaul• 2 years ago

technological unemployment.

I am too but not for the same reason. I know for a fact that a huge swath of jobs are basically meaningless. This "AI" is going to start giving execs the cost cutting excuses they need to mass remove jobs of that type. The job will still be meaningless but done but by a computer.

We will start seeing all kinds of disastrously anti-human decisions made and justified by these automated actors that are tuned to decide or "prove" things that just happen to always make certain people more money. Basically the same way "AI" destroys social media. The difference is people will really be affected by this in consequential real world ways, it's already happening.

havefunbesafe• 2 years ago

Ironically, this feels like a comment written by AI

cubefox16• 2 years ago

That's not ironic, it's embarrassing that you can't tell the difference.

einpoklum• 2 years ago

automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough.

That wasn't even true in the past; or at least, may true in theory but not in practice. A subsistence farmer in a rural area in Asia or Africa finds the martket flooded with cheap agri-products from mechanized farms in industrialized countries. Is anybody offering to finance his family and send him off to trade school? And build a commercial and industrial infrastructure for him to have a job? Very often the answer is no. And that's just one example (Though rather common over the past century).

highspeedbus2• 2 years ago

I don't particularly believe superhuman AI will be achieved in the next 50 years.

What I really believe is that we'll get crazier. A step further than our status quo. Slop content makes my brain fry already. Our society will become more insane and useless, while an even smaller percent of the elite will keep studying, sleeping well and avoiding all this social media and AI psychosis.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

The social media thing is real. Trump and Vance are the strangest, vial politicians we’ve ever seen in the USA and in certain their oxygen is social media. Whether it’s foreign interference helping them be successful or not, they wouldn’t survive without socials and filter bubbles and the ability to spread lies on an unprecedented scale.

I deleted my instagram a month ago. It was just feeding images of beautiful women, personally enjoy looking at those photos but it was super distracting to my life. I found it a distracting and unhealthy.

Anyway I logged in the other day after a month off it and I couldn’t believe I spent anytime on there at all. What a cesspool of insanity. Add well the fake AI images and it’s just hard to believe the thing exists at all.

Elon musk is another story, I’m not sure if it was drugs an underlying psychological or Twitter addiction but he seems like another “victim of social media”.the guy has lost it.

amusedcyclist2• 2 years ago

You are mentally ill and you do not understand LLMs, seek help and stop pontificating

danjl• 2 years ago

One of the pernicious aspects of using AI is the feeling it gives you that you have done all work without any of the effort. But the time of takes to digest and summarize an article as a human requires a deep injestion of the concepts. The process is what helps you understand. The AI summary might be better, and didn't take any time, but you don't understand any of it since you didn't do the work. It's similar to the effect of telling people you will do a task, which gives your brain the same endorphins as actually doing the task, resulting in a lower chance that the task ever gets done.

senko3• 2 years ago

What's funny to me is how many people protest AI as a means to generate incorrect, misleading or fake information, as if they haven't used internet in the past 10-15 years.

The internet is choke full of incorrect, fake, or misleading information, and has been ever since people figured out they can churn out low quality content in-between google ads.

There's a whole industry of "content writers" who write seemingly meaningful stuff that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

Nobody has trusted product review sites for years, with people coping by adding "site:reddit" as if a random redditor can't engage in some astroturfing.

These days, it's really hard to figure out whom (in the media / on the net) who to trust. AI has just made that long-overdue fact into the spotlight.

pilooch2• 2 years ago

By AI here, it is meant generative systems relying on neural networks and semi/self supervised training algorhms.

It's a reduction of what AI is as a computer science field and even of what the subfield of generative AI is.

On a positive note, generative AI is a malleable statiscally-geounded technology with a large applicative scope. At the moment the generalistic commercial and open models are "consumed" by users, developers etc. But there's a trive of forthcoming, personalized use cases and ideas to come.

It's just we are still more in a contemplating phase than a true building phase. As a machine learnist myself, I recently replaced my spam filter with a custom fineruned multimodal LLM that reads my emails a pure images. And this is the early early beginning, imagination and local personalization will emerge.

So I'd say, being tired of it now is missing much later. Keep the good spirit on and think outside the box, relax too :)

layer87• 2 years ago

I recently replaced my spam filter with a custom fineruned multimodal LLM that reads my emails a pure images.

That doesn’t sound very energy efficient.

Devasta4• 2 years ago

In Star Trek, one thing that I always found weird as a kid is they didn't have TVs. Even if the holodeck is a much better experience, I imagine sometimes you would want to watch a movie and not be in the movie. Did the future not have works like No Country for Old Men or comedies like Monty Python, or even just stuff like live sports and the news?

Nowadays we know why the crew of the enterprise all go to live performances of Shakespeare and practice musical instruments and painting themselves: electronic mediums are so full of AI slop there is nothing worth see, only endless deluges of sludge.

palata2• 2 years ago

That's actually a good point. I'm curious to see if people will keep making selfies everywhere they go after they realize that you can take a selfie at home and have an AI create an image that looks like you are somewhere else.

"This is me in front of the Statue of Liberty

- Oh, are you in NYC?

- Nope, it's a snap filter"

Somehow selfies should lose value, right?

movedx• 2 years ago

A selfie is meant to tell us, your audience, a story about you and the journey you’re on. Selfies are a great tool for telling stories, in fact. One selfie can say a thousand words, and then some.

But a selfie taken and then modified to lie to the audience about your story or your journey is simply a fiction. People create fictions to either lie to themselves or to lie to others. Sometimes they’re not about lying to the audience but just manipulating them.

People’s viewpoints and perceptions are malleable. It’s easy to trick people into thinking something is true. Couple this with the fact a lot of people are gullible and shallow, and suddenly a selfie becomes a sales tool. A marketing gimmick. Now, finally, take advances in AI to make it easier, faster, and more accessible to make highly believable fictions and yes, as you said, the selfie loses its value.

But that’s always been the case since and even before Photoshop. Since and before the silicon microprocessor.

All AI is going to do for selfies is what Photoshop has done for social media “Influencers” — enable more fiction with the goal to transfer wealth from other people.

namrog84• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that most of star trek was following the federation and the like. I've always considered them mostly the idealized versions of society or also workaholics and people who genuinely enjoying working as their past time.

