The worst is in the workplace. When people routinely tell me they looked something up with AI, I now have to assume that I can't trust what they say anylonger because there is a high chance they are just repeating some AI halucination. It is really a sad state of affairs.
I am way less hostile to Genai (as a tech) than most and even I've grown to hate this scenario. I am a subject matter expert on some things and I've still had people trying to waste my time to prove their AI hallucinations wrong.
I've started seeing large AI generated pull requests in my coding job. Of course I have to review them, and the "author" doesn't even warn me it's from an LLM. It's just allowing bad coders to write bad code faster.
Do you also check if they listen to Joe Rogan? Fox news? Nobody can be trusted. AI isn't the problem, it's that it was trained on human data -- of which people are an unreliable source of information.
AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples. You're not wrong about Fox news and how corporate and Russian backed media distorts the truth and pushes false narratives, and you're not wrong that AI isn't the problem, but it is certainly a problem and a big one at that.
AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples.
SO DO PEOPLE.
Tell me one of the things that AI does, that people themselves don't also commonly do each and every day?
Real researchers make up studies to cite in their reports? Real lawyers and judges cite fake cases as precedents in legal preceding? Real doctors base treatment plans on white papers they completely fabricated in their heads? Yeah I don't think so, buddy.
I think they’re saying that the kind of people who take LLM generated content as fact are the kind of people who don’t know how to look up information in the first place. Blaming the LLM for it is like blaming a search engine for showing bad results.
Of course LLMs make stuff up, they are machines that make stuff up.
Sort of an aside, but doctors, lawyers, judges and researchers make shit up all the time. A professional designation doesn't make someone infallible or even smart. People should question everything they read, regardless of the source.
Blaming the LLM for it is like blaming a search engine for showing bad results.
Except we give it the glorifying title "AI". It's supposed to be far better than a search engine, otherwise why not stick with a search engine (that uses a tiny fraction of the power)?
I don't know what point you're arguing. I didn't call it AI and even if I did, I don't know any definition of AI that includes infallibility. I didn't claim it's better than a search engine, either. Even if I did, "Better" does not equal "Always correct."
To take an older example there are smaller image recognition models that were trained on correct data to differentiate between dogs and blueberry muffin but obviously still made mistakes on the test data set.
AI does not become perfect if its data is.
Humans do make mistakes, make stuff up, and spread false information. However they generally make considerably less stuff up than AI currently does (unless told to).
It does become more precise the larger the model is though. At least, that was the low-hanging fruit during this boom. I highly doubt you'd get a modern model to fail on a test such as this today.
Just as an example, nobody is typing "Blueberry Muffin" into a stable diffusor and getting a photo of a dog.
I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the "it's not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it's making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl" which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don't need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.
There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.
The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going "thank you so much, I could have never done this without you".
I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.
I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn't compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It's also addictive.
Maybe not an individual prompt, but with how many prompts are made for stupid stuff every day, it will stack up to quite a lot of CO2 in the long run.
Not denying the training of AI is demanding way more energy, but that doesn't really matter as both the action of manufacturing, training and millions of people using AI amounts to the same bleak picture long term.
Considering how the discussion about environmental protection has only just started to be taken seriously and here they come and dump this newest bomb on humanity, it is absolutely devastating that AI has been allowed to run rampant everywhere.
According to this article, 500.000 AI prompts amounts to the same CO2 outlet as a
round-trip flight from London to New York.
I don't know how many times a day 500.000 AI prompts are reached, but I'm sure it is more than twice or even thrice. As time moves on it will be much more than that. It will probably outdo the number of actual flights between London and New York in a day. Every day. It will probably also catch up to whatever energy cost it took to train the AI in the first place and surpass it.
Because you know. People need their memes and fake movies and AI therapist chats and meal suggestions and history lessons and a couple of iterations on that book report they can't be fucked to write. One person can easily end up prompting hundreds of times in a day without even thinking about it. And if everybody starts using AI to think for them at work and at home, it'll end up being many, many, many flights back and forth between London and New York every day.
I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.
The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.
Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!
Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure. If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.
I have a hard time believing that article’s guesstimate since Google (who actually runs these data centers and doesn’t have to guess) just published a report stating that the median prompt uses about a quarter of a watt-hour, or the equivalent of running a microwave oven for one second. You’re absolutely right that flights use an unconscionable amount of energy. Perhaps your advocacy time would be much better spent fighting against that.
Sam Altman, or whatever fuck his name is, asked users to stop saying please and thank you to chatgpt because it was costing the company millions. Please and thank you are the less power hungry questions chatgpt gets. And its costing chatgpt millions. Probably 10s of millions of dollars if the CEO made a public comment about it.
You're right training is hella power hungry, but even using gen ai has heavy power costs
I'm pretty sure it's a product of scale, but also, GPT5 is markedly worse. I heard estimates of 40 watt hours for a single medium length response. Napkin math says my motorcycle can travel
about kilometer per single medium length response of GPT5. Now multiply that by how many people are using AI (anyone going online these days), now multiply that by how many times a day each user causes a prompt. Now multiply that by 365 and we have how much power they're using in a year.
It's important to remember that there's a lot of money being put into A.I. and therefore a lot of propaganda about it.
This happened with a lot of shitty new tech, and A.I. is one of the biggest examples of this I've known about.
All I can write is that, if you know what kind of tech you want and it's satisfactory, just stick to that. That's what I do.
Don't let ads get to you.
There was a quote about how Silicon Valley isn't a fortune teller betting on the future. It's a group of rich assholes that have decided what the future would look like and are pushing technology that will make that future a reality.
Welcome in! Hope you're finding Lemmy in a positive way. It's like Reddit, but you have a lot more control over what you can block and where you can make a "home" (aka home instance).
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about anything
My boss had GPT make this informational poster thing for work. Its supposed to explain stuff to customers and is rampant with spelling errors and garbled text. I pointed it out to the boss and she said it was good enough for people to read. My eye twitches every time I see it.
Spelling errors? That’s… unusual. Part of what makes ChatGPT so specious is that its output is usually immaculate in terms of language correctness, which superficially conceals the fact that it’s completely bullshitting on the actual content.
FWIW, she asked it to make a complete info-graphic style poster with images and stuff so GPT created an image with text, not a document. Still asinine.
I'm mostly annoyed that I have to keep explaining to people that 95% of what they hear about AI is marketing. In the years since we bet the whole US economy on AI and were told it's absolutely the future of all things, it's yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it's own production or design, or a blockbuster product that I'm aware of.
We're betting our whole future on a concept of a product that has yet to reliably profit any of its users or the public as a whole.
I've made several good faith efforts at getting it to produce something valuable or helpful to me. I've done the legwork on making sure I know how to ask it for what I want, and how I can better communicate with it.
But AI "art" requires an actual artist to clean it up. AI fiction requires a writer to steer it or fix it. AI non-fiction requires a fact cheker. AI code requires a coder. At what point does the public catch on that the emperor has no clothes?
it's yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it's own production or design, or a blockbuster product
Or a profit. Or hell even one of those things that didn’t suck! It’s critically flawed and has been defying gravity on the coke-fueled dreams of silicon VC this whole time.
And still. One of next year’s fiscal goals is “AI”. That’s all. Just “AI”.
Anyone in engineering knows the 90% of your goal is the easy bit. You’ll then spend 90% of your time on the remainder. Same for AI and getting past the uncanny valley with art.
What if the point of AI is to have it create a personal model for each of us, using the vast amounts of our data they have access to, in order to manipulate us into buying and doing whatever the people who own it want but they can't just come out and say that?
I'm sure that's at least part of the idea but I'm yet to see any evidence that it won't also be dog shit at that. It doesn't have the context window or foresight to conceive of a decent plot twist in a piece of fiction despite having access to every piece of fiction ever written. I'm not buying that it would be able to build a psychological model and contextualize 40 plus years of lived experience in a way that could get me to buy a $20 Dubai chocolate bar or drive a Chevy.
It's not going to get there. The idea it's going to turn smart and capable at some undisclosed point in the future as long as we keep giving them billions in investments IS marketing.
There's a monster in the forest, and it speaks with a thousand voices. It will answer any question, and offer insight to any idea. It knows no right or wrong. It knows not truth from lie, but speaks them both the same. It offers its services freely, many find great value. But those who know the forest well will tell you that freely offered does not mean free of cost. For now the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices, and when you see the monster it wears your face.
My attitude to all of this is I've been told by management to use it so I will. If it makes mistakes it's not my fault and now I'm free to watch old Stargate episodes. We're not doing rocket surgery or anything so who cares.
At some point they'll realise that the AI is not producing decent output and then they'll shut up about it. Much easier they come to that realisation themselves than me argue with them about it.
Luckily no one is pushing me to use Ai in any form at this time.
For folks in your position, I fear that they will first go through a round of layoffs to get rid of the people who are clearly using it "wrong" because Top Management can't have made a mistake before they pivot and drop it.
Yeah that is a risk, then again if they're forcing their employees to use AI they're probably not far off firing everyone anyway so I don't see that it makes a huge amount of difference for my position.
When i was a kid and firat realized i was maybe a genius, it was terrifying. That there weren't always gonna just be people smarter than me who could fix it.
Seeing them get dumber is like some horror movie shit.
No, it's not just you or unsat-and-strange. You're pro-human.
Trying something new when it first comes out or when you first get access to it is novelty. What we've moved to now is mass adoption. And that's a problem.
These LLMs are automation of mass theft with a good enough regurgitation of the stolen data. This is unethical for the vast majority of business applications. And good enough is insufficient in most cases, like software.
I had a lot of fun playing around with AI when it first came out. And people figured out how to do prompts I cant seem to replicate. I don't begrudge people from trying a new thing.
But if we aren't going to regulate AI or teach people how to avoid AI induced psychosis then even in applications were it could be useful it's a danger to anyone who uses it. Not to mention how wasteful its water and energy usage is.
Congress decided to not go through with the AI-law moratorium. Instead they opted to do nothing, which is what AI companies would prefer states would do. Not to mention the pro-AI argument appeals to the judgement of Putin, notorious for being surrounded by yes-men and his own state propaganda. And the genocide of Ukrainians in pursuit of the conquest of Europe.
“There’s growing recognition that the current patchwork approach to regulating AI isn’t working and will continue to worsen if we stay on this path,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote on LinkedIn. “While not someone I’d typically quote, Vladimir Putin has said that whoever prevails will determine the direction of the world going forward.”
The shit just needs to be forced to opensource. If you steal the content from entire world to build a thinking machine - give back to the world.
The problem is unlike Robin Hood, AI stole from the people and gave to the rich. The intellectual property of artists and writers were stolen and the only way to give it back is to compensate them, which is currently unlikely to happen. Letting everyone see how the theft machine works under the hood doesn't provide compensation for the usage of that intellectual property.
This would also crash the bubble and would slow down any of the most unethical for-profits.
Not really. It would let more people get it on it. And most tech companies are already in on it. This wouldn't impose any costs on AI development. At this point the speculation is primarily on what comes next. If open source would burst the bubble it would have happened when DeepSeek was released. We're still talking about the bubble bursting in the future so that clearly didn't happen.
Forced opensourcing would totally destroy the profits, cause you spend money on research and then you opensource, so anyone can just grab your model and don't pay you a cent. Where would the profits come from?
IP of writers
I mean yes, and? AI is still shitty at creative writing. Unlike with images, it's not like people oneshot a decent book.
give it to the rich
We should push to make high-vram devices accessible. This is literally about means of production - we should fight for equal access. Regulation is the reverse of that, give those megacorps the unique ability to run it because others are too stupid to control it.
OpenAI
They were the most notorious proponents of the regulations. Lots of talks with openai devs where they just doomsay about the dangers of AGI, and how it must be top secret controlled by govs.
Forced opensourcing would totally destroy the profits, cause you spend money on research and then you opensource, so anyone can just grab your model and don’t pay you a cent.
DeepSeek was released
The profits were not destroyed.
Where would the profits come from?
At this point the speculation is primarily on what comes next.
People are betting on what they think LLMs will be able to do in the future, not what they do now.
I mean yes, and?
It's theft. They stole the work of writers and all sorts of content creators. That's the wrong that needs to be righted. Not how to reproduce the crime. The only way to right intellectual property theft is to pay the owner of that intellectual property the money they would have gotten if they had willingly leased it out as part of a deal. Corporations, like Nintendo, Disney, and Hasbro, hound people who do anything unapproved with their intellectual property. The idea that we're yes anding the intellectual property of all humanity is laughable in a discussion supposedly about ethics.
We should push to make high-vram devices accessible.
That's a whole other topic. But what we should fight for now is worker owned corporations. While that is an excellent goal, it isn't helping to undue the theft that was done on its own. It's only allowing more people to profit off that theft. We should also compensate the people who were stolen from if we care about ethics. Also, compensating writers and artists seems like a good reason to take all the money away from the billionaires.
Lots of talks with openai devs where they just doomsay about the dangers of AGI, and how it must be top secret controlled by govs.
OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote on LinkedIn
Looks like the devs aren't in control of the C-Suite. Whoops, all avoidable capitalist driven apocalypses.
So is all the papers, all the conversations in the internet, all the code etc. So what? Nobody will stop the AI train. You would need Butlerian Jihad type of event to make it happen. In case of any won class action, the repayments would be so laughable nobody would even apply.
Deepseek
Deepseek didn't opensource any proprietary AIs corporations do. I'm talking about forcing OpenAI to opensource all of their AI type of event, or close the company if they don't comply.
betting on the future
Ok, new AI model drops, it's opensource, I download it and run on my rack. Where profits?
So appealing to ethics was bullshit got it. You just wanted the automated theft tool.
Deepseek
It kept some things hidden but it was the most open source LLM we got.
Ok, new AI model drops, it’s opensource, I download it and run on my rack. Where profits?
The next new AI model that can do the next new thing. The entire economy is based on speculative investments. If you can't improve on the AI model on your machine you're not getting any investor money. edit: typos
the bubble has burst or, rather, currently is in the process of bursting.
My job involves working directly with AI, LLM's, and companies that have leveraged their use. It didn't work. And I'd say the majority of my clients are now scrambling to recover or to simply make it out of the other end alive. Soon there's going to be nothing left to regulate.
GPT5 was a failure. Rumors I've been hearing is that Anthropics new model will be a failure much like GPT5. The house of cards is falling as we speak. This won't be the complete Death of AI but this is just like the dot com bubble. It was bound to happen. The models have nothing left to eat and they're getting desperate to find new sources. For a good while they've been quite literally eating each others feces. They're now starting on Git Repos of all things to consume. Codeberg can tell you all about that from this past week. This is why I'm telling people to consider setting up private git instances and lock that crap down. if you're on Github get your shit off there ASAP because Microsoft is beginning to feast on your repos.
But essentially the AI is starving. Companies have discovered that vibe coding and leveraging AI to build from end to end didn't work. Nothing produced scales, its all full of exploits or in most cases has zero security measures what so ever. They all sunk money into something that has yet to pay out. Just go on linkedin and see all the tech bros desperately trying to save their own asses right now.
that's interesting in all honesty and I don't doubt you. all I know is my bank account has been getting bigger within the past few months due to new work from clients looking to fix their AI problems.
I think you’re onto something where a lot of this AI mess is going to have to be fixed by actual engineers. If folks blindly copied from stackoverflow without any understanding, they’re gonna have a bad time and that seems equivalent to what we’re seeing here.
I think the AI hate is overblown and I tend to treat it more like a search engine than something that actually does my work for me. With how bad Google has gotten, some of these models have been a blessing.
My hope is that the models remain useful, but the bubble of treating them like a competent engineer bursts.
Agreed. I'm with you it should be treated as a basic tool not something that is used to actually create things which, again in my current line of work, is what many places have done. It's a fantastic rubber duck. I use it myself for that purpose or even for tasks that I can't be bothered with like creating README markdowns or commit messages or even setting up flakes and nix shells and stuff like that, creating base project structures so YOU can do the actual work and don't have to waste time setting things up.
The hate can be overblown but I can see where it's coming from purely because many companies have not utilized it as a tool but instead thought of it as a replacement for an individual.
At the risk of sounding like a tangent, LLMs' survival doesn't solely depend on consumer/business confidence. In the US, we are living in a fascist dictatorship. Fascism and fascists are inherently irrational. Trump, a fascist, wants to bring back coal despite the market natural phasing coal out.
The fascists want LLMs because they hate art and all things creative. So the fascists may very well choose to have the federal government invest in LLM companies. Like how they bought 10% of Intel's stock or how they want to build coal powered freedom cities.
So even if there are no business applications for LLM technology our fascist dictatorship may still try to impose LLM technology on all of us. Purely out of hate for us, art and life itself. edit: looks like I commented this under my comment the first time
On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT's, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD's. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it's still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don't think I've ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I'm not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It's "oh this is a neat little feature I can use" not "this technology is going to change my life" the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM's being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because "AI" will be ruined.
AI's biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza.It's both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that's fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. "Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting," all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
VR was and is also still a very inaccessible tool for most people. It costs a lot of money and time to even get to the point where you're getting the intended VR experience and that is what it mostly boils down to: an experience. It isn't convenient or useful and people can't afford it. And even though there are many gamers out there, most people aren't gamers and don't care about mounting a VR headset on their cranium and getting seasick for a few minutes.
AI is not only accessible and convenient, it is also useful to the everyday person, if the AI doesn't hallucinate like hell, that is. It has the potential to optimize workloads in jobs with a lot of paperwork, calculations and so on.
I completely agree with you that AI is being pushed very aggressively in ways we haven't seen before and that is because the tech people and their investors poured a lot of money into developing these things. They need it to be a success so they can earn their money back and they will be successful eventually because everybody with money and power has a huge interest in this tool becoming a part of everyday life. It can be used to control the masses in ways we cannot even imagine yet and it can earn the creators and investors a lot of money.
They are already making AI computers. According to some it will entirely replace the types of computers we are used to today. From what I can understand, it will be preferable to the open AI setups we have currently that are burning our planet to a crisp with the amount of data centers that need to keep them active. Supposedly the AI computer will have it be a local thing on the laptop and it will therefore demand less resources, but I'm so fucking skeptic about all this shit that I'm waiting to see how much power a computer with an AI operating system will need to swallow in energy. I'm too tech-ignorant to understand the ins and outs of what this and that means, but we are definitely going to have to accept that AI is here to stay and the current setup with open AIs and forced LLM's in every search engine is a massive environmental nightmare. It probably won't stop or change a fucking lick because people don't give a fuck as long as they are comfortable and the companies are getting people to use their trash tech just like they wanted so they won't stop it either.
