Has been a while since AI were introduced into the daily basis of the users around all the internet. When it firstly came I was curious yeah like everyone and tried some prompts to see “what this thing can do”, then, I never, ever, used AI again, because I really never saw it like something necesary, we had automatic systems already, so, the time keep moving to me until this day, when I realized something: how people is dependent of this shit. I mean, REALLY is dependent, and then they go like “I only used it for school 😢” like, are you serious dude? Do you leave your future to an algorithm? Coming back with my question, years have passed, I do think we all have an opinion more developed about AI, what do you think? Fuck it and use it anyways? If that is the case, why blame companys to make more accessible it’s use? Like microsoft putting copilot even in notepad. “Microsoft just wants to compile your data.” Isn’t LLM about that? Why blame them if you are going to use the same problem with different flavor? Not defending Microsoft here, I’m only using it like an example, change it for the company of your own preference.
AI all the things? Bad
AI for specific use cases? Good
I use AI probably a dozen times a week for work tasks, saving myself about 2-4 hours of work time on tasks that I know it can do easily in seconds. Simple e-mail draft? Done. Write a complex formula for excel? Easy. Generate a summary of some longer text? Yup.
It’s easy to argue that we may become dependant upon it, but that’s already true for lots of things. Would you have any idea on how to preserve food if you didn’t have a fridge? Would you have any idea on even how to get food if you didn’t have a grocery store nearby? How would you organize a party with your friends without a phone? If a computer wasn’t tracking your bank balance, how would you keep track of your money? Can you multiply 423 by 365 without using a calculator?
You’re actually making a good point that I don’t wholesale disagree with.
But the last paragraph really set me off I guess.
Personally I believe it’s important to have a somewhat granular understanding of the things we use every day, otherwise we risk becoming a slave to them.
None of us can go through life believing that it’s okay to have no skills and no ability to do anything because there’s an easier solution there for us
Because something is going to happen at some point that will take that easy solution away and then you’re fucked. What happens when all you have is a paper map, but all you’ve done is rely on these cool glowing boxes to tell you which direction to walk? You’re out in the bush with a wet phone and you sit down to cry… Because you’ve made yourself a slave and you have no idea what to do now.
I’m 50 now, and I don’t want to talk like an old man, but I can see that young people have no ability to manage their lives or do anything. There’s always a free ad supported app to do it, and then when the internet goes down they are doomed.
If you drive a car, you need to know how to change a tire and put gas in it. If you have a fridge to preserve food, yeah, you probably should understand how and why it preserves food and what to do if power goes down for a day. You should probably further understand how to preserve and ferment things because at many points in your life you’re going to get a lot of ingredients that are going to go to waste and you can eat them if you know what you’re doing.
Overall I cannot go for your advocacy of self-imposed helplessness. Every time you take an easy answer, you actually screw yourself. Most of the time it’s better to take the long road and do the hard work and figure out how to be a capable human being. Once you know how to do it without the easy solution, then you can use the easy solution. In a short metaphor, use the calculator once you know math.
Great answer, sir. Thank you
You’re not wrong, but also you aren’t right. The basics that you need should be taught to you by your parents and at school before you move out. AI isn’t interfering with either of those at this point.
You couldn’t manage your life in the event of every possible problem either, the question then becomes which things should you know how to do yourself, and which things can be delegated.
I don’t know how to repair a car beyond changing a tire or the oil, but even that isn’t really necessary anymore since many cars don’t even come with a spare at this point and knowing how to change the oil is now irrelevant to me, since I’m using an EV.
Knowing how to ferment for preservation may come in handy for saving a couple of dollars, but it’s hardly a life saving skill anymore. Even in the event of a massive catastrophe, it’s unlikely that fermentation would come in handy before aid arrived or you were able to leave the area.
Your response is actually baffling to me.
I’m not sure why you think parents are there to serve you every piece of knowledge.
You’re an autonomous human being and you’d better learn how to learn on your own if you want to have a happy, functional life.
As you get older you’re going to realize that nobody is going to spoon-serve you free knowledge … That’s something that is hard fought, absolutely not a gift from parents or anything else. You have to do the work.
The fact that you just cherry-pick and poo poo my comment is a little bit sad. I see you self-imposing helplessness upon yourself, it’s a really poor attitude. I think you’re actually just lazy.
You think it’s a kids job to learn how to become an adult themselves? What the fuck
I’m 40, with my own kids. I’ve been teaching them everything I think they should know how to do to be an adult when they move out. How to cook and clean, make a budget, fill out forms, how to show up on time, be part of a team, etc. The school is taking care of most of the academics, but I add some extra things that the school fails to cover as extensively as I’d like such as how to properly use Microsoft Excel.