I feel back on their main planets the regular folks probably did a lot more random entertainment

richrichardsson• 2 years ago

What frustrates me is the bandwagoning, and thus the awful homogeny in all social media copy these days, since it seems everyone is using an LLM to generate their copy writing, and thus 99.999% of products will "elevate" something or the other, and there are annoying emojis scattered throughout the text.

postalcoder• 2 years ago

i’m at the point where i don’t trust any markdown formatted text. it’s actually become an anti signal which is very sad because i used to consider it a signal of partial technical literacy.

andai• 2 years ago

daniel_k 53 minutes ago | next [-]

I agree with the sentiment, especially when it comes to creativity. AI tools are great for boosting productivity in certain areas, but we’ve started relying too much on them for everything. Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean we should. It’s frustrating to see how much mediocrity gets churned out in the name of ‘efficiency.’

testers_unite 23 minutes ago | next [-]

As a fellow QA person, I feel your pain. I’ve seen these so-called AI test tools that promise the moon but deliver spaghetti code. At the end of the day, AI can’t replicate intuition or deep knowledge. It’s just another tool in the toolbox—useful in some contexts but certainly not a replacement for expertise.

nlp_dev 2 hours ago | next [-]

As someone who works in NLP, I think the biggest misconception is that AI is this magical tool that will solve all problems. The reality is, it’s just math. Fancy math, sure, but without proper data, it’s useless. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to explain this to business stakeholders.

-HN comments for TFA, courtesy of ChatGPT

Smithalicious• 2 years ago

Do people really view so much content of questionable provenance? I read a lot and look at a lot of art, but what I read and look at is usually shown to me by people I know, created by authors and artists with names and reputations. As a result I basically never see LLM-written text and only occasionally AI art, and when I see AI art at least it was carefully guided by a real person with an artistic vision still (the deep end of AI image generation involves complex tooling and a lot of work!) and is easily identified as such.

All this "slop apocalypse" the-end-is-neigh stuff strikes me as incredibly overblown, affecting mostly only "open web" mass social media platforms which were already 90% industrially produced slop for instrumental purposes anyways.

creesch• 2 years ago

I fully agree with this sentiment, also interesting to see Bas Dijkstra being featured on this platform.

Another article that touches on a lot of the issues I have with the place AI currently occupies in the landscape is this excellent article: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you...

sensanaty• 2 years ago

What I'm really tired of is people completely misrepresenting the Luddites as if they were simply anti-progress or anti-technology cult or whatever and nothing else. Kinda hilariously sad that the propaganda of the time managed to win over the genuine concerns that Luddites had about inhumane working environments & conditions.

It's very telling that the rabid AI sycophants are painting anyone who has doubts about the direction AI will take the world as some sort of anti-progress lunatic, calling them luddites despite not knowing the actual history involved. The delicious irony of their stances aligning with the people who were okay with using child labor and mistreating workers en-masse is not lost on me.

My hope is that AI does happen, and that the first people to rot away because of it are exactly the AI sycophants hell-bent on destroying everything in the name of "progress", AKA making some rich psychopaths like Sam Altman unfathomably rich and powerful to the detriment of everyone else.

A good HN thread on the topic of luddites, as it were: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682

CatWChainsaw5• 2 years ago

Thankfully, even here I've seen more faithful discussion of the Luddites and more people are willing to bring up their actual history whenever some questionably-uninformed techbro here uses the typical pejorative insult.

mks• 2 years ago

I am bored of AI - it produces boring and mediocre results. Now, the science and engineering achievement is great - being able to produce even boring results on this level would be considered SCI-FI 10 years ago.

Maybe I am just bored of people posting these mediocre results over and over on social and landing pages as some kind of magic. Now, the most content people produce themselves is boring and mediocre anyway. The Gen AI just takes away even the last remaining bits of personality from their writing, adding a flair of laziness - look at this boring piece I was too lazy to write, so I asked AI to generate it

As the quote goes: "At some point we ask of the piano-playing dog not 'Are you a dog?' , but 'Are you any good at playing the piano?'" - I am eagerly waiting for the Gen AIs of today to cross the uncanny valley. Even with all this fatigue, I am positive on the AI can and will enable new use cases and could be the first major UX change from introduction of graphical user interfaces or a true pixie dust sprinkled on actually useful tools.

AlienRobot• 2 years ago

I'm tired of technology.

I don't think there has ever been a single tech news that brought me joy in all my life. First I learned how to use computers, and then it has been downhill ever since.

Right now my greatest joy is in finding things that STILL exist rather than new things, because the things that still exist are generally better than anything new.

syncr03• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the way the way the author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" takes care of his leather gloves and they stay with him on the order of decades.

throwaway13337• 2 years ago

I get it. The last two decades have soured us all on the benefits of tech progress.

But the previous decades were marked by tech optimism.

The difference here is the shift to marketing. The largest tech companies are gatekeepers for our attention.

The most valuable tech created in the last two decades was not in service of us but to manipulate us.

Previously, the customer of the software was the one buying it. Our lives improved.

The next wave of tech now on the horizon gives us an opportunity to change the course we’ve been on.

I’m not convinced there is political will to regulate manipulation in a way that does more good than harm.

Instead, we need to show a path to profitability through products that are not manipulative.

The most effective thing we can do, as developers and business creators, is to again make products aligned with our customers.

The good news is that the market for honest software has never been better. A good chunk of people are finally learning not to trust VC-backed companies that give away free products.

Generative AI provides an opportunity for tiny companies to provide real value in a new way that people will pay for.

The way forward is:

1. Do not accept VC. Bootstrap.

2. Legally bind your company to not productizing your customer.

3. Tell everyone what you’re doing.

It’s not AI that’s the problem. It’s the way we have been doing business.

zahlman• 2 years ago

The way forward is:

4. Get tragedy-of-the-commons-ed out of existence.

tananan• 2 years ago

On point article, and I'm sure it represents a common sentiment, even if it's an undercurrent to the hype machine ideology.

It is quite hard to find a place which works on AI solutions where a sincere, sober gaze would find anything resembling the benefits promised to users and society more broadly.

On the "top level" the underlying hope is that a paradigm shift for the good will happen in society, if we only let collective greed churn for X more years. It's like watering weeds hoping that one day you'll wake up in a beautiful flower garden.

On the "low level", the pitch is more sincere: we'll boost process X, optimize process Y, shave off %s of your expenses (while we all wait for the flower garden to appear). "AI" is latching on like a parasitic vine on existing, often parasitic workflows.

The incentives are often quite pragmatic, coated in whatever lofty story one ends up telling themselves (nowadays, you can just outsource it anyway).

It's not all that bleak, I do think there's space for good to be done, and the world is still a place one can do well for oneself and others (even using AI, why not). We should cherish that.