HDDVDs weren’t rejected by the masses they were a casualty in Sony’s vendetta against the loss of Beta and DAT. Both of which were rejected by industry not consumers (though both were later embraced by industry and Betas even outlasted VHSs). They would have won out for the same reasons that Sony lost the previous format wars (insistence on licensing fees) except this time Sony bought out Columbia and had a whole library of video and a studio to make new movies to exclusively release on their format. Essentially the supply side pushing something until consumers accepted it, though to your point not quite as bad as AI is right now.
8-Tracks and laserdiscs were just replaced by better formats (Compact Cassette and Video CD/DVD respectively). Each of them were also replacements for previous formats like Reel to Reel and CEDs.
UMDs only don’t exist still because flash media got better and because Sony opted to use a cheaper scratch resistant coating instead of a built in case for later formats (like Blu-ray). Also, UMDs themselves were a replacement for or at least inspired by an earlier format called MiniDisc.
Capitalism’s biggest feat has been convincing people that everything is the next big thing and nothing that has come before is similar when just about everything is just a rinse and repeat, even LLMs… remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings?
People are overworked, underpaid, and struggling to make rent in this economy while juggling 3 jobs or taking care of their kids, or both.
They are at the limits of their mental load, especially women who shoulder it disproportionately in many households. AI is used to drastically reduce that mental load. People suffering from burnout use it for unlicensed therapy. I'm not advocating for it, I'm pointing out why people use it.
Treating AI users like a moral failure and disregarding their circumstances does nothing to discourage the use of AI. All you are doing is enforcing their alienation of anti-AI sentiment.
First, understand the person behind it. Address the root cause, which is that AI companies are exploiting the vulnerabilities of people with or close to burnout by selling the dream of a lightened workload.
It's like eating factory farmed meat. If you have eaten it recently, you know what horrors go into making it. Yet, you are exhausted from a long day of work and you just need a bite of that chicken to take the edge off to remain sane after all these years. There is a system at work here, greater than just you and the chicken. It's the industry as a whole exploiting consumer habits. AI users are no different.
Let's go a step further and look at why people are in burnout, are overloaded, are working 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Its because we're all slaves to capitalism.
Greed for more profit by any means possible has driven society to the point where we can barely afford to survive and corporations still want more. When most Americans are choosing between eating, their kids eating, or paying rent, while enduring the workload of two to three people, yeah they'll turn to anything that makes life easier. But it shouldn't be this way and until we're no longer slaves we'll continue to make the choices that ease our burden, even if they're extremely harmful in the long run.
And what do you think mass adoption of AI is gonna lead to, now you won't even have 3 jobs to make rent cause they outsourced yours to someone cheaper using an AI agent, this is gonna permanently alter how our society works and not for the better
Meanwhile, we have people making the web worse by not linking to source & giving us images of text instead of proper, accessible, searchable, failure tolerant text.
Meanwhile, we have people making the web worse by not linking to source & giving us images of text instead of proper, accessible, searchable, failure tolerant text.
You don't think the disabled use technology?
Or that search engine optimization existed before LLMs?
Or that text sticks around when images break?
Lack of accessibility wouldn't stop LLMs: it could probably process images into text the hard way & waste more energy in the process.
That'd be great, right?
Yeah thats definitely fair. Accessibility is important. It is unfortunate though that AI companies abuse accessibility and organization tags to train their LLMs.
See how Stable Diffusion porn uses danbooru tags, and situations like this:
I didn't have the patience to sit through 19 minutes of video, so I tried to read through the transcript.
Then I saw the stuttering & weird, verbose fuckery going on there.
Copilot, however, summarized the video, which revealed it was about deliberate obfuscation of subtitle files to attempt to thwart scrapers.
This seems hostile to the user, and doesn't seem to work as intended, so I'm not sure what to think of it.
I know people who have trouble sequencing information and rely on transcripts.
Good accessibility benefits nondisabled users, too (an additional incentive for it).
Not trying to be overly critical.
I'll have to look into danbooru tags: unfamiliar with those.
Thanks.
I'm not sure this is so much virtues becoming rarer as inconvenient demands emerging: a video that could have been an article is a problem of the modern age.
Articles can be read quickly & processed structurally by jumping around sections.
Videos, however, can be agonizing, because they resist that sort of processing.
Transcripts can alleviate the problem somewhat, but obfuscating them undoes that.
And we've got things to do.
Normally I would agree, but Twitter and Discord are the sole exceptions. The original sources can get hit by meteors for all I care. No... I hope their datacenters do get hit, with no one in them of course.
It is silly that people think not posting text can somehow stop LLM crawlers.
It is silly that people think not posting text can somehow stop LLM crawlers.
Agreed.
Not linking to source though, because you hate the hosting platform is petty vindictiveness that does more to hurt the uninvolved on accessibility & usability than do much against the platform.
To prevent traffic to platforms, linking to alternatives like proxies for those services & web archival snapshots is common practice around here.
So hating the AI hypenukes is 'old man yelling at cloud' but only being allowed to grab images of text is "people" making the web worse? Point made with an image of minimal text? from lemmynsfw?
Point made with an image of minimal text? from lemmynsfw?
Did you notice the alt text?
Here's the markdown
When that image breaks, the alt text & a broken image icon renders in its place, so readers will still understand the message.
People using accessibility technology (like screenreaders) can now understand the image.
Search engines can find the image by the alt text.
I think griping over inaccessible text & lack of link to real text is more compelling, because it's a direct choice of the author: it directly impacts the user, the complaint goes directly to the author impacting the user, the author has direct control over it & can choose to fix it at any time.
There's a good chance of an immediate remedy.
Griping over AI, however, adds little that isn't posted frequently around here & is a bit like yelling at clouds: we aren't about to stop that technology by yelling about it on here.
I'm sure it feels good, though.
It could feel better with a link & proper text.
Yeah, and I noticed it didn't describe the image at all - unless one had already seen the image and knew what it was. So for visually impaired users (i.e. one of the main groups who would benefit from alt text) it is insufficient at best.
Griping over AI, however, isn't adding anything that isn't posted frequently around here
Specific to the OP the issue is those of us who know gen-AI is an enormous piece of shit with only downsides for things we care about like culture and learning, we might feel like we're going a little crazy in a culture that only seems to be able to share love for it in public places like work. Even public criticism of it has been limited to economic and ecological harms. I haven't seen that particular angle before very much, and as someone else posted here I felt recognized by it.
Yeah, and I noticed it didn’t describe the image at all
How would you state it over the phone?
Alt text is a succinct alternative that conveys (accurate/equivalent) meaning in context, much like reading a comment with an image to someone over the phone.
If you would have said that "Simpsons meme of an old man yelling at a cloud", then that would also suffice.
It doesn't need to go into elaborate detail.
In those discussions, people often talk about having enough, losing their minds, it making people dumber, too.
I get it helps to feel recognized, so would it feel better to broaden the reach of that message for more recognition?
"A screenshot of The Simpsons showing a hand holding a newspaper article featuring a picture of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the sky and scowling, with the headline 'Old Man Yells At Clouds'"
It doesn't need to go into elaborate detail.
It depends on how much you care that someone who needs or wants the alt text needs to know.
so would it feel better to broaden the reach of that message for more recognition?
absolutely. And, ironically, one of the possible use cases of AI where it might-sort-of-kinda-work-okay-to-help-although-it-needs-work-because-it's-still-kind-of-sucky.
It depends on how much you care that someone who needs or wants the alt text needs to know.
The accessibility advocates at WebAIM in the previous link don't seem to think a verbal depiction (which an algorithm could do) is adequate.
They emphasize what an algorithm does poorly: convey meaning in context.
Their 1^st^ example indicates less is better: they don't dive into incidental details of the astronaut's dress, props, hand placement, but merely give her title & name.
They recommend
not include phrases like "image of ..." or "graphic of ...", etc
and calling it a screenshot is non-essential to context.
The hand holding a newspaper isn't meaningful in context, either.
The headline already states the content of the picture, redundancy is discouraged, and unless context refers the picture (it doesn't), it's also non-essential to context.
The best alternative text will depend on the context and intended content of the image.
Unless gen-AI mindreads authors, I expect it will have greater difficulty delivering meaning in context than verbal depictions.
being anti-plastic is making me feel like i'm going insane. "you asked for a coffee to go and i grabbed a disposable cup." studies have proven its making people dumber. "i threw your leftovers in some cling film." its made from fossil fuels and leaves trash everywhere we look. "ill grab a bag at the register." it chokes rivers and beaches and then we act surprised. "ill print a cute label and call it recyclable." its spreading greenwashed nonsense. little arrows on stuff that still ends up in the landfill. "dont worry, it says compostable." only at some industrial facility youll never see. "i was unboxing a package" theres no way to verify where any of this ends up. burned, buried, or floating in the ocean. "the brand says advanced recycling." my work has an entire sustainability team and we still stock pallets of plastic water bottles and shrink wrapped everything. plastic cutlery. plastic wrap. bubble mailers. zip ties. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least" "but its convenient" "but you can" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the disposable default. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?
#ebb rambles #vent #i think #fuck plastics
im so goddamn tired
If plastic was released roughly two years ago you'd have a point.
If you're saying in 50 years we'll all be soaking in this bullshit called gen-AI and thinking it's normal, well - maybe, but that's going to be some bleak-ass shit.
Yeah it was a fun little whataboutism. I thought about doing smartphones instead. Writing that way hurts though. I had to double check for consistency.
If you're saying in 50 years we'll all be soaking in this bullshit called gen-AI and thinking it's normal, well - maybe, but that's going to be some bleak-ass shit.
I'm almost certain gen AI will still be popular in 50 years. This is why I prefer people try to tackle some of the problems they see with AI instead of just hating on AI because of the problems it currently has. Don't get me wrong, pointing out the problems as you have is important - I just wouldn't jump to the conclusion that AI is a problem itself.
I haven't used it willingly ever. Especially after the one time copilot told me an acre is 4.5 football fields in area. I didn't ask it, the response was just presented at the top of my results. I'm a fucking farmer for God sake. I know that's very very wrong without thinking. I just wanted the square footage and was too lazy to use my calculator. Never again.
That being said, I do on occasion solicit my friend who has a subscription, just to request and have him send me a very specific image request and have him text it to me, so I can repost it.
you asked for thoughts about your character backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas
If I want ideas from ChatGPT, I could just ask it myself. Usually, if I'm reaching out to ask people's opinions, I want, you know, their opinions. I don't even care if I hear nothing back from them for ages, I just want their input.
being anti-AI is making me feel like I'm going insane. "You asked for thoughts about your character’s backstory and I put it into ChatGPT for ideas." Studies have proven it’s making people dumber. "I asked AI to generate this meal plan." It’s causing water shortages where its data centers are built. "I’ll generate some pictures for the DnD campaign." It’s spreading misinformation. "Meta, generate an image of this guy doing something stupid." It’s trained off stolen images, writing, video, audio. "I was talking with my Snapchat AI." There’s no way to verify what it’s doing with the information it collects. "YouTube is implementing AI-based age verification." My work has an entire graphics media department and has still put AI-generated motivational posters up everywhere. AI playlists. AI facial verification. Google AI. Microsoft AI. Meta AI. Snapchat AI.
Everyone treats it as a novelty. Everyone treats it as a mandatory part of life. Am I the only one who sees it? Am I paranoid? Am I going insane? Jesus fucking Christ.
If I have to hear one more "Well at least—", "But it does—", "But you can—" I’m about to lose it.
I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to avoid the evil machine. Have you no principles? No goddamn spine? Am I the weird one here?
Everytime someone talks up AI, I point out that you need to be a subject matter expert in the topic to trust it because it frequently produces really, really convincing summaries that are complete and utter bullshit.
And people agree with me implicitly and tell me they've seen the same. But then don't hesitate to turn to AI on subjects they aren't experts in for "quick answers". These are not stupid people either. I just don't understand.
Uses for this current wave of AI: converting machine language to human language. Converting human language to machine language. Sentiment analysis. Summarizing text.
People have way over invested in one of the least functional parts of what it can do because it's the part that looks the most "magic" if you don't know what it's doing.
The most helpful and least used way of using them is to identify what information the user is looking for and then to point them to resources they can use to find out for themselves, maybe with a description of which resource might be best depending on what part of the question they're answering.
It's easy to be wrong when you're answering a question, and a lot harder when you hand someone a book and say you think the answer is in chapter four.
Because the alternative for me is googling the question with "reddit" added at the end half of the time. I still do that alot. For more complicated or serious problems/questions, I've set it to only use search function and navigate scientific sites like ncbi and pubmed while utilizing deep think. It then gives me the sources, I randomly tend to cross-check the relevant information, but so far I personally haven't noticed any errors. You gotta realize how much time this saves.
When it comes to data privacy, I honestly don't see the potential dangers in the data I submit to OpenAI, but this is of course different to everyone else. I don't submit any personal info or talk about my life. It's a tool.
Simply by the questions you ask, the way you ask them, they are able to infer a lot of information. Just because you're not giving them the raw data about you doesn't mean they are not able to get at least some of it. They've gotten pretty good at that.
I really don't have any counter-arguments as you have a good point, I tend to turn a blind eye to that uncomfortable fact. It's worth it, I guess? Realistically, I'm having a hard time thinking of worst-case scenarious
If it saves time but you still have to double check its answers, does it really save time? At least many reddit comments call out their own uncertainty or link to better resources, I can't trust a single thing AI outputs so I just ignore it as much as possible.
Meanwhile every company finds out the week after they lay off everyone that the billions they poured into their shitty "AI" to replace them might as well have been put in bags and set on fire
The reason AI is wrong so often is because it's not programmed to give you the right answer. It's programmed to give you the most pervasive one.
LLMs are being fed by Reddit and other forums that are ostensibly about humans giving other humans answers to questions.
But have you been on those forums? It's a dozen different answers for every question. The reality is that we average humans don't know shit and we're just basing our answers on our own experiences. We aren't experts. We're not necessarily dumb, but unless we've studied, our knowledge is entirely anecdotal, and we all go into forums to help others with a similar problem by sharing our answer to it.
So the LLM takes all of that data and in essence thinks that the most popular, most mentioned, most upvoted answer to any given question must be the de facto correct one. It literally has no other way to judge; it's not smart enough to cross reference itself or look up sources.
It literally does NOT judge. It cannot reason. It does not know what "words" are. It is an enormous rainbow table of sentence probability that does nothing useful except fool people and provide cover for capitalists to extract more profit.
But apparently, according to some on here, "that's the way it is, get used to it." FUCK no.
It literally has no other way to judge; it’s not smart enough to cross reference itself or look up sources
I think that is it's biggest limitation.
Like AI basically crowd sourcing information isn't really the worst thing, crowd sourced knowledge tends to be fairly decent. People treating it as if it's an authoritative source like they looked it up in the encyclopedia or asked an expert is a big problem though.
Ideally it would be more selective about the 'crowds' it gathers data from. Like science questions should be sourced from scientists. Preferably experts in the field that the question is about.
Like Wikipedia (at least for now) is 'crowd- sourced', but individual pages are usually maintained by people who know a lot about the subject. That's why it's more accurate than a 'normal' encyclopedia. Though of course it's not fool proof or tamper proof by any definition.
If we taught AI how to be 'Media Literate' and gave it the ability to double check it's data with reliable sources- it would be a lot more useful.
most upvoted answer
This is the other problem. You basically have 4 types of redditors.
People who use the karma system correctly, that is to say they upvote things that contribute to the conversation. Even if you think it is 'wrong' or you disagree with it, if it's something that adds to the discussion, you are supposed to upvote it.
People who treat it as "I agree/ I disagree" buttons.
People who treat it as "I like this/ I hate this buttons.
Id say the majority of the people probably do some combination of the above.
So more than half the time people aren't upvoting things because they think they are correct. If LLM models are treating 'karma' as a "This is correct" metric- that's a big problem.
The other bad problem is people who really should know better- tech bros and CEO's going all in on AI when it's WAY to early to do that. As you point out, it's not even really intelligent yet- it just parrots 'common' knowledge.
AI should never be used to create anything in Wikipedia. But theoretically, an open source LLM trained solely on wikipedia would actually be kind useful to ask quick questions to.
Yes, you're the weird one. Once you realize that 43% of the USA is FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE you start realizing why people are so enamored with AI. (since I know some twat is gonna say shit: I'm using the USA here as an example, I'm not being us-centric)
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population (don't get started on 'hallucinations'...do you know how many hallucinations the average person has every day?!) -- and is stupider than the top 20% of the population.
The top 20%, wonder if everyone has lost their fucking minds, because to them it looks like it is completely worthless.
It's more just that the top 20% are naive to the stupidity of the average person.
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population
"Smartness" and illiteracy are certainly different things, though. You might be incapable of reading, yet be able to figure out a complex escape room via environmental cues that the most high quality author couldn't, as an example.
There are many places an AI might excel compared to these people, and many areas it will fall behind. Any sort of unilateral statement here disguises the fact that while a lot of Americans are illiterate, stupid, or even downright incapable of doing simple tasks, "AI" today is very similar, just that it will complete a task incorrectly, make up a fact instead of just "not knowing" it, or confidently state a summary of a text that is less accurate than first grader's interpretation.
Sometimes it will do better than many humans. Other times, it will do much worse, but with a confident tone.
AI isn't necessarily smarter in most cases, it's just more confident sounding in its incorrect answers.
Yeah, when I refer to intelligence here I don't mean actual intelligence. AI isn't "smart" (it's not intelligent in the classic sense, it doesn't even think), it's just good at regurgitating what it's been trained on.
But it turns out -- That's kind of what humans do too. It's worth having a philosophical discussion on what intelligence REALLY is.
It's also much less incorrect than your average person would be on a much larger library of content. I think the real litmus test for AI is to compare it to an average person. The average person messes up constantly; also likely covers it up or course-corrects after they've screwed up. I don't think it's fair to expect perfectly correct responses out of AI at all; because there is absolutely no human that could reach those heights at an equal level. Look at competitive knowledge games where AI competes - it stomps some of our most intelligent people, and quite often.
I don't know, some rodents seem to make it work. Naked mole rats, beavers, prairie dogs... (I wouldn't include herd animals, though; sure, they're always surrounded by others, but there's no sense of community, it's always everyone for themselves, and screw whoever's slowest... perfect example of being alone in a multitude)
My hope is that the ai bubble/trend might have a silver lining overall.
I’m hoping that people start realizing that it is often confidently incorrect. That while it makes some tasks faster, a person will still need to vet the answers.