What they do to grow once they’re out of the house isn’t my problem, I’m just setting the foundation and that absolutely is the job of parents and teachers.
The llms have impressive mathematics but can it cure cancer or create world peace? No. Can it confuse people by pretending to be human? Yes. Put all that compute to work solving problems instead of writing emails or basic code or customer service and I’ll care. I hear that AlphaFold is useful. I want to hear more about the useful machine learnimg.
It’s just like any big technological breakthrough. Some people will lose their jobs, jobs that don’t currently exist will be created, and while it’ll create acute problems for some people, the average quality of life will go up. Some people will use it for good things, some people will use it for bad things.
I’m a tech guy, I like it a lot. Before COVID, I used to teach software dev, including neural networks, so seeing this stuff gradually reach the point it has now has been incredible.
That said, at the moment, it’s being put into all kinds of use-cases that don’t need it. I think that’s more harmful than not. There’s no need for Copilot in Notepad.
We have numerous AI tools where I work, but it hasn’t cost anyone their job - they just make life easier for the people who use them. I think too many companies see it as a way to reduce overheads instead of increasing output capability, and all this does is create a negative sentiment towards AI.
It really depends. There’s some good uses, but it requires careful consideration and understanding of what the technology can actually provide. And if for your use case there isnt anything, it’s just not what you should use.
Most if not all of the bigger companies that push it dont really try to use it for those purposes, but instead treat it as the next big thing that nobody quite understands, building mostly on hype. But smaller companies and open source initiatives indeed try to make the good uses more accessible and less objectionable.
There’s plenty of cases where people do nifty things that have positive outcomes. Researchers using it for pattern recognition, scambait chatbots, creative projects that try to make use of the characteristics of AI different from human creations, etc.
I like to keep an open mind as to what people come up with, rather than dismissing it outright when AI is involved. Although hailing it as an AI product is a red flag for me if thats all thats advertised.
I have less to say about the tech side than I do about this whole forced mass adoption of LLMs and how I’ve seen people react to it doing things.
I agree that they’re unethically made by stealing data. That’s indisputable. What I fail to grasp is what the purpose of hating a technology is. Blame and responsibility are weird concepts. I’m not knowledgeable in philosophy or anything related to this. What I can tell, however, is that hating on the tech itself distracts people from blaming those actually responsible, the humans doing the enshittification. The billionaires, dictators…
(tangent) and I’d go as far as to say anyone who politically represents more people than they know personally is not the type of politician that should be allowed. Same if they have enough power to violence a lot of people. But this is just my inner anarchist speculating how an ethical society with limited hierarchy might work.
“What I can tell, however, is that hating on the tech itself distracts people from blaming those actually responsible, the humans doing the enshittification. The billionaires, dictators…”
^– SattaRIP^
That’s something I’ve been trying to convince people of that I converse with about LLMs and similar generative technology. I’ve met so many people that just throw a big blanket of hate right over the entire concept of the technology and I just find it so bizarre. Criticize the people and corporations using the tech irresponsibly! It’s like a mass redirection of what and who is really to blame. Which I think is partially because “AI” is something that sort of anthropomorphizes itself to a large portion of society and most people think the “personality within” the technology is responsible for the perceived misdeeds.
I figure when all is said and done and historians and researchers look back on this time, there will be a lot to learn about human behavior that we likely have little grasp of at the moment.
I find it a little bit useful to supplement a search engine at work as a dev but it can’t write code properly yet.
I can see it doing a lot of harm in the ways has been implemented unethically, and in some cases we don’t have legal resolution on whether it’s “legal” but I think any reasonable person knows that taking an original artist’s work, and making a computer generate counterfeits is not really correct.
I think there is going to be a massive culling of people who are charlatans anyways, and whose artistic output is meritless. See 98% of webcomics. Most pop music. Those are already producing output that is so flavorless and bland it might as well have come from AI model. Those people are going to have to find real jobs that they are good at.
I think the worst of what AI is going to bring is not even in making art, music, video, shit like that… It’s going to be that dark pattern stuff where human behavioral patterns and psychology is meticulously analyzed and used against us. Industries that target human frailties are going to use these heavily.
Effective communication will become a quaint memory of the past that seniors rant about.
Llms have been here for a while, which helped a lot of people, the thing is now though the “AI” now is corporations stealing content from people instead of making it there own or creating a llm on training data that is not stolen from the general public.
Llms are fucking amazing, helps with cancer research iirc, and other things, I believe auto correct is a form of a LLM. But now capatilism wants more and more making it with stolen content which is the wrong direction they should be going.
I want actual AI, and not even necessarily for anything other than answering the question of “can we make a sentient being that isn’t human?”
What is being sold as AI isn’t anything cool, or special, or even super useful outside of extremely specific tasks that are certainly not things that can be sold to the general public.