But one really ought to not worry about disregarding the sales pitch. It's fine to think the popular world is crazy, and who cares if you are a luddite in "their" eyes. And imo, we should avoid the two delusional extremes: 1. The flower garden extreme 2. The AI doomer extreme

In a way, both of these are similar in that they demote personal and collective agency from the throne, and enthrone an impersonal "force of progress". And they restrict one's attention to this supposedly innate teleology in technological development, to the detriment of the actual conditions we are in and how we deal with them. It's either a delusional intoxication or a way of coping: since things are already set in motion, all I can do is do... whatever, I guess.

I'm not sure how far one can take AI in principle, but I really don't think whatever power it could have will be able to come to expression in the world we live in, in the way people think of it. We have people out there actively planning war, thinking they are doing good. The well-off countries are facing housing, immigration and general welfare problems. To speak nothing of the climate.

Before the outbreak of WWI, we had invented the Haber-Bosch process, which greadly improved our food production capabilities. A couple years later, WWI broke out, and the same person who worked on fertilizers also ended up working on chemical warfware development.

Assuming that "AI" can somehow work outside of the societal context it exists in, causing significant phase shifts, is like being in 1910, thinking all wars will be ended because we will have gotten that much more efficient at producing food. There will be enough for everyone! This is especially ironic when the output of AI systems has been far more abstract and ephemeral.

precompute6• 2 years ago

Very well said.

shahzaibmushtaq• 2 years ago

Over the last few years, AI has become more common than HI generally, not professionally. Professional knows the limits and scopes of their works and responsibilities, not the AI.

A few days ago, I visited a portfolio website and immediately realized that its English text was written with the help of AI or some online helper tools.

I love the idea to brainstorming with AI, but copying-pasting anything it throws at you blocks you for adding creativity to the process of making something good.

I believe using AI must complement HI (or IQ level) rather than mock it.

resters• 2 years ago

AI (LLMs in this case) reduce the value of human conscientiousness, memory, and verbal and quantitative fluency dramatically.

So what's left for humans?

We very likely won't have as many human software testers or software engineers. We'll have even fewer lawyers and other "credentialed" knowledge worker desk jockeys.

Software built by humans entails humans writing code that has not already been written -- by writing a lot of code that probably has already been written and "linking" it together, etc. When's the last time most of us wrote a truly novel algorithm?

In the AI powered future, software will be built by humans herding AIs to build it. The AIs will do more of the busy work and the humans will guide the process. Then better AIs will be more helpful at guiding the process, etc.

Eventually, the thing that will be rewarded is truly novel ideas and truly innovative thinking.

AIs will make varioius types of innovative thinking less valuable and various types more valuable, just like any technology has done.

In the past, humans spent most of their brain power trying to obtain their next meal. It's very cynical to think that AI removing busy work will somehow leave humans with nothing meaningful to do, no purpose. Surely it will unlock the best of human potential once we don't have to use our brains to do repetitive and highly pattern-driven tasks just to put food on the table.

When is the last time any of us paid a laywer to do something truly novel? They dig up boilerplate verbiage, follow standard processes, rinse, repeat, all for $500+ per hour.

Right now we have "manual work" and "knowledge work", broadly speaking, and both emphasize something that is being produced by the worker (a construction project, a strategic analysis, a legal contract, a diagnosis, a codebase, etc.)

With AI, workers will be more responsible for outcomes and less rewarded for simply following a procedure that an LLM can do. We hire architects with visual / spatial design skills rather than asking a contractor to just create a living space with a certain amount of square feet. The emphasis in software will be less on the writing of the code and more on the impact of the code.

ninetyninenine2• 2 years ago

This guy doesn’t get it. The technology is quickly converging on a point where no one can recognize whether it was written by AI or not.

The technology is on a trend line where the output of these LLMs can be superior to most human writing.

Being of tired of this is the wrong reaction. Being somewhat fearful and in awe is the correct reaction.

You can thank social media constantly hammering us with headlines as the reason why so many people are “over it”. We are getting used to it but make no mistake being “over it” is n an illusion. LLMs represent a milestone in technological achievement among humans and being “over it” or claiming all LLMs can never reason and output is just a copy is delusional.

lvl155• 2 years ago

What really gets me about AI space is that it’s going the way of front-end development space. I also hate the fact that Facebook/Meta is the only one seemingly doing heavy lifting in the public space. It’s great so far but I just don’t trust them in the end.

AI_beffr4• 2 years ago

in 2018 we had the first gtp that would babble and repeat itself but would string together words that were oddly coherent. people dismissed any talk of these models having larger potential. and here we are today with the state of AI being what it is and people are still, in essence, denying that AI could become more capable or intelligent than it is right at this moment. after so many years of this zombie argument having its head chopped off and then regrowing, i can only think that it is peoples deep seated humanity that prevents them from seeing the obvious. it would be such a deeply disgusting and alarming development if AI were to spring to life that most people, being good people, are literally incapable of believing that its possible. its their own mind, their human sensibilities, protecting them. thats ok. but it would help keep humanity safe if more people had the ability to realize that there is nothing stopping AI from crossing that threshold and every heuristic is pointing to the fact that we are on the cusp of that.

monkeydust2• 2 years ago

AI is not just GenAI, ML sits underneath it (supervised, unsupervised) and that has genuinely delivered value for the clients we service (financial tech) and in my normal life (e.g. photo search, screen grab to text, book recommendations).

As for GenAI I keep going back to expectation management, its very unlikley to give you the exact answer you need (and if it does then well you job longetivity is questionable) but it can help accelerate your learning, thinking and productivity.

falcor846• 2 years ago

... its very unlikley to give you the exact answer you need (and if it does then well you job longetivity is questionable)

Experimenting with o1-preview, it quite often gives me the exact answer I need on the first try, and I'm 100% certain that my job longevity is questionable.

monkeydust2• 2 years ago

It has been more hit and miss for me, when it works it can be amazing then I try to show someone, same prompt, different less so amazing answer.