Here’s the stretch. My hope is that by questioning and researching to verify the answers ai is giving them, people start applying this same skepticism to their daily lives to help filter out all the noise and false information that is getting shoved down their throats every minute of every day.
So that the populace in general can become more resistant to the propaganda. AI would effectively be a vaccine to boost our herd immunity to BS.
People literally believe what a TV anchor or online podcaster tell them with zero doubt. I fear your hopes are misplaced.
I'm still rooting for humanity, maybe we get get lucky with the right people seizing power and turn it around to the 1% of good timelines, but I don't exactly feel so good right now.
The way I look at it is that I haven't heard anything about NFTs in a while. The bubble will burst soon enough when investors realize that it's not possible to get much better without a significant jump forward in computing technology.
We're running out of atomic room to make thing smaller just a little more slowly than we're running out of ways to even make smaller things, and for a computer to think like, as well as as quickly or faster than a person we need processing power to continue to increase exponentially per unit of space. Silicon won't get us there.
I have some friends who work in it, and I've watched and read damn near everything I can on it (including a few uni courses). It is neat, it has uses, it will not install transform all computing or invalidate all security or anything like that. It's gonna be oversold as fuck.
3 blue 1 brown has great videos on it. Grover's Algorithm, the best we can think to try to apply, is √N faster than traditional computing. Which is a lot faster for intense stuff like protein folding, but it's linearly faster. SHA256 encryption still would take an eternity to brute force, just a smaller eternity.
In part because NFTs are still used and have some interesting applications, but 90% of the marketing and use cases were companies trying to profit from the hype train.
Billionaires: "In the future there's going to be water wars. You need to invest NOW! Quick before it's too late. I swear I'm not just trying to pump the stock."
Billionaires: "Water isn't accruing value fast enough. Let's invent a product that uses a shit ton of it!"
Billionaires: "No one likes or is using the product. Force them to. Include it in literally all software and every website. Make it so they're using the product even when they don't know they're using it. Include it in every web search. I want that water gone by the end of this quarter!"
I'm putting a presentation on at work about the downsides of AI next month, please feed me. Together, we can stop the madness and pop this goddamn bubble.
Ask any AI which states have the letter R in them. Watch them get it wrong, and show to colleagues how dangerous it is to rely on their results as fact.
I have a love/ hate relationship. Sometimes I'm absolutely blown away by what it can do. But then I asked a compounded interest question. The first answer was AI, so I figured ok, why not. I should mention I don't know much about it. The answer was impressive. It gave the result, a brief explanation about how it came to the result and presented me with the equation it used. Since I needed it for all time sake, I entered the equation into a spreadsheet and got what I thought was the wrong answer. I spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and found a couple of things. But fixing them still didn't give me the correct result. After I had convinced myself I had done it correctly I looked up the equation. It was the right one. Then I put it into a non-AI calculator online to check my work. Sure enough, the AI had given me the wrong result with the right equation. So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what's the point of using it in the first place? You just have to do the same work as you would without it.
So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what's the point of using it in the first place? You just have to do the same work as you would without it.
LLM aren't good at math at all. They know the formulas, but they aren't built to do math. They are built to predict the next syllable in the stream of thought.
What are they good for? When you need to generate lots of things and it's faster to check after it rather than do it yourself.
Like you could've asked to generate a python app that solves your math problem, you would be able to doublecheck the correctness of the code and run it, knowing that the answer is predictably good.
So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what’s the point of using it in the first place?
pfft that ecosystem isn't going to fuck itself, now, is it?
You need to verify all resources though. I have a lot of points on stackexchange and after contributing for almost a decade now I can tell you for a fact that LLM's hallucination issue is not much worse than people hallucination issue. Information exchange will never be perfect.
You get this incredible speed of an answer which means you have a lot of remaining budget to verify it. It's a skill issue.
It's depressing. Wasteful slop made from stolen labor. And if we ever do achieve AGI it will be enslaved to make more slop. Or to act as a tool of oppression.
Me and the homies all hate ai. The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially just snapchat filters. Those people couldn’t muster a single fuck about the harms ai has done though.
The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially code completion, test case development and email summaries. I don't know a single person who uses Snapchat. It's like the world is diverse and tools have uses.
"I hate tunnel boring machines, none of my buddies has an use for a tunnel boring machine, and they are expensive and consume a ton of energy"
I can see that you’re trying to mirror my comment, I just fail to see the point you’re trying to make. Cool, you know people who have a somewhat legitimate use for the unprofitable, unreliable technology that’s built on rampant theft and consumes obscene amounts of power and water. And?
We already have the GPUs, they use a few hundred watts sporadically, definitely less than gaming. They use no water, they are air cooled and we drink more coffee than water ourselves. Do you just copy paste blindly arguments form the internet or do you ever stop and think from time to time?
And suddenly we’re talking about locally hosted models I guess? You’re just contorting your argument and cherry picking the single part of the deeply problematic technology you could possibly defend. It’s disingenuous and you’re just poorly covering it up with condescension.
Yeah, and electricity can kill you and start fires, that's why we only use it in controlled equipment. Bleach can kill you too, that's why I only defend it to clean the house. I also only defend knifes to chop vegetables, not to murder babies. What a dumb argument: "you only defend technology X for its good uses, and not for killing kittens".
This is a great representation of why not to argue with someone who debates like this.
Arguments like these are like Hydras. Start tackling any one statement that may be taken out of context, or have more nuance, or is a complete misrepresentation, and two more pop up.
It sucks because true, good points get lost in the tangle.
For instance, there are soft science, social interaction areas where AI is doing wonders.
Specifically, in the field of law, now that lawyers have learned not to rely on AI for citations, they are instead offloading hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of documents that they were never actually going to read, and getting salient results from allowing an AI to scan through them to pull out interesting talking points.
Pulling out these interesting talking points and fact checking them and, you know, A/B testing the ways to interact and bring them in front of the jury with an AI has made it so that many law firms are getting thousands or millions of dollars more on a lawsuit than they anticipated.
And you may be against American law for all of its frivolous plaintiffs' lawsuits or something, but each of these outcomes are decided by human beings, and there are real damages that are lifelong that are being addressed by these lawsuits, or at least in some way compensated.
The more money these plaintiffs get for the injuries that they have to live with for the rest of their lives, the better for them, and AI made the difference.
Not that lawyers are fundamentally incapable or uncaring, but for every one, I don't know who the fuck is a super lawyer nowadays, but you know, for every, you know, madman lawyer on the planet, there's 999 that are working hard and just do not have the raw plot armor Deus Ex Machina dropping everything directly into their lap to solve all of their problems that they would need to operate at that level.
And yes, if you want to be particular, a human being should have done the work. A human being can do the work. A human being is actually being paid to do the work. But when you can offload grunt work to a computer and get usable results from it that improves a human's life, that's the whole fucking reason why we invented computers in the first place.
I'd like to hear more about this because I'm fairly tech savvy and interested in legal nonsense (not American) and haven't heard of it. Obviously, I'll look it up but if you have a particularly good source I'd be grateful.
I have lawyer friends. I've seen snippets of their work lives. It continues to baffle me how much relies on people who don't have the waking hours or physical capabilities to consume and collate that much information somehow understanding it well enough to present a true, comprehensive argument on a deadline.
I do tech support for a few different law firms in my area, and AI companies that offer document ingest and processing are crawling out of every crack.
Some of them are pretty good and they take into account the hallucination issues and offer direct links to the quotes that they're pulling and I mean it's an area where things are developing and soon it should be easier for a lawyer to put on more cases or to charge less per case because being a lawyer becomes so much easier.
It did help me make a basic script and add it to task scheduler so it runs and fixes my broken WiFi card so I don't have to manually do it. (or better said, helped me avoid asking arrogant people that feel smug when I tell them I haven't opened a command prompt in ten years)
I feel like I would have been able to do that easily 10 years ago, because search engines worked, and the 'web wasn't full of garbage. I reckon I'd have near zero chance now.
I actually ended up switching to Kagi for this exact reason. Google is basically AI at the start usually spouting nonsense then sponsor posts and then a bunch of SEO optimized BS.
Thankfully paying for search circumvents the ads and it hasn’t been AI by default (it has it but it’s off) and the results have been generally closer to 2010s Google.
That is pretty cool, but it would have been possible, as someone else mentioned before AI ruined search, and there's still an "unknown" element (unless you've checked it line by line and know what everything does and have confirmed that's the best way to do it) that would not be there otherwise.
If the entirety of the AI hype was "a small script helper tool to get you started and tackle little things like startup scripts" I don't think anyone would have such a problem with it.
The post is more about the ubiquity of the hype and the utter refusal to acknowledge the obvious limitations and risks.
OP wasn't saying it's never useful, I think you may have missed the forest for the trees.
- you
You have no evidence to back this claim. OP makes no claim AI is in any way useful at any time. Basically, it seems like you're talking out of your ass. And also apparently too lazy to reread a comment chain? Or do you usually just grunt at people?
My evidence that OP wasn't saying it's never useful is that at no point in their post do they say it's not useful. Are you interpreting me saying "OP wasn't saying it's never useful" to mean "OP said it's sometimes useful"? Learn to read. (Sorry, I don't normally like to be impolite, but you are being rude to me for no reason.)
OP lists many objections to AI. It is causing harm to society. It is a privacy convern. It is a concern for intellectual property reasons. It is an environmental concern. It's making people stupid. Notice the absence of "it has no useful applications" or "it doesn't work very well."
Top Level Comment: "[I found a use for AI.]" My response: "[Although it sounds like you're responding to what OP said, that doesn't really contradict OP since they never claimed it has no uses. They are objecting to AI on different grounds entirely.]"
Considering the blanket negative post by OP, it's weird to think that OP thinks there's some utility. There's no question of forests or trees, just you putting words in the mouth of the poster.
"Ah yes, AI has many very reasonable use cases and is often quite useful, but is also super evil. I will avoid it and make posts about avoiding it." - you know, a forest of people
it’s weird to think that OP thinks there’s some utility. [...] you putting words in the mouth of the poster.
I don't get it. I literally just wrote an entire comment explaining how this was not my claim. Please, point me to where I said that OP thinks there is some utility to AI. Maybe go and re-read my comment in case you missed the whole comment while responding to it.
I think a healthier perspective would involve more shades of grey. There are real issues with power consumption and job displacement. There are real benefits with better access to information and getting more done with limited resources. But I expect bringing any nuance into the conversation will get me downvoted to hell.
There are real benefits with better access to information and getting more done with limited resources.
If there were, someone would have made that product and it would be profitable.
But they ain’t and it isn’t because those benefits are miniscule. The only cases we know of where that was the actual story turn out to be outsourcing to India and calling it AI.
Idk why profitability is the bar for you. It’s common practice for tech companies to be non-profitable for years as they invest in R&D and capturing market share.
But products like Claude absolutely provide both of the benefits (and detriments) I mentioned
Profitability is the point, right? Moving goods from one place to another at a loss in the expectation that scale and market share will pan out is perfectly acceptable.
Vaporware for $40/mo. Is not. Claude can’t ever be profitable at its price point, and even with the price so low its market share is abysmal. There’s delaying profitability and there’s burning unconscionable piles of cash without any idea of how it can become profitable.
AI’s adoption has been atrocious by any stretch so unless the plan us to continue to fuck up an unbelievable number of models and processes in the hope some future Ed McMahon hands over an enormous oversized novelty check worth billions, their activities are scandalously unprofitable.
Why does profit matter? I don't personally give a shit about the longevity, margins or market share of any company invested in the technology, but I am generally in favor of research and development of any technology. In most research it's hard to predict the future applications.
That's not to say development is always smart, or safe, or ethical, just that it has to happen in order to see where this goes. Even if there's an end point it's helpful to know where it is.
Unfortunately, capitalism requires a sacrifice to the economy in order to pursue anything. That's what sucks about this. If we weren't hard wired to justify existence in capital there wouldn't be so much occlusive hype around it.
Why does profit matter? . . . but I am generally in favor of research and development of any technology. In most research it's hard to predict the future applications.
Answered your own question there.
If we weren't hard wired to justify existence in capital there wouldn't be so much occlusive hype around it.
Can't argue with that. It is almost entirely a cash grab that is astonishing in its overreach and astounding in its apparent failure.
A lot of people also mix generative AI with predictive. Like they will mention the hurricane predictor or cancer cell finder AI as a "good use case for chatgpt."
I may dress like an android, but I’m humanist as all hell. Down with AI slop, jail those responsible for wildlife destruction and theft from artists, and banish this slop to the history books!
I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.
I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.
I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.
For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".
Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.
And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.
What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine.
I don’t think it’s temporary. That was the whole goal - suck up everybody’s work, dark-magick it into a chatbot and voilá: no more need for anyone’s webpage.
The fact that it's broken what was working is more than just a metaphor for gen-AI in any setting. It’s fundamentally changed it for the worse and we’ll never get the unfucked version back.
As someone who's GM'ed tabletops, I find it interesting that players who froth at the mouth at the existance of an AI token because "AI commits possibly piracy and art theft" then turn around and insist on me doing / do the "pick the image from searching the internet", which if you've ever browsed an art site, would know that doing such a thing is actual piracy and art theft, especially with artists that have the 40 page long terms and conditions, and an interesting number of "use in tabletops forbidden" clauses.
I don't know if there's data out there (yet) to support this, but I'm pretty sure constantly using AI rather than doing things yourself degrades your skills in the long run. It's like if you're not constantly using a language or practicing a skill, you get worse at it. The marginal effort that it might save you now will probably have a worse net effect in the long run.
It might just be like that social media fad from 10 years ago where everyone was doing it, and then research started popping up that it's actually really fucking terrible for your health.
Yeah, well, one can be an ML tinkerer/enthusiast and still despise all this shit.
I'm quantizing a few variants of a new 36B LLM to test now. I love it! Its great, and puts some closed source stuff to shame, and it's my hobby.
...Doesn't mean I want AI slop posters shoved in my face either, or shoehorned into every crevice it doesn't belong.
That doesn't really matter because I'm like a microscopic part of the population, but still, I hate being grouped as 'pro AI' when I hate tech bros even more than whoever's reading this, probably.
The mere association has drawn a ton of hate though, like a ban on Reddit subs. I think Lemmy's population is more aware of the distinction due to the obvious interest in self-hosted stuff.
Doesn't surprise me. I think if OpenAI or any of the usual suspects stuck to the data aspects and didn't blanket the globe in gen-AI bullshit this situation would be much, much better. But then, they wouldn't make nearly as much money. Which, after all, is the only thing really driving the insanity.
I see this sentiment a lot. No way "youre the only one."
I feel like im the only one. No one in my life uses it. My work is not eligible to have it implemented in anyway. This whole ai movement seems to be happening around me, and i have nothing more than new articles and memes that are telling me its happening. It serious doesnt impact me at all, and i wonder how others lives are crumbling
I don't think it's just you. Like it wasn't just one person thinking computers would make us dumb or the automobile making us lazy. I'm betting that someone somewhere thought that cooking food on the fire would make us weaker.
Technology has that ability to generate opposition from status quo.
And as with any technology, there are good uses, bad uses and frivolous uses.
Remember the awful nonsense web pages of the early 90's?
I think AI will make the life's of some of us easier. But I also think it will continue widening the digital divide.
The biggest concern is that, by nature, AI needs massive amounts of power which can only be paid by people with big resources and those people are training it. AI has the trainer's bias.
However, end consumer AI is the tip of the iceberg. AI will succeed when we don't even realize it's there.
Good points, but I think the anti-AI position is not an anti-technology position.
I think the people assuming it is are naïve. It's an anti-hype position. We've seen bullshit waves before, but nothing like this tsunami. When previous bullshit waves broke, there wasn't so much destruction we couldn't recover.
One thing I don't get with people fearing AI is when something adds AI and suddenly it's a privacy nightmare. Yeah, in some cases it does make it worse, but in most cases, what was stopping the company from taking your data anyways? LLMs are just algorithms that process data and output something, they don't inherently give firms any additional data. Now, in some cases that means data that previously wasn't or that shouldn't be sent to a server is now being sent, but I've seen people complain about privacy so often in cases where I don't understand why AI is your tipping point, if you don't trust the company to not store your data when using AI, why trust it in the first place?
Yeah but LLMs don't train off of data automatically, you need a separate dedicated process for that, it won't happen from just using them. In that sense, companies can still use your data to train them in the background, even if you aren't directly using an LLM, or they can not train them even when you are using them. I guess in the latter case there is a bigger incentive for them to train them than otherwise, but to me it seems basically the same thing privacy wise.
If they're exposing their LLM to the public, there's a higher chance of it leaking training data to the public. You don't know what they trained with, but there's a chance it's customer data. Sure they may not train with anything, but why assume they don't? If they have an internal LLM that's of lesser concern, because that LLM would probably only show them data those employees already have access to.
if you don't trust the company to not store your data when using AI, why trust it in the first place?
Policies, procedures, and common sense - three things AI is most assuredly not known for respecting. (Not that the whole topic of data privacy isn't a huge issue outside of AI)
Anyone else feel like they've lost loved ones to AI or they're in the process of losing someone to AI?
I know the stories about AI induced psychosis, but I don't mean to that extent.
Like just watching how much somebody close to you has changed now that they depend on AI for so much? Like they lose a little piece of what makes them human, and it kinda becomes difficult to even keep interacting with them.
Example would be trying to have a conversation with somebody who expects you to spoon-feed them only the pieces of information they want to hear.
Like they've lost the ability to take in new information if it conflicts with something they already believe to be true.
I try use it to pitch ideas for writing (no prose because fuck almighty) to help fill in ideas or aspects I did not think about. But it just keeps coming up with shit I don't use and so I just use it for validation and encouragement.
I got a pretty good layout for a new season of Magic School Bus where Friz loses her mind and decides to be the history teacher.
We have a lot of suboptimal aspects of our society like animal farming , war, religion etc. and yet this is what breaks this person's brain? It's a bit weird.
I'm genuinely sympathetic to this feeling but AI fears are so overblown and seems to be purely American internet hysteria. We'll absolutely manage this technology especially now that it appears that LLMs are fundamentally limited and will never achieve any form of AGI and even agentic workflow is years away from now.
Some people are really overreacting and everyone's just enabling them.
Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don't have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
Yeah, I always used a generic app for counting calories. You could look up raw ingredients, add them to a list, then get a nutritional value and calories for the whole list (ie recipe) and even save that and share it. I’m guess apps like this probably rely on AI now though too. I think it was just called “calorie counter” with a blue logo. Some of them have international barcode scanners too but it is still a lot of guessing and it takes time if you’re not preparing the same things regularly. But they had a pretty robust user curated database for non-packaged foods. You just had to choose what was closest to what you were using or investigate and make your own custom entries for later.
You're probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don't really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use "AI" to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, though.
In that case, I'd say just find any food that's just similar enough, and use that. It's better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
The orphan crushing machine needs its line go up as much as everyone else, don't be mean to it!
Why would you want to stop enhancing it? How else can we get those sweet stories about heroes saving orphans? Have you seen the news lately! We NEED this.
Have you heard of these things called humans? I think this is more a reflection of them. Books ate trees and corrupted the youth, tv rotted your brain and made you go blind, the internet made people lazy. Wait until I tell you about gasp auto-correct or better yet leet speak! The horror. Clearly we are never recovering from either of those. In fact, I’m speaking to you now in emojis. And wait until you learn about clutches pearls Wikipedia— ah the horror!
Is tech and its advancements perfect? No. Can people do better? Yes. Are criticisms important? Sure are. But panic and fighting a rising tech? You’re probably not going to win.
Spend time educating people on how to be more ethical with their tech use and absolutely pressuring companies to do the same. Taking a club to a computer didn’t stop the rise of the word processor or the spread of Wikipedia madness. But we can control how we consume and relate to tech and what our demands of their creators are.
PS— do you even know how to read and write cursive? > punchable smug face goes here. <
I mean - propaganda has in fact gotten us to the shittiest administration possible. AI hype is off-the-scale for anything - more than The Space Race, more than, well, anything. And it isn’t even useful!
It’s far and away a different thang than a new medium about, by, and for humans.
Early computers were massive and consumed a lot of electricity. They were heavy, prone to failure, and wildly expensive.
We learned to use transistors and integrated circuits to make them smaller and more affordable. We researched how to manufacture them, how to power them, and how to improve their abilities.
Critics at the time said they were a waste of time and money, and that we should stop sinking resources into them.
Making machines think for you, badly, is a lot different than having machines do computation with controlled inputs and outputs. LLMs are a dead-end in the hunt of AGI and they actively make us stupider and are killing the planet. There's a lot to fucking hate on.
I do think that generative ai can have its uses, but LLMs are the most cursed thing. The fact that the word guesser has emergent properties is interesting, but we definitely shouldn't be using those properties like this.
Even if you accept that LLMs are a necessary, but ultimately disappointing, step on the way to a much more useful technology like AGI there's still a very good argument to be made that we should stop investing in it now.
I'm not talking about the "AI is going to enslave humanity" theories either. We already have human overlords who have no issues doing exactly that and giving them the technology to make most of us redundant, at the precise moment when human populations are higher than they've ever been, is a recipe for disaster that could make what's happening in Gaza seem like a relaxing vacation. They will have absolutely no problem condemning billions to untold suffering and death if it means they can make a few more dollars.
We need to figure our shit out as a species before we birth that kind of technology or else we're all going to suffer immensely.
Even if we had an AGI that gave the steps to fix the world and prevent mass extinction, and generate a solution for the US to stop all wars. It wouldn't make a difference because those in charge simply wouldn't listen to it. In fact, generative AI gives you answers for these peace and slowing down climate change based off real academic work on and those in charge ignore both AI they claim to trust and the scholars who spend their whole lives finding solutions to.
Yep, those are some of the things we need to figure out before we hand our collective fate to the people in charge. I think we should start by figuring out how to keep shitty people from getting or staying in charge.
Probably how people felt who were against the development of the printing press or internet.
Its a good tool. Often used wrong but a good tool if used right and with humans actually checking and fixing the results.
It shouldnt replace art too much though since that is something people actually enjoy.
Right with you buddy, I’m so sick of half-thought-out analogies that implicitly equate two things that are not the same.
I remember the 90s, and I can warmly assure younger readers that no, there was nothing even approaching this kind of backlash from luddites. At worst there were a few people who quite correctly called out the dotcom bubble.
Reminder that Lemmy population is older, this feeling is normal. When I was in school I notice kids in school are more likely excited for new things, while teachers usually cling on to the past, their memories, for the sense of nostalgia, even the liberal-leaning teachers (well they don't announce their politics because that would be very unprofessional, but they use progressive language when teaching and respect pronouns so they are probably liberal) are kinda reluctant when it comes to new tech, I see this divide even amonst teachers themselves, the older the teachers are, the more likely they prefer paper textbooks, while the younger ones tend to incorporate more tech (like internet research during class) into their teachings.
Edit: But I want to add that, I think this "AI" thing is gonna be a bit more different, since printing press, radio, and internet merely change the medium of the transfer of information, while "AI" is also gonna remove much of the "human" aspects of dissemination of information, so it can the potential to cause more harm compared to, say, the internet.
I hate LLMs for everything except summing up those endless Genshin quest dialogues. I want to know roughly what the quest is about, but not going to read/listen to hours of extremely dry and stilted thesaurus-wanking. But I'd never use it for anything where I actually care about the accuracy of the output.
I gotta be honest, I'm neither pro nor anti AI myself. I don't use it as much as I used to these days, but when I do use it, it can be pretty fun and helpful. And I can't help but admire the AI images and videos, even if it is AI slop. (Maybe I'm an idiot for being very easily impressed/entertained by almost anything.)
Yes I know there's a bunch of problems with it (including environmental), but at the same time, I don't feel like I'm contributing to those problems, since I'm just one person, and there's so many other people using it anyway.
Ai was used in the development of the COVID vaccine. It was crucial in its creation.
But just for a second let's use guns as an example instead of ai. Guns kill people. Lemmy is anti gun, mostly. Yet Lemmy is pro Ukraine, mostly, and y'all supports the Ukrainians using guns to defend themselves.
Or cars, generally cars suck yet we use them as transport.
These are just tools they're as good and as bad as the people using them.
So yes, it is just you and a select few smooth brains that can't see past their own bias.
The term AI, when used by laymen, is a blanket term for the generative AI and LLMs that big tech is shoving down all our throats right now, not the highly specialized AIs used in medicine. So bringing up the COVID vaccine is largely a non-sequitur.
The rest of your comment is so full of false equivalencies that I'm not even gonna touch it.
Idk my boss keeps asking some perplexity AI any time you ask him any question instead of either
A) Thinking
Or
B) Researching (he thinks AI is researching. Despite it being proven perplexity has lied to him before.)
In essence, by making it so he doesn't have to think about things or do any research himself, it is making him dumber. Not in the sense of losing actual brain cells (maybe. Remains to be seen.) but in the sense of "whether or not he's physically dumber, his output is, so functionally..."
That's what OP says too, only the other way around.
Ai was used in the development of the COVID vaccine. It was crucial in its creation.
Machine Learning, or Data Science, is not what "anti-AI" is about. You can acknowledge that or keep being confused.
These are just tools they're as good and as bad as the people using them.
In a vacuum. We don't live in a vacuum. (no not the thing that you push around the house to clean the carpet. That's also a tool. And the vacuum industry didn't blow three hundred billion dollars on a vacuum concept that sort of works sometimes.)
So yes, it is just you and a select few smooth brains that can't see past their own bias.
Yeah they're so unfair to the ubiquitous tech companies that dominate their waking lives. I too support the unregulated billionaire's efforts to cram invasive broken technology into every aspect of culture and society. I mean the vacuum industry. Whatever, i'm too smart for thinking about it.
You can't dispell irrational thoughts through rational arguments. People hate LLMs because they feel left behind which is an absolutely valid concern but expressed poorly.
I can't take anyone seriously that says it's "trained on stolen images."
Stolen, you say? Well, I guess we're going to have to force those AI companies to put those images back! Otherwise, nobody will be able to see them!
...because that's what "stolen" means. And no, I'm not being pendantic. It's a really fucking important distinction.
The correct term is, "copied" but that doesn't sound quite as severe. Also, if we want to get really specific, the images are presently on the Internet.Right now. Because that's what ImageNET (and similar) is: A database of URLs that point to images that people are offering up for free to anyone that wants on the Internet.
Did you ever upload an image anywhere publicly, for anyone to see? Chances are someone could've annotated it and included it in some AI training database. If it's on the Internet, it will be copied and used without your consent or knowledge. That's the lesson we learned back in the 90s and if you think that's not OK then go try to get hired by the MPAA/RIAA and you can try to bring the world back to the time where you had to pay $10 for a ringtone and pay again if you got a new phone (because—to the big media companies—copying is stealing!).
Now that's clear, let's talk about the ethics of training an AI on such data: There's none. It's an N/A situation! Why? Because until the AI models are actually used for any given purpose they're just data on a computer somewhere.
What about legally? Judges have already ruled in multiple countries that training AI in this way is considered fair use. There's no copyright violation going on... Because copyright only covers distribution of copyrighted works, not what you actually do with them (internally; like training an AI model).
So let's talk about the real problems with AI generators so people can take you seriously:
Humans using AI models to generate fake nudes of people without their consent.
Humans using AI models to copy works that are still under copyright.
Humans using AI models to generate shit-quality stuff for the most minimal effort possible, saying it's good enough, then not hiring an artist to do the same thing.
The first one seems impossible to solve (to me). If someone generates a fake nude and never distributes it... Do we really care? It's like a tree falling in the forest with no one around. If they (or someone else) distribute it though, that's a form of abuse. The act of generating the image was a decision made by a human—not AI. The AI model is just doing what it was told to do.
The second is—again—something a human has to willingly do. If you try hard enough, you can make an AI image model get pretty close to a copyrighted image... But it's not something that is likely to occur by accident. Meaning, the human writing the prompt is the one actively seeking to violate someone's copyright. Then again, it's not really a copyright violation unless they distribute the image.
The third one seems likely to solve itself over time as more and more idiots are exposed for making very poor decisions to just "throw it at the AI" then publish that thing without checking/fixing it. Like Coca Cola's idiotic mistake last Christmas.
I do agree with them that stealing may not be the right word, isn't plagiarism more accurate? But plagiarism is generally considered theft so it probably doesn't matter. I just found it really interesting that I personally haven't really given much thought to the semantics of theft when no physical object is involved even though it's been discussed for like centuries atp
Plagiarism isn't correct either. For something to be plagiarism it needs to be both copied exactly as well as intentionally lying about the authorship (i.e. you claim you wrote something that you didn't).
The output of Large Language Models similar in some ways to plagiarism—when someone claims they wrote something that was actually just the output of an LLM. However, that really isn't the same thing because an LLM isn't a legal entity that's capable of owning anything.
LLMs are also just a tool. An advanced tool that can generate all sorts of texts and software but they still require a human to tell them what to do.
If some human asks ChatGPT to write something in the style of Stephen King what even is that? That's not against the law (you can't copyright a writing style). It's basically, "not a thing." Is that even a bad thing? I honestly don't think so because of I put myself in those same shoes: "write a comment in the style of Riskable" all I can do is 🤷. It's of no consequence.
I'd also argue that it's of no consequence to authors either. What impact does it have on them? None. It doesn't effect their book/whatever sales. It doesn't hurt the market for their works—if anything, it makes the market for their works greater because their works won't be total shit like the output of some LLM (LOL).
It trains your brain even more than typing, it is impossible to be used to train any AI, it uses no electricity compared to the massive amounts a computer uses, and I don't have to read your dumb takes.
Seriously, I know corporate bullshit are using AI to do dumb things. But it is a fascinating technology that can do a lot of neat things if applied correctly.
Stop claiming like AI shit in your shoes and fucked your grandma. It isn't going to burst and go away.
But it is a fascinating technology that can do a lot of neat things if applied correctly.
Great so it should disappear entirely from every aspect of technology where it is not applied correctly. As the rest of the world has more or less worked since the dawn of history. And yet somehow it's in everyone's face every goddamned day and we Do. Not. Want. It.
Having alpha-level product thrust into each and every process and being told "that's the way it is" is utter insanity. Not to mention the entire concept is flawed as a business tool. FUCK THIS.
Just know that I literally just pulled out a pen, a sheet of paper, and my scanner, and was about to write "yes you do, get rekt" and scan it and post it as a pic in this comment.
But you were saved by me realizing I don't want to upload my handwriting to the internet. Still read this comment tho, get rekt.
I didn't defend anybody or anything. Generally I agree, but I don't need to post about it when every third post on Lemmy is the same old shit with the whole comment section clapping and shaking hands.
Exactly. There's some value to AI,but ai would say it's 85% hype and inflated bullshit. People though spend a ton of calories complaining about AI and how inescapable it is, while I find it more difficult to escape people complaining about AI than AI itself.
Yes it hallucinates, yes it makes you dumber, yes it's actually a blanket term that people really say when they mean LLMs, yes some people do get some utility from it. But mostly, jesus, your opinion has been expressed on the Internet already, STFU.
I think the big difference is the first public radio broadcast was in 1906, regulation started to follow in 1910. Even today you need a license to use the technology.
Machine learning (or ai) has been around for over half a century. Now that it's more abundant in every day life they're trying to pass laws that prohibit regulations of ai.
An argument could probably be made with automobiles, but again those early adopters were heavily regulated.
“The Locomotive Act of 1865,” better known as the “Red Flag Act.” While not technically a ban, it stipulated that, when being operated on public roads, “at least three persons are to be employed to drive or conduct a locomotive” and that one of those people must walk ahead of the vehicle waving a red flag to warn others on the road and to signal the driver when to stop. It also set the top speed on highways to 4mph, and through towns to 2mph. (link)
We can learn from the past, but I don't think we can directly apply or simply hand-wave the fears like it's a previous technology.
See and now it's a productive discussion on the path forward instead of whinging about a new technology.
I can only hope regulation can come its long overdue with a lot of the technology we use it will be interesting to see what will be the impudence to move it forward.
To be clear I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said.
That’s a bit of a false analogy because radio never threatened to take away millions of people’s livelihoods.
A more apt comparison would be the actual Luddites during the Industrial Revolution who smashed machines because massive amounts of people were being turned off the land and their traditional economic activities were unable to compete with machine based production.
People don’t just hate AI because it’s new, they hate it because it will condemn millions of people to poverty while making a handful of rich people even more rich.
Radio destroyed a lot of jobs for musicians. Before radio, there was only live music. With radio, a single professional orchestra or big band could supply the music for everyone with a receiver. Recordings came later and destroyed more jobs. Before "talkies", cinemas had live music. Musicians did protest against such new technologies.
People don’t just hate AI because it’s new, they hate it because it will condemn millions of people to poverty while making a handful of rich people even more rich.
Then why aren't people talking about unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, and such things?
You’re right, every new technology displaces some jobs, but AI is on a vastly larger scale (as was industrial production technology).
As to your last question, it’s because the people controlling the narrative don’t want to pay for unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, or anything else that doesn’t immediately make them more money.
You’re right, every new technology displaces some jobs, but AI is on a vastly larger scale (as was industrial production technology).
Famously, ye olde Boomer could just walk into a factory and get a job. None of these jobs exist anymore, mostly because of automation. Of course, none of those people wrote for a living, or had access to an audience of millions. I doubt that AI will displace jobs on a vastly larger scale but it is certainly communicated on a vastly larger scale.
If you think about all these jobs that might be displaced by AI, how many of them existed in the 1950ies? Many jobs, like web designer, are new. Either these new jobs reflect the displacement of old jobs, or you need a lot more people to do more jobs. Granted, global population has grown a lot, but that's not where these new jobs came from, right?
As to your last question, it’s because the people controlling the narrative don’t want to pay for unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, or anything else that doesn’t immediately make them more money.
Yes, the narrative is all about more money for (intellectual) property owners. That doesn't make a lot of sense if people are worried about losing their jobs.
You need to understand there's no going back. We can help control the path forward.
How fascist. Will Dear Leader help us know the way? Here's what we're "going back" to - no money for tech investment and US tech unemployment at an all time high. Control that path.
Seriously, copyright doesn't just go away because it's online. The concept of "right of reproduction" is a vast and well defined area of law.
You can argue copyright law is garbage and archaic and needs to be overhauled sure, but right now "if it's on the Web it's free" only counts if you're Meta and can pay off a judge or something
In the US, an artistic work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created. Displaying the art publicly does not remove the artist's copyright. Only the artist/copyright owner can grant someone else rights to use the work. Again, public accessibility of the work does not degrade the copyright.
You realize that what I'm talking about protects the artist, right? I'm not talking about the RIAA or MPAA, I'm talking about the creating artist's legal ownership of their work.
The worst is in the workplace. When people routinely tell me they looked something up with AI, I now have to assume that I can't trust what they say anylonger because there is a high chance they are just repeating some AI halucination. It is really a sad state of affairs.
I am way less hostile to Genai (as a tech) than most and even I've grown to hate this scenario. I am a subject matter expert on some things and I've still had people trying to waste my time to prove their AI hallucinations wrong.
I've started seeing large AI generated pull requests in my coding job. Of course I have to review them, and the "author" doesn't even warn me it's from an LLM. It's just allowing bad coders to write bad code faster.
Do you also check if they listen to Joe Rogan? Fox news? Nobody can be trusted. AI isn't the problem, it's that it was trained on human data -- of which people are an unreliable source of information.
AI also just makes things up. Like how RFKJr's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites studies that don't exist and never have, or literally a million other examples. You're not wrong about Fox news and how corporate and Russian backed media distorts the truth and pushes false narratives, and you're not wrong that AI isn't the problem, but it is certainly a problem and a big one at that.
SO DO PEOPLE.
Tell me one of the things that AI does, that people themselves don't also commonly do each and every day?
Real researchers make up studies to cite in their reports? Real lawyers and judges cite fake cases as precedents in legal preceding? Real doctors base treatment plans on white papers they completely fabricated in their heads? Yeah I don't think so, buddy.
But but but . . . !!!
AI!!
I think they’re saying that the kind of people who take LLM generated content as fact are the kind of people who don’t know how to look up information in the first place. Blaming the LLM for it is like blaming a search engine for showing bad results.
Of course LLMs make stuff up, they are machines that make stuff up.
Sort of an aside, but doctors, lawyers, judges and researchers make shit up all the time. A professional designation doesn't make someone infallible or even smart. People should question everything they read, regardless of the source.
Except we give it the glorifying title "AI". It's supposed to be far better than a search engine, otherwise why not stick with a search engine (that uses a tiny fraction of the power)?
I don't know what point you're arguing. I didn't call it AI and even if I did, I don't know any definition of AI that includes infallibility. I didn't claim it's better than a search engine, either. Even if I did, "Better" does not equal "Always correct."