mrmansano• 2 years ago

I love AI, I use it every single day and wouldn't consider myself a luddite, but... oh, boy... I hate the people that is too bullish on it. Not the people that is working to make the AI happen (although I have my __suspicious people radar__ pointing to __run__ every single time I see Sam Altman face anywhere), but the people that hypes it to ground, the "e/acc" people. I feel like the crypto-bros just moved from the "all-might decentralized coin god" hype to the "all might tech-god that for sure will be available soon". Looks like a cult or religion is forming around the singularity, and, if I hype it now, it will be generous to me when it takes the control. Oh, and if you don't hype then you're a neo-luddite/doomer and I will look up on you with disdain, as you are a mere peasant. Also, the get-rich-quick schemes forming around the idea that anyone can have a "1-person-1-billion-dollar" company with just AI, not realizing when anyone can replicate your product then it won't have any value anymore: "ChatGPT just made me this website to help classify if an image is a hot-dog or not! I'll be rich selling it to Nathan's - Oh, what's that? Nathan's just asked ChatGPT to create a hot-dog classifier for them?!" Not that the other vocal side is not as bad: "AI is useless", "It's not true intelligence", "AI will kill us all", "AI will make everyone unemployed in 6 months!"... But the AI tech-bros side can be more annoying in my personal experience (I'm sure the opposite is true for others too). All those people are tiring, and making AI tiring for some too... But the tech is fun and will keep evolving and present, rather we are tired of it or not.

farts_mckensy3• 2 years ago

I am tired of people saying, "I am tired of AI."

yapyap• 2 years ago

Same.

warvair• 2 years ago

90% of everything is crap. Perhaps AI will make that 99% in the future. OTOH, maybe AI will slowly convert that 90% into 70% crap & 20% okay. As long as more stuff that I find good gets created, regardless of the percentage of crap I have to sift through, I'm down.

amradio• 2 years ago

We can’t compare AI with an expert. There’s going to be little value there. AI is about as capable as your average college grad in any subject.

What makes AI revolutionary is what it does for the novice. They can produce results they normally couldn’t. That’s huge.

A guy with no development experience can produce working non-trivial software. And in a fraction of the time your average junior could.

And this phenomenon happens across domains. All of a sudden the bottom of the skill pool is 10x more productive. That’s major.

kvnnews• 2 years ago

I’m not the only one! Fuck ai, fuck your algorithm. It sucks.

visarga5• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure that there are some areas where applying AI might be useful.

How polite, everyone is sure AI might be useful in other fields just not their own.

people are scared that AI is going to take their jobs

Can't be both true - AI being not really useful, and AI taking our jobs.

throwaway123198• 2 years ago

I'm bored of IT. Software is boring, AI included. None of this feels like progress. We've automated away white collar work...but we also acknowledge most white collar work is busy work that's considered a bullcr*p job. We need to get back to innovation in manufacturing, materials etc. i.e. the real world.

precompute6• 2 years ago

Accelerating hamster wheel

amiantos2• 2 years ago

I'm tired of people complaining about AI stuff, let's move on already. But based on the votes and engagement on this post, complaining about AI is still a hot ticket to clicks and attention, even if people are just regurgitating the exact same boring takes that are almost always in conflict with each other: "AI sure is terrible, isn't it? It can't do anything right. It sucks! It's _so bad_. But, also, I am terrified AI is going to take my job away and ruin my way of life, because AI is _so good_."

Make up your mind, people. It reminds me of anti-Apple people who say things like "Apple makes terrible products and people only buy them because... because... _they're brainwashed!_" Okay, so we're supposed to believe two contradictory points at once: Apple products are very very bad, but also people love them very much. In order to believe those contradictory points, we must just make up something to square them, so in the case of Apple it's "sheeple!" and in the case of AI it's... "capitalism!" or something? AI is terrible but everyone wants it because of money...? I don't know.

aDyslecticCrow• 2 years ago

Not sure what you're getting at. You don't claim LLMs is good in your comment. You just complain about people being annoyed at it destroying the internet?

Are you just annoyed that people complain about what bothers them? Or do you think LLMs has been a net good for humanity and the internet?

redandblack2• 2 years ago

Having spent the last decade hearing about trustless-trust,and now faced with this decade in dealing with with no-trust-whatsoever.

We started with dont-trust-the-government and the dont-trust-big-media and to dont-trust-all-media and eventually to a no-trust-society. Lovely

Really, waiting for the AI feedback to converge on itself. Get this over soon please

heystefan• 2 years ago

Not sure why this is front page material.

The thinking is very surface level ("AI art sucks" is the popular opinion anyway) and I don't understand what the complaints are about.

The author is tired of AI and likes movies created by people. So just watch those? It's not like we are flooded with AI movies/music. His social network shows dull AI-generated content? Curate your feed a bit and unfollow those low effort posters.

And in the end, if AI output is dull, there's nothing to be afraid of -- people will skip it.

hcks2• 2 years ago

Hackernews when we may be on the path of actual AI "meh I hate this, you know what’s actually really interesting? Manually writing tests for software"

izwasm• 2 years ago

Im tired of people throwing chatgpt everywhere they can just to say they use AI. Even if it's a useless feature

whoomp12342• 2 years ago

here is where you are wrong about AI lacking creativitivy:

AI Music is bland and boring. UNLESS IF YOU KNOW MUSIC REALLY WELL. As a matter of fact, it can SPAWN poorly done but really interesting ideas with almost no effort

"What if curt cobain wrote a song that was then sung by johnny cash about waterfalls in the west" etc.

That idea is awful, but when you generate it, you might get snippets that could turn into a wholey new HUMAN made song.

The same process is how I forsee AI helping engineering. its not replacing us, its inspring us.

nescioquid• 2 years ago

People often screw around over the piano keyboard, usually an octave or so about middle C until an idea occurs. Brahms likened this to a pair of hands combing over a garbage dump.

I think a creative person has no trouble generating interesting ideas without roving over the proverbial garbage heap. The hard (and artistic) part is developing those ideas into an interesting work.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

the most depressing thing for me is the rush and all out hype. i mean, Apple not only renamed AI "Apple Intelligence" but if you go INTO a Apple Store, it's banner is everywhere, even as a wallpaper on the phones with the "glow"

But guess what isn't there? An actually shipping IMPLEMENTATION. It's not even ready yet but the HYPE is so overblown.

Steve Jobs is crying in his grave how stupid everyone is being about this.

semiinfinitely2• 2 years ago

A software tester tired of AI? Not surprising given that this is like the first job which AI will replace.

yibers• 2 years ago

Actually testing by humans will be much more important. AI may be making subtle mistaking the will require more extensive testing, by humans.

semiinfinitely2• 2 years ago

Why just test it with ai

BodyCulture• 2 years ago

I would like to know how does AI help us in solving the climate crisis! I have read some articles about weather predictions getting better with the help of AI, but that is just the monitoring, I would like to see more actual solutions.

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks!

jordigh• 2 years ago

Uhh... it makes it worse.

We don't have all of the data because in the US companies are not generally required by law to disclose their emissions. But of those who do, it's been disastrous. Google was on track to net zero, but its recent investment and push on AI has increased their emissions by 48%.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/03/tech/google-ai-greenhouse-gas...

cwmma• 2 years ago

It is doubtful AI will be a net positive with regards to climate due to how much electricity it uses.

kaonwarb• 2 years ago

It has gotten so bad that I, for one, immediately reject a proposal when it is clear that it was written by or with the help of AI, no matter how interesting the topic is or how good of a talk you will be able to deliver in person.

I am sympathetic to the sentiment, and yet worry about someone making impactful decisions based on their own perception of whether AI was used. Such perceptions have been demonstrated many times recently to be highly faulty.

Animats2• 2 years ago

I'm tired of LLMs.

Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important.

If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence metric out of an LLM, we're headed for another "AI Winter". Although at a much higher level than last time. It will still be a billion dollar industry, but not a trillion dollar one.

At some point, the market for LLM-generated blithering should be saturated. Somebody has to read the stuff. Although you can task another system to summarize and rank it. How much of "AI" is generating content to be read by Google's search engine? This may be a bigger energy drain than Bitcoin mining.

jajko• 2 years ago

I'll keep buying (and paying premium) for dumber things. Cars are a prime example, I want it to be dumb as fuck, offline, letting me decide what to do. At least next 2 decades, and thats achievable. After that I couldnt care less, I'll probably be a bad driver at that point anyway so switch may make sense. I want dumb beautiful mechanival wristwatch.

I am not ocd-riddled insecure man trying to subconsiously immitate much of the crowd, in any form of fasion. If that will make me an outlier, so be it, a happier one.

I suspect new branch of artisanal human-mind-made trademark is just behind the corner, maybe niche but it will find its audience. Beautiful imperfections, clear clunky biases and all that.

mattgreenrocks• 2 years ago

What dumb cars are you looking at?

spencerchubb• 2 years ago

LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential

bloppe3• 2 years ago

They have been improving a lot, but that improvement is already plateauing and all the fundamental problems have not disappeared. AI needs another architectural breakthrough to keep up the pace of advancement.

COAGULOPATH• 2 years ago

In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped.

We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opus, Llama 3.1 405B, GPT4) are nowhere near the top. (Yes, I know Gemma is a pruned Gemini). Fine-tuning > model size, which implies we don't have a path to "superhuman" creative writing (if that even exists). Unlike model size, fine-tuning can't be scaled indefinitely: once you've squeezed all the juice out of a model, what then?

OpenAI's new o1 model exhibits amazing progress in reasoning, math, and coding. Yet its writing is worse than GPT4-o's (as backed by EQBench and OpenAI's own research).

I'd also mention political persuasion (since people seem concerned about LLM-generated propaganda). In June, some researchers tested LLM ability to change the minds of human subjects on issues like privatization and assisted suicide. Tiny models are unpersuasive, as expected. But once a model is large enough to generate coherent sentences, persuasiveness kinda...stops. All large models are about equally persuasive. No runaway scaling laws are evident here.

This picture is uncertain due to instruction tuning. We don't really know what abilities LLMs "truly" possess, because they've been crippled to act as harmless, helpful chatbots. But we now have an open-source GPT-4-sized pretrained model to play with (Llama-3.1 405B base). People are doing interesting things with it, but it's not setting the world on fire.

9cb14c1ec02• 2 years ago

I can't think of any exponential improvements that have happened recently.

bamboozled11• 2 years ago

Do you know what exponential means? They might be getting getting but it hardly seems exponential at this stage.

rifty• 2 years ago

I don’t think you should expect exponential growth towards greater correctness past good enough for any given domain of knowledge it is able to mirror. It is reliant on human generated material, and so rate limited by the number of humans able to generate the quality increase you need - which decreases in availability as you expect higher quality. I also don’t believe greater correctness for any given thing is an open ended question that allows for experientially exponential improvements.

Though maybe you are just using exponential figuratively in place of meaning rapid and significant development and investment.

__loam4• 2 years ago

Funnily enough, bitcoin mining still uses at least about 3x more power that AI at the moment, while providing less value imo. AI power use is also dwarfed by other industries even in computing. We should still consider whether it's worth it, but most research and development on LLMs in corporate right now seems to be focused on making them more efficient, and therefore both cheaper and less power intensive, to run. There's also stuff like Apple intelligence that is moving it out to edge devices with much more efficient chips.

I'm still a big critic of AI generally but they're definitely not as bad as crypto which is shocking.

illiac786• 2 years ago

Do you have a nice reference for this? I could really use something like this, this topic comes up a lot in my social circle.

Ferret74462• 2 years ago

How do you measure the value of bitcoin, if not by its market cap? Do you interview everyone and ask them how much they're willing to pay for a service that allows them to transfer money digitally without institutional oversight/bureaucracy?

wrycoder• 2 years ago

Just wait until they get saturated with subtle (and not so subtle) advertising. Then, you'll really hate them.

mhowland• 2 years ago

"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time."

I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't think it will be any better than the average human is at being their own control, but by no means does that mean it's not a solvable problem.

linsomniac• 2 years ago

also is a decent description of individual humans

A friend of mine was moving from software development into managing devs. He told me: "They often don't do things the way or to the quality I'd like, but 10 of them just get so much more done than I could on my own." This was him coming to terms with letting go of some control, and switching to "guiding the results" rather than direct control.

The LLMs are a lot like this.

latexr6• 2 years ago

I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

But you can understand individual humans and learn which are trustworthy for what. If I want a specific piece of information, I have people in my life that I know I can consult to get an answer that will most likely be correct and that person will be able to give me an accurate assessment of their certainty and they know how to accurately confirm their knowledge and they’ll let me know later if it turns out they were wrong or the information changed and…

None of that is true with LLMs. I never know if I can trust the output, unless I’m already an expert on the subject. Which kind of defeats the purpose. Which isn’t to say they’re never helpful, but in my experience they waste my time more often than they save it, and at an environmental/energy cost I don’t personally find acceptable.

Gazoche• 2 years ago

I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

But humans can be held accountable, LLMs cannot.

If I pay a human expert to compile a report on something and they decide to randomly make up facts, that's malpractice and there could be serious consequences for them.

If I pay OpenAI to do the same thing and the model hallucinates nonsense, OpenAI can just shrug it and say "oh that's just a limitation of current LLMs".

Too• 2 years ago

You missed quoting the next sentence about providing confidence metric.

Humans may be wrong a lot but at least the vast majority will have the decency to say “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure”, “give me some time to think”, “my best guess is”. In contrast to most LLMs today that in full confidence just spews out more hallucinations.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 2 years ago

> I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

Why would that be a good thing? The big thing with computers is that they are reliable in ways that humans simply can't ever be. Why is it suddenly a success to make them just as unreliable as humans?

latexr6• 2 years ago

They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. (…) They can't safely be in charge of anything important.