To take an older example there are smaller image recognition models that were trained on correct data to differentiate between dogs and blueberry muffin but obviously still made mistakes on the test data set.
AI does not become perfect if its data is.
Humans do make mistakes, make stuff up, and spread false information. However they generally make considerably less stuff up than AI currently does (unless told to).
It does become more precise the larger the model is though. At least, that was the low-hanging fruit during this boom. I highly doubt you'd get a modern model to fail on a test such as this today.
Just as an example, nobody is typing "Blueberry Muffin" into a stable diffusor and getting a photo of a dog.
Joe Rogan doesn't tell them false domain kowledge 🤷
LOL riiiiiight.
Ok please show me the Joe Rogan episode where he confidently talks BS about process engineering for wastewater treatment plants 🙄
I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the "it's not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it's making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl" which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don't need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.
There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.
The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going "thank you so much, I could have never done this without you".
I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.
I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn't compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It's also addictive.
You are not correct about the energy use of prompts. They are not very energy intensive at all. Training the AI, however, is breaking the power grid.
Maybe not an individual prompt, but with how many prompts are made for stupid stuff every day, it will stack up to quite a lot of CO2 in the long run.
Not denying the training of AI is demanding way more energy, but that doesn't really matter as both the action of manufacturing, training and millions of people using AI amounts to the same bleak picture long term.
Considering how the discussion about environmental protection has only just started to be taken seriously and here they come and dump this newest bomb on humanity, it is absolutely devastating that AI has been allowed to run rampant everywhere.
According to this article, 500.000 AI prompts amounts to the same CO2 outlet as a
I don't know how many times a day 500.000 AI prompts are reached, but I'm sure it is more than twice or even thrice. As time moves on it will be much more than that. It will probably outdo the number of actual flights between London and New York in a day. Every day. It will probably also catch up to whatever energy cost it took to train the AI in the first place and surpass it.
Because you know. People need their memes and fake movies and AI therapist chats and meal suggestions and history lessons and a couple of iterations on that book report they can't be fucked to write. One person can easily end up prompting hundreds of times in a day without even thinking about it. And if everybody starts using AI to think for them at work and at home, it'll end up being many, many, many flights back and forth between London and New York every day.
I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.
The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.
Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!
Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure. If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.
Read up here!
I have a hard time believing that article’s guesstimate since Google (who actually runs these data centers and doesn’t have to guess) just published a report stating that the median prompt uses about a quarter of a watt-hour, or the equivalent of running a microwave oven for one second. You’re absolutely right that flights use an unconscionable amount of energy. Perhaps your advocacy time would be much better spent fighting against that.
And Google would never lie about how much energy a prompt costs, right?
Especially not since they have an invested interest in having people use their AI products, right?
That’s not really Google’s style when it comes to data center whitepapers. They did, however, omit all information about training energy use.
Ahahah. Not their style to lie and betray people for profit? Get out!
... They're kind of governed by law about what things they're allowed to tell their stockholders.
And before you try to say otherwise, yes, laws that protect the ownership class are still being enforced.
Sam Altman, or whatever fuck his name is, asked users to stop saying please and thank you to chatgpt because it was costing the company millions. Please and thank you are the less power hungry questions chatgpt gets. And its costing chatgpt millions. Probably 10s of millions of dollars if the CEO made a public comment about it.
You're right training is hella power hungry, but even using gen ai has heavy power costs
I'm pretty sure it's a product of scale, but also, GPT5 is markedly worse. I heard estimates of 40 watt hours for a single medium length response. Napkin math says my motorcycle can travel about kilometer per single medium length response of GPT5. Now multiply that by how many people are using AI (anyone going online these days), now multiply that by how many times a day each user causes a prompt. Now multiply that by 365 and we have how much power they're using in a year.
It's important to remember that there's a lot of money being put into A.I. and therefore a lot of propaganda about it.
This happened with a lot of shitty new tech, and A.I. is one of the biggest examples of this I've known about.
All I can write is that, if you know what kind of tech you want and it's satisfactory, just stick to that. That's what I do.
Don't let ads get to you.
First post on a lemmy server, by the way. Hello!
There was a quote about how Silicon Valley isn't a fortune teller betting on the future. It's a group of rich assholes that have decided what the future would look like and are pushing technology that will make that future a reality.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Classic Torment Nexus moment over and over again really
Reminds me of the way NFTs were pushed. I don’t think any regular person cared about them or used them, it was just astroturfed to fuck.
Hello and welcome!) Also, thank you for good advice!
Hello!
It's like Valorant, but much bigger and even worse.
Welcome in! Hope you're finding Lemmy in a positive way. It's like Reddit, but you have a lot more control over what you can block and where you can make a "home" (aka home instance).
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about anything
My boss had GPT make this informational poster thing for work. Its supposed to explain stuff to customers and is rampant with spelling errors and garbled text. I pointed it out to the boss and she said it was good enough for people to read. My eye twitches every time I see it.
wow, what a standard, super professional look for your customers!
I think that's exactly what the author was referring to.
Spelling errors? That’s… unusual. Part of what makes ChatGPT so specious is that its output is usually immaculate in terms of language correctness, which superficially conceals the fact that it’s completely bullshitting on the actual content.
FWIW, she asked it to make a complete info-graphic style poster with images and stuff so GPT created an image with text, not a document. Still asinine.
I'm mostly annoyed that I have to keep explaining to people that 95% of what they hear about AI is marketing. In the years since we bet the whole US economy on AI and were told it's absolutely the future of all things, it's yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it's own production or design, or a blockbuster product that I'm aware of.
We're betting our whole future on a concept of a product that has yet to reliably profit any of its users or the public as a whole.
I've made several good faith efforts at getting it to produce something valuable or helpful to me. I've done the legwork on making sure I know how to ask it for what I want, and how I can better communicate with it.
But AI "art" requires an actual artist to clean it up. AI fiction requires a writer to steer it or fix it. AI non-fiction requires a fact cheker. AI code requires a coder. At what point does the public catch on that the emperor has no clothes?
Or a profit. Or hell even one of those things that didn’t suck! It’s critically flawed and has been defying gravity on the coke-fueled dreams of silicon VC this whole time.
And still. One of next year’s fiscal goals is “AI”. That’s all. Just “AI”.
It’s a goal. Somehow. It’s utter insanity.
The goal is "[Replace you money-needing meatsacks with] AI" but the suits don't want to say it that clearly.
Anyone in engineering knows the 90% of your goal is the easy bit. You’ll then spend 90% of your time on the remainder. Same for AI and getting past the uncanny valley with art.
What if the point of AI is to have it create a personal model for each of us, using the vast amounts of our data they have access to, in order to manipulate us into buying and doing whatever the people who own it want but they can't just come out and say that?
I'm sure that's at least part of the idea but I'm yet to see any evidence that it won't also be dog shit at that. It doesn't have the context window or foresight to conceive of a decent plot twist in a piece of fiction despite having access to every piece of fiction ever written. I'm not buying that it would be able to build a psychological model and contextualize 40 plus years of lived experience in a way that could get me to buy a $20 Dubai chocolate bar or drive a Chevy.
Im pretty sure I said "the point of it and not that it was 100% ready to go now.
Also, no one thinks advertising works on them. So, I'm sure you don't believe it 👍
It's not going to get there. The idea it's going to turn smart and capable at some undisclosed point in the future as long as we keep giving them billions in investments IS marketing.
It's our own version of The Matrix
When you order your Matrix from Wish...
There's a monster in the forest, and it speaks with a thousand voices. It will answer any question, and offer insight to any idea. It knows no right or wrong. It knows not truth from lie, but speaks them both the same. It offers its services freely, many find great value. But those who know the forest well will tell you that freely offered does not mean free of cost. For now the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices, and when you see the monster it wears your face.
Not just you. Ai is making people dumber. I am frequently correcting the mistakes of my colleagues that use.
My attitude to all of this is I've been told by management to use it so I will. If it makes mistakes it's not my fault and now I'm free to watch old Stargate episodes. We're not doing rocket surgery or anything so who cares.
At some point they'll realise that the AI is not producing decent output and then they'll shut up about it. Much easier they come to that realisation themselves than me argue with them about it.
Luckily no one is pushing me to use Ai in any form at this time.
For folks in your position, I fear that they will first go through a round of layoffs to get rid of the people who are clearly using it "wrong" because Top Management can't have made a mistake before they pivot and drop it.
Yeah that is a risk, then again if they're forcing their employees to use AI they're probably not far off firing everyone anyway so I don't see that it makes a huge amount of difference for my position.
When i was a kid and firat realized i was maybe a genius, it was terrifying. That there weren't always gonna just be people smarter than me who could fix it.
Seeing them get dumber is like some horror movie shit.
I don't fancy myself a genius but the way other people navigate things seems to create a strangely compelling case on its own
It's like offering unsolicited advice, but it's not even your own advice
Hammer time.
"Here's me telling everyone that I have no critical thinking ability whatsoever."
Is more like it
No, it's not just you or unsat-and-strange. You're pro-human.
Trying something new when it first comes out or when you first get access to it is novelty. What we've moved to now is mass adoption. And that's a problem.
These LLMs are automation of mass theft with a good enough regurgitation of the stolen data. This is unethical for the vast majority of business applications. And good enough is insufficient in most cases, like software.
I had a lot of fun playing around with AI when it first came out. And people figured out how to do prompts I cant seem to replicate. I don't begrudge people from trying a new thing.
But if we aren't going to regulate AI or teach people how to avoid AI induced psychosis then even in applications were it could be useful it's a danger to anyone who uses it. Not to mention how wasteful its water and energy usage is.
Regulate? This is what lead AI companies are pushing for, they would pass the bureaucracy but not the competitors.
The shit just needs to be forced to opensource. If you steal the content from entire world to build a thinking machine - give back to the world.
This would also crash the bubble and would slow down any of the most unethical for-profits.
I was referring to this in my comment:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-beautiful-bill-ai-moratorium-ted-cruz-pass-vote-rcna215111
Congress decided to not go through with the AI-law moratorium. Instead they opted to do nothing, which is what AI companies would prefer states would do. Not to mention the pro-AI argument appeals to the judgement of Putin, notorious for being surrounded by yes-men and his own state propaganda. And the genocide of Ukrainians in pursuit of the conquest of Europe.
The problem is unlike Robin Hood, AI stole from the people and gave to the rich. The intellectual property of artists and writers were stolen and the only way to give it back is to compensate them, which is currently unlikely to happen. Letting everyone see how the theft machine works under the hood doesn't provide compensation for the usage of that intellectual property.
Not really. It would let more people get it on it. And most tech companies are already in on it. This wouldn't impose any costs on AI development. At this point the speculation is primarily on what comes next. If open source would burst the bubble it would have happened when DeepSeek was released. We're still talking about the bubble bursting in the future so that clearly didn't happen.
Forced opensourcing would totally destroy the profits, cause you spend money on research and then you opensource, so anyone can just grab your model and don't pay you a cent. Where would the profits come from?
I mean yes, and? AI is still shitty at creative writing. Unlike with images, it's not like people oneshot a decent book.
We should push to make high-vram devices accessible. This is literally about means of production - we should fight for equal access. Regulation is the reverse of that, give those megacorps the unique ability to run it because others are too stupid to control it.
They were the most notorious proponents of the regulations. Lots of talks with openai devs where they just doomsay about the dangers of AGI, and how it must be top secret controlled by govs.
The profits were not destroyed.
People are betting on what they think LLMs will be able to do in the future, not what they do now.
It's theft. They stole the work of writers and all sorts of content creators. That's the wrong that needs to be righted. Not how to reproduce the crime. The only way to right intellectual property theft is to pay the owner of that intellectual property the money they would have gotten if they had willingly leased it out as part of a deal. Corporations, like Nintendo, Disney, and Hasbro, hound people who do anything unapproved with their intellectual property. The idea that we're yes anding the intellectual property of all humanity is laughable in a discussion supposedly about ethics.
That's a whole other topic. But what we should fight for now is worker owned corporations. While that is an excellent goal, it isn't helping to undue the theft that was done on its own. It's only allowing more people to profit off that theft. We should also compensate the people who were stolen from if we care about ethics. Also, compensating writers and artists seems like a good reason to take all the money away from the billionaires.
Looks like the devs aren't in control of the C-Suite. Whoops, all avoidable capitalist driven apocalypses.
So is all the papers, all the conversations in the internet, all the code etc. So what? Nobody will stop the AI train. You would need Butlerian Jihad type of event to make it happen. In case of any won class action, the repayments would be so laughable nobody would even apply.
Deepseek didn't opensource any proprietary AIs corporations do. I'm talking about forcing OpenAI to opensource all of their AI type of event, or close the company if they don't comply.
Ok, new AI model drops, it's opensource, I download it and run on my rack. Where profits?
So appealing to ethics was bullshit got it. You just wanted the automated theft tool.
It kept some things hidden but it was the most open source LLM we got.
The next new AI model that can do the next new thing. The entire economy is based on speculative investments. If you can't improve on the AI model on your machine you're not getting any investor money. edit: typos
the bubble has burst or, rather, currently is in the process of bursting.
My job involves working directly with AI, LLM's, and companies that have leveraged their use. It didn't work. And I'd say the majority of my clients are now scrambling to recover or to simply make it out of the other end alive. Soon there's going to be nothing left to regulate.
GPT5 was a failure. Rumors I've been hearing is that Anthropics new model will be a failure much like GPT5. The house of cards is falling as we speak. This won't be the complete Death of AI but this is just like the dot com bubble. It was bound to happen. The models have nothing left to eat and they're getting desperate to find new sources. For a good while they've been quite literally eating each others feces. They're now starting on Git Repos of all things to consume. Codeberg can tell you all about that from this past week. This is why I'm telling people to consider setting up private git instances and lock that crap down. if you're on Github get your shit off there ASAP because Microsoft is beginning to feast on your repos.
But essentially the AI is starving. Companies have discovered that vibe coding and leveraging AI to build from end to end didn't work. Nothing produced scales, its all full of exploits or in most cases has zero security measures what so ever. They all sunk money into something that has yet to pay out. Just go on linkedin and see all the tech bros desperately trying to save their own asses right now.
the bubble is bursting.
The folks I know at both OpenAI and Anthropic don’t share your belief.
Also, anecdotally, I’m only seeing more and more push for LLM use at work.
that's interesting in all honesty and I don't doubt you. all I know is my bank account has been getting bigger within the past few months due to new work from clients looking to fix their AI problems.
I think you’re onto something where a lot of this AI mess is going to have to be fixed by actual engineers. If folks blindly copied from stackoverflow without any understanding, they’re gonna have a bad time and that seems equivalent to what we’re seeing here.
I think the AI hate is overblown and I tend to treat it more like a search engine than something that actually does my work for me. With how bad Google has gotten, some of these models have been a blessing.
My hope is that the models remain useful, but the bubble of treating them like a competent engineer bursts.
Agreed. I'm with you it should be treated as a basic tool not something that is used to actually create things which, again in my current line of work, is what many places have done. It's a fantastic rubber duck. I use it myself for that purpose or even for tasks that I can't be bothered with like creating README markdowns or commit messages or even setting up flakes and nix shells and stuff like that, creating base project structures so YOU can do the actual work and don't have to waste time setting things up.
The hate can be overblown but I can see where it's coming from purely because many companies have not utilized it as a tool but instead thought of it as a replacement for an individual.
At the risk of sounding like a tangent, LLMs' survival doesn't solely depend on consumer/business confidence. In the US, we are living in a fascist dictatorship. Fascism and fascists are inherently irrational. Trump, a fascist, wants to bring back coal despite the market natural phasing coal out.
The fascists want LLMs because they hate art and all things creative. So the fascists may very well choose to have the federal government invest in LLM companies. Like how they bought 10% of Intel's stock or how they want to build coal powered freedom cities.
So even if there are no business applications for LLM technology our fascist dictatorship may still try to impose LLM technology on all of us. Purely out of hate for us, art and life itself. edit: looks like I commented this under my comment the first time
On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT's, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD's. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it's still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don't think I've ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I'm not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It's "oh this is a neat little feature I can use" not "this technology is going to change my life" the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM's being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because "AI" will be ruined.
AI's biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza. It's both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that's fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. "Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting," all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
VR was and is also still a very inaccessible tool for most people. It costs a lot of money and time to even get to the point where you're getting the intended VR experience and that is what it mostly boils down to: an experience. It isn't convenient or useful and people can't afford it. And even though there are many gamers out there, most people aren't gamers and don't care about mounting a VR headset on their cranium and getting seasick for a few minutes.
AI is not only accessible and convenient, it is also useful to the everyday person, if the AI doesn't hallucinate like hell, that is. It has the potential to optimize workloads in jobs with a lot of paperwork, calculations and so on.
I completely agree with you that AI is being pushed very aggressively in ways we haven't seen before and that is because the tech people and their investors poured a lot of money into developing these things. They need it to be a success so they can earn their money back and they will be successful eventually because everybody with money and power has a huge interest in this tool becoming a part of everyday life. It can be used to control the masses in ways we cannot even imagine yet and it can earn the creators and investors a lot of money.
They are already making AI computers. According to some it will entirely replace the types of computers we are used to today. From what I can understand, it will be preferable to the open AI setups we have currently that are burning our planet to a crisp with the amount of data centers that need to keep them active. Supposedly the AI computer will have it be a local thing on the laptop and it will therefore demand less resources, but I'm so fucking skeptic about all this shit that I'm waiting to see how much power a computer with an AI operating system will need to swallow in energy. I'm too tech-ignorant to understand the ins and outs of what this and that means, but we are definitely going to have to accept that AI is here to stay and the current setup with open AIs and forced LLM's in every search engine is a massive environmental nightmare. It probably won't stop or change a fucking lick because people don't give a fuck as long as they are comfortable and the companies are getting people to use their trash tech just like they wanted so they won't stop it either.
This is literally the pitch burning hundreds of billions of dollars into ash. It’s insane.
HDDVDs weren’t rejected by the masses they were a casualty in Sony’s vendetta against the loss of Beta and DAT. Both of which were rejected by industry not consumers (though both were later embraced by industry and Betas even outlasted VHSs). They would have won out for the same reasons that Sony lost the previous format wars (insistence on licensing fees) except this time Sony bought out Columbia and had a whole library of video and a studio to make new movies to exclusively release on their format. Essentially the supply side pushing something until consumers accepted it, though to your point not quite as bad as AI is right now.
8-Tracks and laserdiscs were just replaced by better formats (Compact Cassette and Video CD/DVD respectively). Each of them were also replacements for previous formats like Reel to Reel and CEDs.
UMDs only don’t exist still because flash media got better and because Sony opted to use a cheaper scratch resistant coating instead of a built in case for later formats (like Blu-ray). Also, UMDs themselves were a replacement for or at least inspired by an earlier format called MiniDisc.
Capitalism’s biggest feat has been convincing people that everything is the next big thing and nothing that has come before is similar when just about everything is just a rinse and repeat, even LLMs… remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings?
See also: Cars, appliances, consumer electronics, movies, food, architecture.
We are ruled by the market and the market is ruled by the lowest common denominator.
People are overworked, underpaid, and struggling to make rent in this economy while juggling 3 jobs or taking care of their kids, or both.
They are at the limits of their mental load, especially women who shoulder it disproportionately in many households. AI is used to drastically reduce that mental load. People suffering from burnout use it for unlicensed therapy. I'm not advocating for it, I'm pointing out why people use it.
Treating AI users like a moral failure and disregarding their circumstances does nothing to discourage the use of AI. All you are doing is enforcing their alienation of anti-AI sentiment.
First, understand the person behind it. Address the root cause, which is that AI companies are exploiting the vulnerabilities of people with or close to burnout by selling the dream of a lightened workload.
It's like eating factory farmed meat. If you have eaten it recently, you know what horrors go into making it. Yet, you are exhausted from a long day of work and you just need a bite of that chicken to take the edge off to remain sane after all these years. There is a system at work here, greater than just you and the chicken. It's the industry as a whole exploiting consumer habits. AI users are no different.
Let's go a step further and look at why people are in burnout, are overloaded, are working 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Its because we're all slaves to capitalism.
Greed for more profit by any means possible has driven society to the point where we can barely afford to survive and corporations still want more. When most Americans are choosing between eating, their kids eating, or paying rent, while enduring the workload of two to three people, yeah they'll turn to anything that makes life easier. But it shouldn't be this way and until we're no longer slaves we'll continue to make the choices that ease our burden, even if they're extremely harmful in the long run.
I read it as "eating their kids". I am an overworked slave.
We shouldn't accuse people of moral failings. That's inaccurate and obfuscates the actual systemic issues and incentives at play.
But people using this for unlicensed therapy are in danger. More often than not LLMs will parrot whatever you give in the prompt.
People have died from AI usage including unlicensed therapy. This would be like the factory farmed meat eating you.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/woman-dies-suicide-using-ai-172040677.html
Maybe more like factory meat giving you food poisoning.
And what do you think mass adoption of AI is gonna lead to, now you won't even have 3 jobs to make rent cause they outsourced yours to someone cheaper using an AI agent, this is gonna permanently alter how our society works and not for the better
Meanwhile, we have people making the web worse by not linking to source & giving us images of text instead of proper, accessible, searchable, failure tolerant text.
- OpenAI Text Crawler
You don't think the disabled use technology? Or that search engine optimization existed before LLMs? Or that text sticks around when images break?
Lack of accessibility wouldn't stop LLMs: it could probably process images into text the hard way & waste more energy in the process. That'd be great, right?
A hyphen isn't a quotation dash.
Are we playing the AI game? Let’s pretend we’re AI. Here's some fun punctuation:
‒−–—―…:Beep bip boop.
Yeah thats definitely fair. Accessibility is important. It is unfortunate though that AI companies abuse accessibility and organization tags to train their LLMs.
See how Stable Diffusion porn uses danbooru tags, and situations like this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NEDFUjqA1s8
Decentralized media based communities have the rare ability to be able to hide their data from scraping.
I didn't have the patience to sit through 19 minutes of video, so I tried to read through the transcript. Then I saw the stuttering & weird, verbose fuckery going on there. Copilot, however, summarized the video, which revealed it was about deliberate obfuscation of subtitle files to attempt to thwart scrapers.
This seems hostile to the user, and doesn't seem to work as intended, so I'm not sure what to think of it. I know people who have trouble sequencing information and rely on transcripts. Good accessibility benefits nondisabled users, too (an additional incentive for it).
Not trying to be overly critical. I'll have to look into danbooru tags: unfamiliar with those. Thanks.
Patience and nuance is a rare virtue in 2025
I'm not sure this is so much virtues becoming rarer as inconvenient demands emerging: a video that could have been an article is a problem of the modern age.
Articles can be read quickly & processed structurally by jumping around sections. Videos, however, can be agonizing, because they resist that sort of processing. Transcripts can alleviate the problem somewhat, but obfuscating them undoes that. And we've got things to do.
The video probably would have been an apprenticeship in the 1800s
Normally I would agree, but Twitter and Discord are the sole exceptions. The original sources can get hit by meteors for all I care. No... I hope their datacenters do get hit, with no one in them of course.
It is silly that people think not posting text can somehow stop LLM crawlers.
Agreed.
Not linking to source though, because you hate the hosting platform is petty vindictiveness that does more to hurt the uninvolved on accessibility & usability than do much against the platform. To prevent traffic to platforms, linking to alternatives like proxies for those services & web archival snapshots is common practice around here.
So hating the AI hypenukes is 'old man yelling at cloud' but only being allowed to grab images of text is "people" making the web worse? Point made with an image of minimal text? from lemmynsfw?
Well goddamn.
Did you notice the alt text? Here's the markdown
When that image breaks, the alt text & a broken image icon renders in its place, so readers will still understand the message. People using accessibility technology (like screenreaders) can now understand the image. Search engines can find the image by the alt text.
I think griping over inaccessible text & lack of link to real text is more compelling, because it's a direct choice of the author: it directly impacts the user, the complaint goes directly to the author impacting the user, the author has direct control over it & can choose to fix it at any time. There's a good chance of an immediate remedy.
Griping over AI, however, adds little that isn't posted frequently around here & is a bit like yelling at clouds: we aren't about to stop that technology by yelling about it on here. I'm sure it feels good, though. It could feel better with a link & proper text.
Yeah, and I noticed it didn't describe the image at all - unless one had already seen the image and knew what it was. So for visually impaired users (i.e. one of the main groups who would benefit from alt text) it is insufficient at best.
Specific to the OP the issue is those of us who know gen-AI is an enormous piece of shit with only downsides for things we care about like culture and learning, we might feel like we're going a little crazy in a culture that only seems to be able to share love for it in public places like work. Even public criticism of it has been limited to economic and ecological harms. I haven't seen that particular angle before very much, and as someone else posted here I felt recognized by it.
How would you state it over the phone? Alt text is a succinct alternative that conveys (accurate/equivalent) meaning in context, much like reading a comment with an image to someone over the phone. If you would have said that "Simpsons meme of an old man yelling at a cloud", then that would also suffice. It doesn't need to go into elaborate detail.
In those discussions, people often talk about having enough, losing their minds, it making people dumber, too. I get it helps to feel recognized, so would it feel better to broaden the reach of that message for more recognition?
"A screenshot of The Simpsons showing a hand holding a newspaper article featuring a picture of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the sky and scowling, with the headline 'Old Man Yells At Clouds'"
It depends on how much you care that someone who needs or wants the alt text needs to know.
absolutely. And, ironically, one of the possible use cases of AI where it might-sort-of-kinda-work-okay-to-help-although-it-needs-work-because-it's-still-kind-of-sucky.
The accessibility advocates at WebAIM in the previous link don't seem to think a verbal depiction (which an algorithm could do) is adequate. They emphasize what an algorithm does poorly: convey meaning in context.
Their 1^st^ example indicates less is better: they don't dive into incidental details of the astronaut's dress, props, hand placement, but merely give her title & name.
They recommend
and calling it a screenshot is non-essential to context. The hand holding a newspaper isn't meaningful in context, either. The headline already states the content of the picture, redundancy is discouraged, and unless context refers the picture (it doesn't), it's also non-essential to context.
Unless gen-AI mindreads authors, I expect it will have greater difficulty delivering meaning in context than verbal depictions.
Geez for someone who ostensibly wants people to use alt text you’re super picky about it.
Good luck?
being anti-plastic is making me feel like i'm going insane. "you asked for a coffee to go and i grabbed a disposable cup." studies have proven its making people dumber. "i threw your leftovers in some cling film." its made from fossil fuels and leaves trash everywhere we look. "ill grab a bag at the register." it chokes rivers and beaches and then we act surprised. "ill print a cute label and call it recyclable." its spreading greenwashed nonsense. little arrows on stuff that still ends up in the landfill. "dont worry, it says compostable." only at some industrial facility youll never see. "i was unboxing a package" theres no way to verify where any of this ends up. burned, buried, or floating in the ocean. "the brand says advanced recycling." my work has an entire sustainability team and we still stock pallets of plastic water bottles and shrink wrapped everything. plastic cutlery. plastic wrap. bubble mailers. zip ties. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least" "but its convenient" "but you can" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the disposable default. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?
#ebb rambles #vent #i think #fuck plastics im so goddamn tired
If plastic was released roughly two years ago you'd have a point.
If you're saying in 50 years we'll all be soaking in this bullshit called gen-AI and thinking it's normal, well - maybe, but that's going to be some bleak-ass shit.
Also you've got plastic in your gonads.
Yeah it was a fun little whataboutism. I thought about doing smartphones instead. Writing that way hurts though. I had to double check for consistency.
On the bright side we have Cyberpunk to give us a tutorial on how to survive the AI dystopia. Have you started picking your implants yet?
I'm almost certain gen AI will still be popular in 50 years. This is why I prefer people try to tackle some of the problems they see with AI instead of just hating on AI because of the problems it currently has. Don't get me wrong, pointing out the problems as you have is important - I just wouldn't jump to the conclusion that AI is a problem itself.
I wish companies were actually punished for their ecological footprint
plastic and AI
At least knowingly. It seems some customer service stuff feeds it direct to AI before any human gets involved.
I haven't used it willingly ever. Especially after the one time copilot told me an acre is 4.5 football fields in area. I didn't ask it, the response was just presented at the top of my results. I'm a fucking farmer for God sake. I know that's very very wrong without thinking. I just wanted the square footage and was too lazy to use my calculator. Never again.
That being said, I do on occasion solicit my friend who has a subscription, just to request and have him send me a very specific image request and have him text it to me, so I can repost it.
Anything for the memes. Literally anything.
TIL one football field is roughly the size of an acre. (Roughly.)
I haven't really played football in years so they must have changed the rules. Because that is one big ball.
If I want ideas from ChatGPT, I could just ask it myself. Usually, if I'm reaching out to ask people's opinions, I want, you know, their opinions. I don't even care if I hear nothing back from them for ages, I just want their input.
"I just fed your private, unpublished intellectual property into black box owned by billionaires. You're welcome."
AI-generated content is like farts. Everyone likes the smell of their own and hates the smell of everyone else’s.
No line breaks and capitalization? Can somebody ask AI to format it properly, please?
Still shoddy.
Got them —s, tho 👍
Should be ellipses.
Wait . . AI didn't make it good? Or even better?
WELL THEN WHAT THE FUCK WAS ALL THAT THREE HUNDRED BILLION BULLSHIT FOR THEN??
Srsly, if anyone has a position open lmk kthx
Everytime someone talks up AI, I point out that you need to be a subject matter expert in the topic to trust it because it frequently produces really, really convincing summaries that are complete and utter bullshit.
And people agree with me implicitly and tell me they've seen the same. But then don't hesitate to turn to AI on subjects they aren't experts in for "quick answers". These are not stupid people either. I just don't understand.
Hence the feeling of creeping insanity. Yeah.
Uses for this current wave of AI: converting machine language to human language. Converting human language to machine language. Sentiment analysis. Summarizing text.
People have way over invested in one of the least functional parts of what it can do because it's the part that looks the most "magic" if you don't know what it's doing.
The most helpful and least used way of using them is to identify what information the user is looking for and then to point them to resources they can use to find out for themselves, maybe with a description of which resource might be best depending on what part of the question they're answering.
It's easy to be wrong when you're answering a question, and a lot harder when you hand someone a book and say you think the answer is in chapter four.
Because the alternative for me is googling the question with "reddit" added at the end half of the time. I still do that alot. For more complicated or serious problems/questions, I've set it to only use search function and navigate scientific sites like ncbi and pubmed while utilizing deep think. It then gives me the sources, I randomly tend to cross-check the relevant information, but so far I personally haven't noticed any errors. You gotta realize how much time this saves.
When it comes to data privacy, I honestly don't see the potential dangers in the data I submit to OpenAI, but this is of course different to everyone else. I don't submit any personal info or talk about my life. It's a tool.
Simply by the questions you ask, the way you ask them, they are able to infer a lot of information. Just because you're not giving them the raw data about you doesn't mean they are not able to get at least some of it. They've gotten pretty good at that.
I really don't have any counter-arguments as you have a good point, I tend to turn a blind eye to that uncomfortable fact. It's worth it, I guess? Realistically, I'm having a hard time thinking of worst-case scenarious
If it saves time but you still have to double check its answers, does it really save time? At least many reddit comments call out their own uncertainty or link to better resources, I can't trust a single thing AI outputs so I just ignore it as much as possible.
Meanwhile every company finds out the week after they lay off everyone that the billions they poured into their shitty "AI" to replace them might as well have been put in bags and set on fire
The reason AI is wrong so often is because it's not programmed to give you the right answer. It's programmed to give you the most pervasive one.
LLMs are being fed by Reddit and other forums that are ostensibly about humans giving other humans answers to questions.
But have you been on those forums? It's a dozen different answers for every question. The reality is that we average humans don't know shit and we're just basing our answers on our own experiences. We aren't experts. We're not necessarily dumb, but unless we've studied, our knowledge is entirely anecdotal, and we all go into forums to help others with a similar problem by sharing our answer to it.
So the LLM takes all of that data and in essence thinks that the most popular, most mentioned, most upvoted answer to any given question must be the de facto correct one. It literally has no other way to judge; it's not smart enough to cross reference itself or look up sources.
It literally does NOT judge. It cannot reason. It does not know what "words" are. It is an enormous rainbow table of sentence probability that does nothing useful except fool people and provide cover for capitalists to extract more profit.
But apparently, according to some on here, "that's the way it is, get used to it." FUCK no.
Markov text generator. Thats all it is. Just made with billions in stolen wages.
"Information wants to be free..." No! Not like that!! 😫
I think that is it's biggest limitation.
Like AI basically crowd sourcing information isn't really the worst thing, crowd sourced knowledge tends to be fairly decent. People treating it as if it's an authoritative source like they looked it up in the encyclopedia or asked an expert is a big problem though.
Ideally it would be more selective about the 'crowds' it gathers data from. Like science questions should be sourced from scientists. Preferably experts in the field that the question is about.
Like Wikipedia (at least for now) is 'crowd- sourced', but individual pages are usually maintained by people who know a lot about the subject. That's why it's more accurate than a 'normal' encyclopedia. Though of course it's not fool proof or tamper proof by any definition.
If we taught AI how to be 'Media Literate' and gave it the ability to double check it's data with reliable sources- it would be a lot more useful.
This is the other problem. You basically have 4 types of redditors.
People who use the karma system correctly, that is to say they upvote things that contribute to the conversation. Even if you think it is 'wrong' or you disagree with it, if it's something that adds to the discussion, you are supposed to upvote it.
People who treat it as "I agree/ I disagree" buttons.
People who treat it as "I like this/ I hate this buttons.
Id say the majority of the people probably do some combination of the above.
So more than half the time people aren't upvoting things because they think they are correct. If LLM models are treating 'karma' as a "This is correct" metric- that's a big problem.
The other bad problem is people who really should know better- tech bros and CEO's going all in on AI when it's WAY to early to do that. As you point out, it's not even really intelligent yet- it just parrots 'common' knowledge.
AI should never be used to create anything in Wikipedia. But theoretically, an open source LLM trained solely on wikipedia would actually be kind useful to ask quick questions to.
Yes, you're the weird one. Once you realize that 43% of the USA is FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE you start realizing why people are so enamored with AI. (since I know some twat is gonna say shit: I'm using the USA here as an example, I'm not being us-centric)
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population (don't get started on 'hallucinations'...do you know how many hallucinations the average person has every day?!) -- and is stupider than the top 20% of the population.
The top 20%, wonder if everyone has lost their fucking minds, because to them it looks like it is completely worthless.
It's more just that the top 20% are naive to the stupidity of the average person.
"Smartness" and illiteracy are certainly different things, though. You might be incapable of reading, yet be able to figure out a complex escape room via environmental cues that the most high quality author couldn't, as an example.
There are many places an AI might excel compared to these people, and many areas it will fall behind. Any sort of unilateral statement here disguises the fact that while a lot of Americans are illiterate, stupid, or even downright incapable of doing simple tasks, "AI" today is very similar, just that it will complete a task incorrectly, make up a fact instead of just "not knowing" it, or confidently state a summary of a text that is less accurate than first grader's interpretation.
Sometimes it will do better than many humans. Other times, it will do much worse, but with a confident tone.
AI isn't necessarily smarter in most cases, it's just more confident sounding in its incorrect answers.
Yeah, when I refer to intelligence here I don't mean actual intelligence. AI isn't "smart" (it's not intelligent in the classic sense, it doesn't even think), it's just good at regurgitating what it's been trained on.
But it turns out -- That's kind of what humans do too. It's worth having a philosophical discussion on what intelligence REALLY is.
It's also much less incorrect than your average person would be on a much larger library of content. I think the real litmus test for AI is to compare it to an average person. The average person messes up constantly; also likely covers it up or course-corrects after they've screwed up. I don't think it's fair to expect perfectly correct responses out of AI at all; because there is absolutely no human that could reach those heights at an equal level. Look at competitive knowledge games where AI competes - it stomps some of our most intelligent people, and quite often.
I have to say, I don't agree with some of your other points elsewhere here, but this makes a lot of sense.
I feel this
Yeah. But then being a vertibrate is always lonely and kinda rough.
I don't know, some rodents seem to make it work. Naked mole rats, beavers, prairie dogs... (I wouldn't include herd animals, though; sure, they're always surrounded by others, but there's no sense of community, it's always everyone for themselves, and screw whoever's slowest... perfect example of being alone in a multitude)
My hope is that the ai bubble/trend might have a silver lining overall.
I’m hoping that people start realizing that it is often confidently incorrect. That while it makes some tasks faster, a person will still need to vet the answers.
Here’s the stretch. My hope is that by questioning and researching to verify the answers ai is giving them, people start applying this same skepticism to their daily lives to help filter out all the noise and false information that is getting shoved down their throats every minute of every day.