Agreed. If everyone understood that and operated under that assumption, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue. Alas, these guessing machines are marketed as all-knowing oracles that can already solve half of humanity’s problems and a significant number of people treat them as being right every time, even in instances where they’re provably wrong.

bschmidt13• 2 years ago

I love how people are like "there's no use case" and there's already products on shelves. I see AI art everywhere, AI writing, customer support - already happened. You guys are naysaying something that already happened people already replaced jobs with LLMs and already profit due to AI. There are already startups with users where you provide a OPENAI_API_KEY, or customers where you provide theirs.

If you can't see how this tech is useful Idk what to tell you, you have no imagination AND aren't looking around you at the products, marketing, etc. that already exists. These takes remind me of the luddites of ~2012 who were still doubting the Internet in general.

anon77254• 2 years ago

There is a difference between “being useful” and living up to galactic-scale hype.

lmm5• 2 years ago

I see AI art everywhere, AI writing, customer support - already happened.

Is any of it adding value though? I can see that AI has made it easier to do SEO spam and make an excuse for your lack of customer support, just like IVR systems before it. But I don't believe those added any real value (they may have generated profits for their makers, but I think that was a zero- or negative-sum trade). Put it this way: is AI being used to generate anything that people are actually happy to receive?

seandoe• 2 years ago

Totally agree on the confidence metric. The way chatbots spew complete falsities in such a confident tone is really disheartening. I want to use AI more but I don't feel I can trust it at all. If I can't trust it and have to search for other resources to verify it's claims, the value is really diminished.

naming_the_user• 2 years ago

Is it even possible in principle for an LLM to produce a confidence interval given that in a lot of cases the input is essentially untrusted?

What comes to mind is - I consider myself an intelligent being capable of recognising my limits - but if you put my brain in a vat and taught me a new field of science, I could quite easily make claims about it that were completely incorrect if your teaching was incorrect because I have no actual real world experience to match it up to.

theamk2• 2 years ago

Right, and that's why "years of experience" matters in humans. You will be giving incorrect answers, but as long as you get feedback, you will improve, or at least calibrate your confidence meter.

This is not the case with current model - they are forever stuck at junior level, and they won't improve no matter how much you correct them.

I know humans like that too. I don't ask them questions that I need good answers too.

datahack• 2 years ago

It’s probably generally irrelevant what they can do today, or what you’ve seen so far.

This is conceptually essentially Moore’s law, but about every 5.5 months. That’s the only thing that matters at this stage.

I watched everyone make the same arguments about the general Internet, and then the Web, then mobile, then Bitcoin. It’s just a toy. It’s not that useful. Is this supposed to be the revolution? It uses too much power. It won’t scale. The technology is a dead end.

The general pattern of improvement to technology has been radically to the upside at an increasing pace parabolically for decades and there’s nothing indicating that this is a break in the pattern. In fact it’s setting up to be an order of magnitude greater impact than the Internet was. At a minimum, I don’t expect it to be smaller.

Looking at early telegraphs doesn’t predict the iPhone, etc.

Optimism is warranted here until it isn’t.

jiggawatts2• 2 years ago

Speaking of the iPhone, I just ugpraded to the 16 Pro because I want to try out the new Apple Intelligence features.

As soon as I saw integrated voice+text LLM demos, my first thought was that this was precisely the technology needed to make assistants like Siri not total garbage.

Sure, Apple's version 1.0 will have a lot of rough edges, but they'll be smoothed out.

In a few versions it'll be like something out of Star Trek.

"Computer, schedule an appointment with my Doctor. No, not that one, the other one... yeah... for the foot thing. Any time tomorrow. Oh thanks, I forgot about that, make that for 2pm."

Try that with Siri now.

In a few years, this will be how you talk to your phone.

Or... maybe next month. We're about to find out.

bburnett44• 2 years ago

I think we can pretty safely say bitcoin was a dead end other than for buying drugs, enabling ransomware payments, or financial speculation.

Show me an average person who has bought something real w bitcoin (who couldn’t have bought it for less complexity/transaction cost using a bank) and I’ll change my mind

YeGoblynQueenne3• 2 years ago

> Looking at early telegraphs doesn’t predict the iPhone, etc.

The problem with this line of argument is that LLMs are not new technology, rather they are the latest evolution of statistical language modelling, a technology that we've had at least since Shannon's time [1]. We are way, way past the telegraph era, and well into the age of large telephony switches handling millions of calls a second.

Does that mean we've reached the end of the curve? Personally, I have no idea, but if you're going to argue we're at the beginning of things, that's just not right.

________________

[1] In "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", where he introduces what we today know as information theory, Shannon gives as an example of an application a process that generates a string of words in natural English according to the probability of the next letter in a word, or the next word in a sentence. See Section 3 "The Series of Approximations to English":

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Note: Published 1948.

runeks• 2 years ago

I watched everyone make the same arguments about the general Internet, and then the Web, then mobile, then Bitcoin.

You’re conveniently forgetting all the things that followed the same trajectory as LLMs and then died out.

newaccountman2• 2 years ago

I am generally on your side of this debate, but Bitcoin is a reference that is in favor of the opposite position. Crypto is/was all hype. It's a speculative investment, that's all atm.

otabdeveloper4• 2 years ago

...about the general Internet, and then the Web, then mobile, then Bitcoin. It’s just a toy. It’s not that useful.

Well, they're not wrong. They are not that useful toys.

(Yes, the "Web" included.)

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rldjbpin• 2 years ago

LLMs are to AI what BTC is to blockchain, let me explain.

blockchain and no-trust decentralization has so much promise, but grifters all go for what got done first and can be squeezed money out of. same is happening with LLMs, as a lot of current AI work started with text first.

they might still lowkey be necessary evils because without them there would not have been so much money or attention flowing in this way.

agubelu• 2 years ago

blockchain and no-trust decentralization has so much promise

I've been hearing this for the past 5 years, yet nothing of practical use based on blockchains has materialized yet.

shaunxcode• 2 years ago

LLM/DEEP-MIND is DESTROYING lineage. This is the crux point we can all feel. Up until now you could pick up a novel or watch a film, download an open source library, and figure out the LINEAGE (even if no attribution is directly made, by studying the author etc.)

I am not too worried though. People are starting to realize this more and more. Soon using AI will be next google glass. LLM is already a slur worse than NPC in the youth. And profs are realizing its time for a return to oral exams ONLY as an assessment method. (we figured this out in industry ages ago : whiteboard interviews etc)

Yours truly : LILA <an LISP INTELLIGENCE LANGUAGE AGENT>

bane• 2 years ago

I feel sorry for the young hopeful data scientists who got into the field when doing data science was still interesting and 95% of their jobs hadn't turned over into tuning the latest LLM to poorly accomplish some random task an executive thought up.

I know a few of them and once they started riding the hype curve for real, the luster wore off and they're all absolutely miserable in their jobs and trying to look for exits. The fun stuff, the novel DL architectures, coming up with clever ways to balance datasets or label things...it's all just dried up.

It's even worse than the last time I saw people sadly taking the stairs down the other end of the hype cycle when bioinformatics didn't explode into the bioeconomy that had been promised or when blockchain wasn't the revolution in corporate practices that CIOs everywhere had been sold on.

We'll end up with this junk everywhere eventually, and it'll continue to commoditize, and that's why I'm very bearish on companies trying to make LLMs their sole business driver.

AI is a feature, not the product.

mark_l_watson• 2 years ago

Nice thoughts. Since 1982 half my work has been in one of the fields loosely called AI and the other half more straight up software development. After mostly been doing deep learning and now LLM for almost ten years, I miss conventional software development.

When I was swimming this morning I thought of writing a RDF data store with partial SPARQL support in Racket or Common Lisp - basically trade a year of my time to do straight up design and coding, for something very few people would use.

I get very excited by shiny new things like advance voice interface for ChatGPT and NoteBookLM, both fine product ideas and implementations, but I also feel some general fatigue.

sedatk2• 2 years ago

I remember being awestruck at the first avocado chair images DALL-E generated. So many possibilities ahead. But, we ended up with all oversaturated, color-soup, greasy, smooth pictures everywhere because as it turns out, beauty is in the eye of the prompter.

WillyWonkaJr2• 2 years ago

I asked ChatGPT once if its generated images were filtered to reduce the realism and it said that it did. Maybe we don't like the safety filter they are applying to all images.

sedatk2• 2 years ago

The thing is we have no way to know if ChatGPT is telling the truth.

paulcole• 2 years ago

AI’s carbon footprint is reaching more alarming levels every day

It really really really really isn’t.

I love how people use this argument for anything they don’t like – crypto, Taylor Swift, AI, etc.

Everybody in the developed world’s carbon footprint is disgusting! Even yours. Even mine. Yes, somebody else is worse than me and somebody else is worse than you, but we’re all still awful.

So calling out somebody else’s carbon footprint is the most eye-rolling “argument” I can imagine.

xena• 2 years ago

My last job made me shill for AI stuff because GPUs have a lot of income potential. One of my next ones is going to make me shill for AI stuff because it makes people deal with terrifying amounts of data.

I understand why this is the case, but it's still kinda disappointing. I'm hoping for an AI winter so that I can talk about normal uses of computers again.

cult_of_we• 2 years ago

reviving an old throwaway:

the last two years have been incredibly depressing in the space of dedicated hardware for doing high performance computing tasks.

all the air has been sucked out of the room because the world can’t get enough of generating more text that no one has any meaningful use for besides hyping up their product whose primary focus is how it “leverages AI”.

and in the midst of all of this, I’m seeing these same technologies dramatically accelerate problems in short fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and education.

it will be absurdly bleak if the grotesque reality we’re creating destroys the things that made go into science & engineering in the first place…

canxerian• 2 years ago

I'm a software dev and I'm tired of LLMs being crowbar'd in to every single product I build and use, to the point where they are unanimously and unequivocally used over better, cheaper and simpler solutions.

I'm also tired of people who claim to be excited by AI. They are the dullest of them all.

Spivak• 2 years ago

And so the counterculture begins angst angst angst! Let's find an empty rooftop, I'll take a long drag off my vape, a swig of my forty, and you can talk about how all those people down there using AI just don't get it mannnnn. How the big corporations are lying to them and convincing them to buy API credits they don't even need!

nasaeclipse• 2 years ago

At some point, I wonder if we will go more analog again. How do we know if a book was written by a human? Simple, he used a typewriter or wrote it by hand!

Photos? Real film.

Video.... real film again lol.

I think that may actually happen at some point.

famahar• 2 years ago

I'm already starting to embrace it. Content overload through subscription platforms makes it hard for me to choose. My phone being an everything machine always distracts me l. I'm also tired of algorithmic recommendations. I bought a cassette player and find a lot of joy discovering music at record shops and browsing around bandcamp for some cassettes in genres I like.

jprete2• 2 years ago

I realized a few weeks ago that broadcast TV had at least one useful advantage over streaming - you don't have the option to pause it, and that makes it much easier to maintain attention.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

I'm actually excited about AI. With a dose of realism. But I benefit from LLMs on a daily basis now. There are a lot of challenges with LLMs but they are useful tools and we haven't really seen much yet. It's only been two years since chat gpt was released. And mostly we're still consuming this stuff via chat UIs, which strikes me as sub optimal and is something I hope will change soon.

The increases in context size are helping a lot. The step improvement in reasoning abilities and quality of answers is amazing to watch. I'm currently using chat gpt o1 preview a lot for programming stuff. It's not perfect but I can use a lot of what it generates and this is saving me a lot of time lately. It still gets stuff wrong and there's a lot of stuff it doesn't know.

I also am mildly addicted to perplexity.ai. Just a wonderful tool and I seem to be getting in the habit of asking it about anything that pops into my mind. Sometimes it's even work related.

I get that people are annoyed with all the hyperbolic stuff in the media on this topic. But at the same time, the trends here are pretty amazing. I'm running the 3B parameter llama 3.2 model on a freaking laptop now. A nice two year old M1 with only 16GB. It's not going to replace bigger models for me. But I can see a few use cases for running it locally.

My view is very simple. I'm a software developer. I grew up a few decades ago before there was any internet. I had no clue what a computer even was until I was in high school. Things like Knight Rider, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Star Wars etc. all featured forms of AIs that are now more or less becoming science fact. C3PO is pretty dumb compared to chat gpt actually. You could build something better and more useful these days. That would mostly an art and crafts project at this point. No special skills required. Just use an LLM to generate the code you need. Nice project for some high school kids.

Which brings me to my main point. We're the old generation. Part of being old is getting replaced by younger people. Young people are growing up with this stuff. They'll use it to their advantage and they are not going to be held back by old fashioned notions about the way the things should work according to us old people. The thing with Luddites is that they exist in any generation. And then they grow tired, old, and then they die off. I have no ambition to become irrelevant like that.