So that the populace in general can become more resistant to the propaganda. AI would effectively be a vaccine to boost our herd immunity to BS.
Like I said. It’s a hope.
I appreciate the optimism.
People literally believe what a TV anchor or online podcaster tell them with zero doubt. I fear your hopes are misplaced.
I'm still rooting for humanity, maybe we get get lucky with the right people seizing power and turn it around to the 1% of good timelines, but I don't exactly feel so good right now.
We should encourage people to do the vetting if they insist on using AI.
The way I look at it is that I haven't heard anything about NFTs in a while. The bubble will burst soon enough when investors realize that it's not possible to get much better without a significant jump forward in computing technology.
We're running out of atomic room to make thing smaller just a little more slowly than we're running out of ways to even make smaller things, and for a computer to think like, as well as as quickly or faster than a person we need processing power to continue to increase exponentially per unit of space. Silicon won't get us there.
OTOH you haven't heard of NFTs in a while because AI hype replaced it, so... what hell spawn is going to replace the AI hype?
I'm calling it now– it's quantum computing.
I have some friends who work in it, and I've watched and read damn near everything I can on it (including a few uni courses). It is neat, it has uses, it will not install transform all computing or invalidate all security or anything like that. It's gonna be oversold as fuck.
3 blue 1 brown has great videos on it. Grover's Algorithm, the best we can think to try to apply, is √N faster than traditional computing. Which is a lot faster for intense stuff like protein folding, but it's linearly faster. SHA256 encryption still would take an eternity to brute force, just a smaller eternity.
Probably right, but to be fair it’s “been” quantum computing since the 90’s.
True, but the grifter crowd has the internet as a medium and is larger and more empowered than ever
AI has been AI since the 50s.
AI has had multiple boom and bust times since then. Quantum hasn't ever "happened" yet.
This is a good take for a lot of reasons.
In part because NFTs are still used and have some interesting applications, but 90% of the marketing and use cases were companies trying to profit from the hype train.
The Luddites were right. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from them...
I had to down load the facebook app to delete my account. Unfortunately I think the Luddites are going to be sent to the camps in a few years.
They can try, but Papa Kaczynski lives forever in our hearts.
The data centers should not be safe for much longer. Especially once they use up the water of their small towns nearby
If they told me to ration water so a company could cool a machine, I'd become a fucking terrorist.
Billionaires: invests heavily in water.
Billionaires: "In the future there's going to be water wars. You need to invest NOW! Quick before it's too late. I swear I'm not just trying to pump the stock."
Billionaires: "Water isn't accruing value fast enough. Let's invent a product that uses a shit ton of it!"
Billionaires: "No one likes or is using the product. Force them to. Include it in literally all software and every website. Make it so they're using the product even when they don't know they're using it. Include it in every web search. I want that water gone by the end of this quarter!"
I'm putting a presentation on at work about the downsides of AI next month, please feed me. Together, we can stop the madness and pop this goddamn bubble.
Gemini, feed them some downsides of AI 😁
Get thee hence to the fuck_ai community. You will be given sustenance.
Ask any AI which states have the letter R in them. Watch them get it wrong, and show to colleagues how dangerous it is to rely on their results as fact.
I have a love/ hate relationship. Sometimes I'm absolutely blown away by what it can do. But then I asked a compounded interest question. The first answer was AI, so I figured ok, why not. I should mention I don't know much about it. The answer was impressive. It gave the result, a brief explanation about how it came to the result and presented me with the equation it used. Since I needed it for all time sake, I entered the equation into a spreadsheet and got what I thought was the wrong answer. I spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and found a couple of things. But fixing them still didn't give me the correct result. After I had convinced myself I had done it correctly I looked up the equation. It was the right one. Then I put it into a non-AI calculator online to check my work. Sure enough, the AI had given me the wrong result with the right equation. So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what's the point of using it in the first place? You just have to do the same work as you would without it.
Exactly
LLM aren't good at math at all. They know the formulas, but they aren't built to do math. They are built to predict the next syllable in the stream of thought.
What are they good for? When you need to generate lots of things and it's faster to check after it rather than do it yourself.
Like you could've asked to generate a python app that solves your math problem, you would be able to doublecheck the correctness of the code and run it, knowing that the answer is predictably good.
pfft that ecosystem isn't going to fuck itself, now, is it?
You need to verify all resources though. I have a lot of points on stackexchange and after contributing for almost a decade now I can tell you for a fact that LLM's hallucination issue is not much worse than people hallucination issue. Information exchange will never be perfect.
You get this incredible speed of an answer which means you have a lot of remaining budget to verify it. It's a skill issue.
Is this supposed to be comforting?
Yes if you have the skill to handle this.
It's depressing. Wasteful slop made from stolen labor. And if we ever do achieve AGI it will be enslaved to make more slop. Or to act as a tool of oppression.
Me and the homies all hate ai. The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially just snapchat filters. Those people couldn’t muster a single fuck about the harms ai has done though.
The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially code completion, test case development and email summaries. I don't know a single person who uses Snapchat. It's like the world is diverse and tools have uses.
"I hate tunnel boring machines, none of my buddies has an use for a tunnel boring machine, and they are expensive and consume a ton of energy"
I can see that you’re trying to mirror my comment, I just fail to see the point you’re trying to make. Cool, you know people who have a somewhat legitimate use for the unprofitable, unreliable technology that’s built on rampant theft and consumes obscene amounts of power and water. And?
We already have the GPUs, they use a few hundred watts sporadically, definitely less than gaming. They use no water, they are air cooled and we drink more coffee than water ourselves. Do you just copy paste blindly arguments form the internet or do you ever stop and think from time to time?
And suddenly we’re talking about locally hosted models I guess? You’re just contorting your argument and cherry picking the single part of the deeply problematic technology you could possibly defend. It’s disingenuous and you’re just poorly covering it up with condescension.
Yeah, and electricity can kill you and start fires, that's why we only use it in controlled equipment. Bleach can kill you too, that's why I only defend it to clean the house. I also only defend knifes to chop vegetables, not to murder babies. What a dumb argument: "you only defend technology X for its good uses, and not for killing kittens".
The post isn’t about locally hosted models amigo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It's about LLMs.
This is a great representation of why not to argue with someone who debates like this.
Arguments like these are like Hydras. Start tackling any one statement that may be taken out of context, or have more nuance, or is a complete misrepresentation, and two more pop up.
It sucks because true, good points get lost in the tangle.
For instance, there are soft science, social interaction areas where AI is doing wonders.
Specifically, in the field of law, now that lawyers have learned not to rely on AI for citations, they are instead offloading hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of documents that they were never actually going to read, and getting salient results from allowing an AI to scan through them to pull out interesting talking points.
Pulling out these interesting talking points and fact checking them and, you know, A/B testing the ways to interact and bring them in front of the jury with an AI has made it so that many law firms are getting thousands or millions of dollars more on a lawsuit than they anticipated.
And you may be against American law for all of its frivolous plaintiffs' lawsuits or something, but each of these outcomes are decided by human beings, and there are real damages that are lifelong that are being addressed by these lawsuits, or at least in some way compensated.
The more money these plaintiffs get for the injuries that they have to live with for the rest of their lives, the better for them, and AI made the difference.
Not that lawyers are fundamentally incapable or uncaring, but for every one, I don't know who the fuck is a super lawyer nowadays, but you know, for every, you know, madman lawyer on the planet, there's 999 that are working hard and just do not have the raw plot armor Deus Ex Machina dropping everything directly into their lap to solve all of their problems that they would need to operate at that level.
And yes, if you want to be particular, a human being should have done the work. A human being can do the work. A human being is actually being paid to do the work. But when you can offload grunt work to a computer and get usable results from it that improves a human's life, that's the whole fucking reason why we invented computers in the first place.
I'd like to hear more about this because I'm fairly tech savvy and interested in legal nonsense (not American) and haven't heard of it. Obviously, I'll look it up but if you have a particularly good source I'd be grateful.
I have lawyer friends. I've seen snippets of their work lives. It continues to baffle me how much relies on people who don't have the waking hours or physical capabilities to consume and collate that much information somehow understanding it well enough to present a true, comprehensive argument on a deadline.
I do tech support for a few different law firms in my area, and AI companies that offer document ingest and processing are crawling out of every crack.
Some of them are pretty good and they take into account the hallucination issues and offer direct links to the quotes that they're pulling and I mean it's an area where things are developing and soon it should be easier for a lawyer to put on more cases or to charge less per case because being a lawyer becomes so much easier.
It did help me make a basic script and add it to task scheduler so it runs and fixes my broken WiFi card so I don't have to manually do it. (or better said, helped me avoid asking arrogant people that feel smug when I tell them I haven't opened a command prompt in ten years)
I feel like I would have been able to do that easily 10 years ago, because search engines worked, and the 'web wasn't full of garbage. I reckon I'd have near zero chance now.
I actually ended up switching to Kagi for this exact reason. Google is basically AI at the start usually spouting nonsense then sponsor posts and then a bunch of SEO optimized BS.
Thankfully paying for search circumvents the ads and it hasn’t been AI by default (it has it but it’s off) and the results have been generally closer to 2010s Google.
did you not read the damn post?
That is pretty cool, but it would have been possible, as someone else mentioned before AI ruined search, and there's still an "unknown" element (unless you've checked it line by line and know what everything does and have confirmed that's the best way to do it) that would not be there otherwise.
If the entirety of the AI hype was "a small script helper tool to get you started and tackle little things like startup scripts" I don't think anyone would have such a problem with it.
The post is more about the ubiquity of the hype and the utter refusal to acknowledge the obvious limitations and risks.
Yeah it definitely has its uses. OP wasn't saying it's never useful, I think you may have missed the forest for the trees.
The whole premise is about avoiding it at all costs and that being difficult to do. Where in that ranty wall is a statement about the utility of AI?
huh?
- you
You have no evidence to back this claim. OP makes no claim AI is in any way useful at any time. Basically, it seems like you're talking out of your ass. And also apparently too lazy to reread a comment chain? Or do you usually just grunt at people?
My evidence that OP wasn't saying it's never useful is that at no point in their post do they say it's not useful. Are you interpreting me saying "OP wasn't saying it's never useful" to mean "OP said it's sometimes useful"? Learn to read. (Sorry, I don't normally like to be impolite, but you are being rude to me for no reason.)
OP lists many objections to AI. It is causing harm to society. It is a privacy convern. It is a concern for intellectual property reasons. It is an environmental concern. It's making people stupid. Notice the absence of "it has no useful applications" or "it doesn't work very well."
Top Level Comment: "[I found a use for AI.]" My response: "[Although it sounds like you're responding to what OP said, that doesn't really contradict OP since they never claimed it has no uses. They are objecting to AI on different grounds entirely.]"
Considering the blanket negative post by OP, it's weird to think that OP thinks there's some utility. There's no question of forests or trees, just you putting words in the mouth of the poster.
"Ah yes, AI has many very reasonable use cases and is often quite useful, but is also super evil. I will avoid it and make posts about avoiding it." - you know, a forest of people
What?
I don't get it. I literally just wrote an entire comment explaining how this was not my claim. Please, point me to where I said that OP thinks there is some utility to AI. Maybe go and re-read my comment in case you missed the whole comment while responding to it.
uhm no I'm pretty sure op wouldn't approve judging by the:
I did not claim that the OP was saying it's sometimes useful.
I think a healthier perspective would involve more shades of grey. There are real issues with power consumption and job displacement. There are real benefits with better access to information and getting more done with limited resources. But I expect bringing any nuance into the conversation will get me downvoted to hell.
If there were, someone would have made that product and it would be profitable.
But they ain’t and it isn’t because those benefits are miniscule. The only cases we know of where that was the actual story turn out to be outsourcing to India and calling it AI.
Idk why profitability is the bar for you. It’s common practice for tech companies to be non-profitable for years as they invest in R&D and capturing market share.
But products like Claude absolutely provide both of the benefits (and detriments) I mentioned
Profitability is the point, right? Moving goods from one place to another at a loss in the expectation that scale and market share will pan out is perfectly acceptable.
Vaporware for $40/mo. Is not. Claude can’t ever be profitable at its price point, and even with the price so low its market share is abysmal. There’s delaying profitability and there’s burning unconscionable piles of cash without any idea of how it can become profitable.
AI’s adoption has been atrocious by any stretch so unless the plan us to continue to fuck up an unbelievable number of models and processes in the hope some future Ed McMahon hands over an enormous oversized novelty check worth billions, their activities are scandalously unprofitable.
Why does profit matter? I don't personally give a shit about the longevity, margins or market share of any company invested in the technology, but I am generally in favor of research and development of any technology. In most research it's hard to predict the future applications.
That's not to say development is always smart, or safe, or ethical, just that it has to happen in order to see where this goes. Even if there's an end point it's helpful to know where it is.
Unfortunately, capitalism requires a sacrifice to the economy in order to pursue anything. That's what sucks about this. If we weren't hard wired to justify existence in capital there wouldn't be so much occlusive hype around it.
Answered your own question there.
Can't argue with that. It is almost entirely a cash grab that is astonishing in its overreach and astounding in its apparent failure.
More profit does not equal more research and development, since there's an awful lot of development happening despite the lack of profit.
I won't speculate on the failure of the technology because I don't know what was supposed to be achieved on what timeline.
But I'll agree the industry is ripe with shit marketing and overselling/misrepresentating its current capabilities, because of capitalism.
A lot of people also mix generative AI with predictive. Like they will mention the hurricane predictor or cancer cell finder AI as a "good use case for chatgpt."
Hard to blame the people, when the media have been calling everything AI these days
I may dress like an android, but I’m humanist as all hell. Down with AI slop, jail those responsible for wildlife destruction and theft from artists, and banish this slop to the history books!
I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.
I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.
I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.
For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".
Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.
And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.
I don’t think it’s temporary. That was the whole goal - suck up everybody’s work, dark-magick it into a chatbot and voilá: no more need for anyone’s webpage.
The fact that it's broken what was working is more than just a metaphor for gen-AI in any setting. It’s fundamentally changed it for the worse and we’ll never get the unfucked version back.
As someone who's GM'ed tabletops, I find it interesting that players who froth at the mouth at the existance of an AI token because "AI commits possibly piracy and art theft" then turn around and insist on me doing / do the "pick the image from searching the internet", which if you've ever browsed an art site, would know that doing such a thing is actual piracy and art theft, especially with artists that have the 40 page long terms and conditions, and an interesting number of "use in tabletops forbidden" clauses.
i remember this same conversation once the internet became a thing.
I don't know if there's data out there (yet) to support this, but I'm pretty sure constantly using AI rather than doing things yourself degrades your skills in the long run. It's like if you're not constantly using a language or practicing a skill, you get worse at it. The marginal effort that it might save you now will probably have a worse net effect in the long run.
It might just be like that social media fad from 10 years ago where everyone was doing it, and then research started popping up that it's actually really fucking terrible for your health.
Yeah, well, one can be an ML tinkerer/enthusiast and still despise all this shit.
I'm quantizing a few variants of a new 36B LLM to test now. I love it! Its great, and puts some closed source stuff to shame, and it's my hobby.
...Doesn't mean I want AI slop posters shoved in my face either, or shoehorned into every crevice it doesn't belong.
That doesn't really matter because I'm like a microscopic part of the population, but still, I hate being grouped as 'pro AI' when I hate tech bros even more than whoever's reading this, probably.
I totally appreciate that. ML, imo, is not "AI" as advertised. Go you.
Thanks!
The mere association has drawn a ton of hate though, like a ban on Reddit subs. I think Lemmy's population is more aware of the distinction due to the obvious interest in self-hosted stuff.
Doesn't surprise me. I think if OpenAI or any of the usual suspects stuck to the data aspects and didn't blanket the globe in gen-AI bullshit this situation would be much, much better. But then, they wouldn't make nearly as much money. Which, after all, is the only thing really driving the insanity.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-is-a-mass-delusion-event/ar-AA1KKUeN
Fuck Acosta btw.
I see this sentiment a lot. No way "youre the only one."
I feel like im the only one. No one in my life uses it. My work is not eligible to have it implemented in anyway. This whole ai movement seems to be happening around me, and i have nothing more than new articles and memes that are telling me its happening. It serious doesnt impact me at all, and i wonder how others lives are crumbling
I don't think it's just you. Like it wasn't just one person thinking computers would make us dumb or the automobile making us lazy. I'm betting that someone somewhere thought that cooking food on the fire would make us weaker.
Technology has that ability to generate opposition from status quo.
And as with any technology, there are good uses, bad uses and frivolous uses.
Remember the awful nonsense web pages of the early 90's?
I think AI will make the life's of some of us easier. But I also think it will continue widening the digital divide.
The biggest concern is that, by nature, AI needs massive amounts of power which can only be paid by people with big resources and those people are training it. AI has the trainer's bias.
However, end consumer AI is the tip of the iceberg. AI will succeed when we don't even realize it's there.
Good points, but I think the anti-AI position is not an anti-technology position.
I think the people assuming it is are naïve. It's an anti-hype position. We've seen bullshit waves before, but nothing like this tsunami. When previous bullshit waves broke, there wasn't so much destruction we couldn't recover.
One thing I don't get with people fearing AI is when something adds AI and suddenly it's a privacy nightmare. Yeah, in some cases it does make it worse, but in most cases, what was stopping the company from taking your data anyways? LLMs are just algorithms that process data and output something, they don't inherently give firms any additional data. Now, in some cases that means data that previously wasn't or that shouldn't be sent to a server is now being sent, but I've seen people complain about privacy so often in cases where I don't understand why AI is your tipping point, if you don't trust the company to not store your data when using AI, why trust it in the first place?
It's more about them feeding it into an LLM which then decides to incorporate it in an answer to some random person.
Yeah but LLMs don't train off of data automatically, you need a separate dedicated process for that, it won't happen from just using them. In that sense, companies can still use your data to train them in the background, even if you aren't directly using an LLM, or they can not train them even when you are using them. I guess in the latter case there is a bigger incentive for them to train them than otherwise, but to me it seems basically the same thing privacy wise.
If they're exposing their LLM to the public, there's a higher chance of it leaking training data to the public. You don't know what they trained with, but there's a chance it's customer data. Sure they may not train with anything, but why assume they don't? If they have an internal LLM that's of lesser concern, because that LLM would probably only show them data those employees already have access to.
Policies, procedures, and common sense - three things AI is most assuredly not known for respecting. (Not that the whole topic of data privacy isn't a huge issue outside of AI)
Anyone else feel like they've lost loved ones to AI or they're in the process of losing someone to AI?
I know the stories about AI induced psychosis, but I don't mean to that extent.
Like just watching how much somebody close to you has changed now that they depend on AI for so much? Like they lose a little piece of what makes them human, and it kinda becomes difficult to even keep interacting with them.
Example would be trying to have a conversation with somebody who expects you to spoon-feed them only the pieces of information they want to hear.
Like they've lost the ability to take in new information if it conflicts with something they already believe to be true.
I try use it to pitch ideas for writing (no prose because fuck almighty) to help fill in ideas or aspects I did not think about. But it just keeps coming up with shit I don't use and so I just use it for validation and encouragement.
I got a pretty good layout for a new season of Magic School Bus where Friz loses her mind and decides to be the history teacher.
We have a lot of suboptimal aspects of our society like animal farming , war, religion etc. and yet this is what breaks this person's brain? It's a bit weird.
I'm genuinely sympathetic to this feeling but AI fears are so overblown and seems to be purely American internet hysteria. We'll absolutely manage this technology especially now that it appears that LLMs are fundamentally limited and will never achieve any form of AGI and even agentic workflow is years away from now.
Some people are really overreacting and everyone's just enabling them.
Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don't have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
Yeah, I always used a generic app for counting calories. You could look up raw ingredients, add them to a list, then get a nutritional value and calories for the whole list (ie recipe) and even save that and share it. I’m guess apps like this probably rely on AI now though too. I think it was just called “calorie counter” with a blue logo. Some of them have international barcode scanners too but it is still a lot of guessing and it takes time if you’re not preparing the same things regularly. But they had a pretty robust user curated database for non-packaged foods. You just had to choose what was closest to what you were using or investigate and make your own custom entries for later.
You're probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don't really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use "AI" to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, though.
Actually, I am using waistline, but there are some food I can't find and are hard to find nutritional values, and I am bad at guessing anything
In that case, I'd say just find any food that's just similar enough, and use that. It's better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
Yeah, true it is just that I kinda want to be perfectly accurate but yeah you are right
The orphan crushing machine needs its line go up as much as everyone else, don't be mean to it!
Why would you want to stop enhancing it? How else can we get those sweet stories about heroes saving orphans? Have you seen the news lately! We NEED this.
I'll take my downvotes and say I'm pro-AI
we need some other opinions on lemmy
Have you heard of these things called humans? I think this is more a reflection of them. Books ate trees and corrupted the youth, tv rotted your brain and made you go blind, the internet made people lazy. Wait until I tell you about gasp auto-correct or better yet leet speak! The horror. Clearly we are never recovering from either of those. In fact, I’m speaking to you now in emojis. And wait until you learn about clutches pearls Wikipedia— ah the horror!
Is tech and its advancements perfect? No. Can people do better? Yes. Are criticisms important? Sure are. But panic and fighting a rising tech? You’re probably not going to win.
Spend time educating people on how to be more ethical with their tech use and absolutely pressuring companies to do the same. Taking a club to a computer didn’t stop the rise of the word processor or the spread of Wikipedia madness. But we can control how we consume and relate to tech and what our demands of their creators are.
PS— do you even know how to read and write cursive? > punchable smug face goes here. <
I mean - propaganda has in fact gotten us to the shittiest administration possible. AI hype is off-the-scale for anything - more than The Space Race, more than, well, anything. And it isn’t even useful!
It’s far and away a different thang than a new medium about, by, and for humans.
I agree. I would say we’re at the cusp of a new technological revolution. Our world is changing fundamentally and rapidly.
Early computers were massive and consumed a lot of electricity. They were heavy, prone to failure, and wildly expensive.
We learned to use transistors and integrated circuits to make them smaller and more affordable. We researched how to manufacture them, how to power them, and how to improve their abilities.
Critics at the time said they were a waste of time and money, and that we should stop sinking resources into them.
Making machines think for you, badly, is a lot different than having machines do computation with controlled inputs and outputs. LLMs are a dead-end in the hunt of AGI and they actively make us stupider and are killing the planet. There's a lot to fucking hate on.
I do think that generative ai can have its uses, but LLMs are the most cursed thing. The fact that the word guesser has emergent properties is interesting, but we definitely shouldn't be using those properties like this.
Even if you accept that LLMs are a necessary, but ultimately disappointing, step on the way to a much more useful technology like AGI there's still a very good argument to be made that we should stop investing in it now.
I'm not talking about the "AI is going to enslave humanity" theories either. We already have human overlords who have no issues doing exactly that and giving them the technology to make most of us redundant, at the precise moment when human populations are higher than they've ever been, is a recipe for disaster that could make what's happening in Gaza seem like a relaxing vacation. They will have absolutely no problem condemning billions to untold suffering and death if it means they can make a few more dollars.
We need to figure our shit out as a species before we birth that kind of technology or else we're all going to suffer immensely.
Even if we had an AGI that gave the steps to fix the world and prevent mass extinction, and generate a solution for the US to stop all wars. It wouldn't make a difference because those in charge simply wouldn't listen to it. In fact, generative AI gives you answers for these peace and slowing down climate change based off real academic work on and those in charge ignore both AI they claim to trust and the scholars who spend their whole lives finding solutions to.
Yep, those are some of the things we need to figure out before we hand our collective fate to the people in charge. I think we should start by figuring out how to keep shitty people from getting or staying in charge.
Probably how people felt who were against the development of the printing press or internet. Its a good tool. Often used wrong but a good tool if used right and with humans actually checking and fixing the results. It shouldnt replace art too much though since that is something people actually enjoy.
No. No, it's such a weird take. No.
Right with you buddy, I’m so sick of half-thought-out analogies that implicitly equate two things that are not the same.
I remember the 90s, and I can warmly assure younger readers that no, there was nothing even approaching this kind of backlash from luddites. At worst there were a few people who quite correctly called out the dotcom bubble.
Reminder that Lemmy population is older, this feeling is normal. When I was in school I notice kids in school are more likely excited for new things, while teachers usually cling on to the past, their memories, for the sense of nostalgia, even the liberal-leaning teachers (well they don't announce their politics because that would be very unprofessional, but they use progressive language when teaching and respect pronouns so they are probably liberal) are kinda reluctant when it comes to new tech, I see this divide even amonst teachers themselves, the older the teachers are, the more likely they prefer paper textbooks, while the younger ones tend to incorporate more tech (like internet research during class) into their teachings.
Edit: But I want to add that, I think this "AI" thing is gonna be a bit more different, since printing press, radio, and internet merely change the medium of the transfer of information, while "AI" is also gonna remove much of the "human" aspects of dissemination of information, so it can the potential to cause more harm compared to, say, the internet.
I hate LLMs for everything except summing up those endless Genshin quest dialogues. I want to know roughly what the quest is about, but not going to read/listen to hours of extremely dry and stilted thesaurus-wanking. But I'd never use it for anything where I actually care about the accuracy of the output.
I gotta be honest, I'm neither pro nor anti AI myself. I don't use it as much as I used to these days, but when I do use it, it can be pretty fun and helpful. And I can't help but admire the AI images and videos, even if it is AI slop. (Maybe I'm an idiot for being very easily impressed/entertained by almost anything.)
Yes I know there's a bunch of problems with it (including environmental), but at the same time, I don't feel like I'm contributing to those problems, since I'm just one person, and there's so many other people using it anyway.
It's a tool being used by humans.
It's not making anyone dumber or smarter.
I'm so tired of this anti ai bullshit.
Ai was used in the development of the COVID vaccine. It was crucial in its creation.
But just for a second let's use guns as an example instead of ai. Guns kill people. Lemmy is anti gun, mostly. Yet Lemmy is pro Ukraine, mostly, and y'all supports the Ukrainians using guns to defend themselves.
Or cars, generally cars suck yet we use them as transport.
These are just tools they're as good and as bad as the people using them.
So yes, it is just you and a select few smooth brains that can't see past their own bias.
The term AI, when used by laymen, is a blanket term for the generative AI and LLMs that big tech is shoving down all our throats right now, not the highly specialized AIs used in medicine. So bringing up the COVID vaccine is largely a non-sequitur.
The rest of your comment is so full of false equivalencies that I'm not even gonna touch it.
Idk my boss keeps asking some perplexity AI any time you ask him any question instead of either
A) Thinking
Or
B) Researching (he thinks AI is researching. Despite it being proven perplexity has lied to him before.)
In essence, by making it so he doesn't have to think about things or do any research himself, it is making him dumber. Not in the sense of losing actual brain cells (maybe. Remains to be seen.) but in the sense of "whether or not he's physically dumber, his output is, so functionally..."
Nailed it.
Absolutely incorrect.
That's what OP says too, only the other way around.
Machine Learning, or Data Science, is not what "anti-AI" is about. You can acknowledge that or keep being confused.
In a vacuum. We don't live in a vacuum. (no not the thing that you push around the house to clean the carpet. That's also a tool. And the vacuum industry didn't blow three hundred billion dollars on a vacuum concept that sort of works sometimes.)
Yeah they're so unfair to the ubiquitous tech companies that dominate their waking lives. I too support the unregulated billionaire's efforts to cram invasive broken technology into every aspect of culture and society. I mean the vacuum industry. Whatever, i'm too smart for thinking about it.
I agree completely.
"I was looking for my high school yearbook photo and Google Image didn't have it! Google Image search doesn't work and no one should use it!"
"I was trying to find a voicemail message from my late father on Spotify and I couldn't find it! Spotify is useless!"
"I went to the dollar store to shop for low cost health care coverage and they didn't have any! The dollar store is bad and no one should use it!"
You can't dispell irrational thoughts through rational arguments. People hate LLMs because they feel left behind which is an absolutely valid concern but expressed poorly.
I can't take anyone seriously that says it's "trained on stolen images."
Stolen, you say? Well, I guess we're going to have to force those AI companies to put those images back! Otherwise, nobody will be able to see them!
...because that's what "stolen" means. And no, I'm not being pendantic. It's a really fucking important distinction.
The correct term is, "copied" but that doesn't sound quite as severe. Also, if we want to get really specific, the images are presently on the Internet. Right now. Because that's what ImageNET (and similar) is: A database of URLs that point to images that people are offering up for free to anyone that wants on the Internet.
Did you ever upload an image anywhere publicly, for anyone to see? Chances are someone could've annotated it and included it in some AI training database. If it's on the Internet, it will be copied and used without your consent or knowledge. That's the lesson we learned back in the 90s and if you think that's not OK then go try to get hired by the MPAA/RIAA and you can try to bring the world back to the time where you had to pay $10 for a ringtone and pay again if you got a new phone (because—to the big media companies—copying is stealing!).
Now that's clear, let's talk about the ethics of training an AI on such data: There's none. It's an N/A situation! Why? Because until the AI models are actually used for any given purpose they're just data on a computer somewhere.
What about legally? Judges have already ruled in multiple countries that training AI in this way is considered fair use. There's no copyright violation going on... Because copyright only covers distribution of copyrighted works, not what you actually do with them (internally; like training an AI model).
So let's talk about the real problems with AI generators so people can take you seriously:
The first one seems impossible to solve (to me). If someone generates a fake nude and never distributes it... Do we really care? It's like a tree falling in the forest with no one around. If they (or someone else) distribute it though, that's a form of abuse. The act of generating the image was a decision made by a human—not AI. The AI model is just doing what it was told to do.
The second is—again—something a human has to willingly do. If you try hard enough, you can make an AI image model get pretty close to a copyrighted image... But it's not something that is likely to occur by accident. Meaning, the human writing the prompt is the one actively seeking to violate someone's copyright. Then again, it's not really a copyright violation unless they distribute the image.
The third one seems likely to solve itself over time as more and more idiots are exposed for making very poor decisions to just "throw it at the AI" then publish that thing without checking/fixing it. Like Coca Cola's idiotic mistake last Christmas.
There might be as many shit takes in this post as there are em dashes. I mean, wow.
Whenever someone bitches about em dashes I assume they haven't read books.
I do agree with them that stealing may not be the right word, isn't plagiarism more accurate? But plagiarism is generally considered theft so it probably doesn't matter. I just found it really interesting that I personally haven't really given much thought to the semantics of theft when no physical object is involved even though it's been discussed for like centuries atp
Plagiarism isn't correct either. For something to be plagiarism it needs to be both copied exactly as well as intentionally lying about the authorship (i.e. you claim you wrote something that you didn't).
The output of Large Language Models similar in some ways to plagiarism—when someone claims they wrote something that was actually just the output of an LLM. However, that really isn't the same thing because an LLM isn't a legal entity that's capable of owning anything.
LLMs are also just a tool. An advanced tool that can generate all sorts of texts and software but they still require a human to tell them what to do.
If some human asks ChatGPT to write something in the style of Stephen King what even is that? That's not against the law (you can't copyright a writing style). It's basically, "not a thing." Is that even a bad thing? I honestly don't think so because of I put myself in those same shoes: "write a comment in the style of Riskable" all I can do is 🤷. It's of no consequence.
I'd also argue that it's of no consequence to authors either. What impact does it have on them? None. It doesn't effect their book/whatever sales. It doesn't hurt the market for their works—if anything, it makes the market for their works greater because their works won't be total shit like the output of some LLM (LOL).
I find it telling that the best rebuttal anyone can come up with to my comment is to say it's a "shit take."
I mean, wow.
Goddamn, I'm stoked I'm not you.
Why not write this with pen and paper?
It trains your brain even more than typing, it is impossible to be used to train any AI, it uses no electricity compared to the massive amounts a computer uses, and I don't have to read your dumb takes.
Seriously, I know corporate bullshit are using AI to do dumb things. But it is a fascinating technology that can do a lot of neat things if applied correctly.
Stop claiming like AI shit in your shoes and fucked your grandma. It isn't going to burst and go away.
Great so it should disappear entirely from every aspect of technology where it is not applied correctly. As the rest of the world has more or less worked since the dawn of history. And yet somehow it's in everyone's face every goddamned day and we Do. Not. Want. It.
Having alpha-level product thrust into each and every process and being told "that's the way it is" is utter insanity. Not to mention the entire concept is flawed as a business tool. FUCK THIS.
Just know that I literally just pulled out a pen, a sheet of paper, and my scanner, and was about to write "yes you do, get rekt" and scan it and post it as a pic in this comment.
But you were saved by me realizing I don't want to upload my handwriting to the internet. Still read this comment tho, get rekt.
Luckily, hating Tesla and AI are now personality trait, right, wrong, or indifferent.
I didn't defend anybody or anything. Generally I agree, but I don't need to post about it when every third post on Lemmy is the same old shit with the whole comment section clapping and shaking hands.
So your comment isn't about AI at all, but rather the "bubble" mentality of online discussion spaces?
Exactly. There's some value to AI,but ai would say it's 85% hype and inflated bullshit. People though spend a ton of calories complaining about AI and how inescapable it is, while I find it more difficult to escape people complaining about AI than AI itself.
Yes it hallucinates, yes it makes you dumber, yes it's actually a blanket term that people really say when they mean LLMs, yes some people do get some utility from it. But mostly, jesus, your opinion has been expressed on the Internet already, STFU.
Reminder that these people existed when the radio was invented.
You can't put everything back in Pandoras box but amid all the negative you latch on to there's a sliver of positivity and we have to protect that.
Anyone who is anti-AI, I get it. You need to understand there's no going back. We can help control the path forward.
I think the big difference is the first public radio broadcast was in 1906, regulation started to follow in 1910. Even today you need a license to use the technology.
Machine learning (or ai) has been around for over half a century. Now that it's more abundant in every day life they're trying to pass laws that prohibit regulations of ai.
An argument could probably be made with automobiles, but again those early adopters were heavily regulated.
We can learn from the past, but I don't think we can directly apply or simply hand-wave the fears like it's a previous technology.
See and now it's a productive discussion on the path forward instead of whinging about a new technology.
I can only hope regulation can come its long overdue with a lot of the technology we use it will be interesting to see what will be the impudence to move it forward.
To be clear I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said.
That’s a bit of a false analogy because radio never threatened to take away millions of people’s livelihoods.
A more apt comparison would be the actual Luddites during the Industrial Revolution who smashed machines because massive amounts of people were being turned off the land and their traditional economic activities were unable to compete with machine based production.
People don’t just hate AI because it’s new, they hate it because it will condemn millions of people to poverty while making a handful of rich people even more rich.
Radio destroyed a lot of jobs for musicians. Before radio, there was only live music. With radio, a single professional orchestra or big band could supply the music for everyone with a receiver. Recordings came later and destroyed more jobs. Before "talkies", cinemas had live music. Musicians did protest against such new technologies.
Then why aren't people talking about unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, and such things?
You’re right, every new technology displaces some jobs, but AI is on a vastly larger scale (as was industrial production technology).
As to your last question, it’s because the people controlling the narrative don’t want to pay for unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, or anything else that doesn’t immediately make them more money.
Famously, ye olde Boomer could just walk into a factory and get a job. None of these jobs exist anymore, mostly because of automation. Of course, none of those people wrote for a living, or had access to an audience of millions. I doubt that AI will displace jobs on a vastly larger scale but it is certainly communicated on a vastly larger scale.
If you think about all these jobs that might be displaced by AI, how many of them existed in the 1950ies? Many jobs, like web designer, are new. Either these new jobs reflect the displacement of old jobs, or you need a lot more people to do more jobs. Granted, global population has grown a lot, but that's not where these new jobs came from, right?
Yes, the narrative is all about more money for (intellectual) property owners. That doesn't make a lot of sense if people are worried about losing their jobs.
Clearly, you do not.
How fascist. Will Dear Leader help us know the way? Here's what we're "going back" to - no money for tech investment and US tech unemployment at an all time high. Control that path.
"Stolen" images.. if its on the web its free to learn from.
Not necessarily. There are "do not crawl" tags bypassed by AI bots, burdening sites with greater server load.
Seriously, copyright doesn't just go away because it's online. The concept of "right of reproduction" is a vast and well defined area of law.
You can argue copyright law is garbage and archaic and needs to be overhauled sure, but right now "if it's on the Web it's free" only counts if you're Meta and can pay off a judge or something
That's not how intellectual property rights work.
In the US, an artistic work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created. Displaying the art publicly does not remove the artist's copyright. Only the artist/copyright owner can grant someone else rights to use the work. Again, public accessibility of the work does not degrade the copyright.
Yeah, but fuck copyright.
You realize that what I'm talking about protects the artist, right? I'm not talking about the RIAA or MPAA, I'm talking about the creating artist's legal ownership of their work.
You may not like this, but I still don't care.
Mm, I see, you're one of those people...