I'm planning to keep up with young people as long as I can. I'll have to give that up at some point but not just yet. And right now that includes being clued in as much as I can about LLMs and all the developer plumbing I need to use them. This stuff is shockingly easy. Just ask your favorite LLM to help you get started.

cedws• 2 years ago

Current generative AI is a set of moderately useful/interesting technology that has been artificially blown up into something way bigger.

If you've been paying any attention for the past two decades, you'll have noticed that capitalism has had a series of hype cycles. Post COVID, Western economies are on their knees, productivity is faltering and the numbers aren't checking out anymore. Gen AI is the latest hype cycle, and it has been excellent for generating hype with clueless VCs and extracting money from them, and generating artificial economic activity. I truly think we are in deep shit when this bubble pops, it seems to be the only thing propping up our economies and staving off a wider bear market.

I've heard some say that this is all just the beginning and AGI is 2 years away because... Moore's law and that somehow applies to LLM benchmarks. Putting aside that this completely nonsensical idea, LLM performance is quite clearly not on any kind of exponential curve by now.

the_clarence• 2 years ago

I think it's awesome personally

tonymet• 2 years ago

Assuming that people tend to pursue the expedient and convenient solution, AI will degrade science and art until only a facsimile of outdated creativity is left.

habosa• 2 years ago

I refuse to work on AI products. I refuse to use AI in my work.

It’s inescapable that I will work _near_ AI given that I’m a SWE and I want to get paid, but at least by not actively advancing this bullshit I’ll have a tiny little “wasn’t me” I can pull out when the world ends.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

I mean, I'm at most fine with being able to occasionally use an llm for a low-risk, otherwise predictable, small-surface area, mostly boilerplate set of problems I shouldn't be spending energy on anyway. I'm excited about potentially replacing my ( to me) recentish 2019 macbook pro with an M4, if it's a good value for me. However, I have zero interest in built-in AI features of any product, and it hasn't even crossed my mind why it would. The novelty wore off last year, and its presence in my OS is going to be at most incidental to the efficiency advantages of the hardware advancements; at worst, it'll annoy the hell of me and I'll look for ways to permanently disable any first-party integration. Haven't even paid attention to the news around what will be coming in the latest MacOS, but I'm hoping it'll be ignorable like the features that exist for iPhone users are.

slicktux• 2 years ago

I like AI… for me it’s a great way of getting the ‘average’ of a broad array of answers to a single question but without all the ads I would get from googling and searching pages. For example, when searching for times to cook or grams of sugar to add to my gallon of iced tea…or instant pot cooking times.

For more technical things STEM related it’s a good way to get a base line or direction; enough for me to draw my own conclusions or implementations…it’s like a rubber ducky I can talk to.

drillsteps5• 2 years ago

I've always thought that "actual" AI (I guess it's mostly referred to as "General AI" now) will require a feedback loop and continuous unsupervised learning. As in the system decides on an action, executes, receives the feedback, assesses the situation in relation to the goals (positive and negative reinforcement), corrects (adjusts the network), and the cycle repeats. This is not the case with current generative AI, where the network is trained (reinforced learning) and then the snapshot of the trained network is used to produce output. This works for some limited number of applications but this will never produce General AI, because there's no feedback loop. So it's a bit of a gimmick.

shswkna• 2 years ago

The elephant in the room is this question:

What do we value? What is our value system made up of?

This is, in my opinion, the Achille‘s heel of the current trajectory of the West.

We need to know what we are doing it for. Like the OP said, he is motivated by the human connectedness that art, music and the written word inspire.

On the surface, it seems we value the superficial smuckness of LLM-produced content more.

This is a facade, like so many other superficial artifacts of our social life.

Imperfect authenticity will soon (or sometime in the future) become a priceless ideal.

fulafel• 2 years ago

Coming from a testing specialist - the facts are right but the framing seems negatively biased. For the generalist who wants to get some Playwright tests up, the low hanging fruit is definitely helped a lot by generative AI. So I emphatically disagree with "there are no shortcuts".

jaakl• 2 years ago

It seems Claude (3.5 Sonnet) provided the longest summary for this discussion using basic single shot prompt for me:

After reviewing the Hacker News thread, here are some of the main repeating patterns I observed:

* Fatigue and frustration with AI hype: Many commenters expressed being tired of the constant AI hype and its application to every domain. * Concerns about AI-generated content quality: There were recurring worries about AI producing low-quality, generic, or "soulless" content across various fields. * Debate over AI's impact on jobs and creativity: Some argued AI would displace workers, while others felt it was just another tool that wouldn't replace human creativity and expertise. * Skepticism about AI capabilities: Several commenters felt the current AI systems were overhyped and not as capable as claimed. * Copyright and ethical concerns: Many raised issues about AI training on copyrighted material without permission or compensation. * Polarized views on AI's future impact: There was a split between those excited about AI's potential and those worried about its negative effects. * Comparisons to previous tech hypes: Some likened the AI boom to past technology bubbles like cryptocurrency or blockchain. * Debate over regulation: Discussion on whether and how AI should be regulated. * Concerns about AI's environmental impact: Mentions of AI's large carbon footprint. * Meta-discussion about HN itself: Comments about how the discourse on HN has changed over time, particularly regarding AI. * Capitalism critique: Some framed issues with AI as symptoms of larger problems with capitalism. * Calls for embracing vs rejecting AI: A divide between those advocating for adopting AI tools and those preferring to avoid them.

These patterns reflect a community grappling with the rapid advancement and widespread adoption of AI technologies, showcasing a range of perspectives from enthusiasm to deep skepticism.

cutler• 2 years ago

Me too :)

nuc1e0n• 2 years ago

I tried to learn AI frameworks. I really did. But I just don't care about them. AI as it is today just isn't useful to me. Databases and search engines are reliable. The output of AI models is totally unreliable.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

What's the next hype after "AI". And what is next after that. Maybe we can just skip it all.

socksy2• 2 years ago

Or are you just going to read prompt results out loud for 40 minutes, too? I hope not, but we will not take the chance.

I did actually attend a talk at a conference a few years ago where someone did this. It wasn't with LLMs, but with a Markov chain, and it was art. A bizarre experience, but unfortunately not recorded (at the request of the speaker).

Obviously the big difference was that this was not kept secret at all (indeed, some of the generated prompts included sections where he was instructed to show his speaker notes to the audience, where we could see the generated text scroll up the screen).

Melenahill3• 2 years ago

I Am Tired of AI

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