this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Do people here actually use AI? And if so…for what?
I use AI for what Google used to be able to do: Finding answers to simple questions. Usually about tech but sometimes movies or music. Like how do I add a physical volume to LVM, or what are the specs of this little fan model? Or who was that actress in a movie about kids buried in a collapsed building? Things like that…
But does it actually link the source or does it just say a basic answer and you have to take a leap of faith?
It links to the original article it found so you can check its work, which is nice. It’s perplexity.ai if you’re curious. I find it quite useful. And as much as AI makes shit up I wouldn’t trust it otherwise.
Cool. Yeah I think the best use case of AI is just gonna be better search of unorganized that. Having said that though, it would never be as good as a good search engine with organized data.
Summarizing, drafting things, understanding complex things that are filled with jargon, etc.
So here's the path that you're envisioning:
Someone wants to send you a communication of some sort. They draft a series of bullet points or short version.
They have an LLM elaborate it into a long-form email or report.
They send the long-from to you.
You receive it and have an LLM summarize the long-form into a short-form.
You read the short form.
Do you realize how stupid this whole process is? The LLM in step (2) cannot create new useful information from nothing. It is simply elaborating on the bullet points or short version of whatever was fed to it. It's extrapolating and elaborating, and it is doing so in a lossy manner. Then in step (4), you go through ANOTHER lossy process. The LLM in step (4) is summarizing things, and it might be removing some of the original real information the human created in step (1), rather than the useless fluff the LLM in step (2) added.
WHY NOT JUST HAVE THE PERSON DIRECTLY SEND YOU THE BULLET POINTS FROM STEP (1)???!!
This is idiocy. Pure and simply idiocy. We send start with a series of bullet points, and we end with a series of bullet points, and it's translated through two separate lossy translation matrices. And we pointlessly burn huge amounts of electricity in the process.
This is fucking stupid. If no one is actually going to read the long-form communications, the long-form communications SHOULDN'T EXIST.
Also neither side necessarily knows the others filter chain. Generational loss could grow exponentially. Not only loss but addition by fabrication. Each side trading back and forth indeterminate deletions/additions. It's worse than traditional generational loss. It's generational noise which can resemble signal too.
So if I receive a long form then how do I know if the substantial text is worth reading for the nuance from an actual human being. I can't tell that apart from generated filler. If a human wrote the long form then maybe they've elaborated some nuance that deserved long form.
On the flip side of the same coin. If I receive a short form either generated by me or them. Then to what degree can I trust the indeterminate noisy summary. I just have to trust that the LLM picked out precisely the key points that the author wanted to convey. And trust that nuance was not lost, skewed, or fabricated.
It would be inevitable that two sides end up in a shooting war. Proverbial or otherwise. Because two communiques were playing a fancy game of telephone. Information that was lost or fabricated resulted in an incident but neither side knows which shot first because nobody realized the miscommunication started happening several generations ago.
if you believe that ai summary, i have a bridge that i'd like to sell to you.
do look up the "forer effect" and then read that ai summary again.
I read this comment chain and no? They are giving you actual criticism about the fundamental behaviour of the technology.
The person basically explained the broken telephone game and how “summarizing” will always have data loss by definition, and you just responded with:
Just because you couldn’t notice the data loss doesn’t mean the principle isn’t true.
Your basically saying translating something from English to Spanish and then back to English again is flawless cause it worked for some words for you.
Here are two cases from your original comment that would have data loss. I get you didn’t use the phrase “data loss” but that doesn’t mean your examples didn’t have that flaw.
Sorry if you view all this as lemmy being “anti ai”. For me, I’m a big fan of ML and what things like image recognition can do. I’m not a fan of LLMs becoming so overhyped that it basically gave the other ML use cases a bad name.
Yep, pretty much every single “good” use case of AI I’ve seen is basically a band aid solution to enshitification.
You know what’s a good solution to that? Removing the profit motive.
The problem is basically this: if you're a knowledge worker, then yes, your ass is at risk.
If your job is to summarize policy documents and write corpo-speak documents and then sit in meetings for hours to talk about what you've been doing, and you're using the AI to do it, then your employer doesn't really need you. They could just use the AI to do that and save the money they're paying you.
Right now they probably won't be replacing anyone other than the bottom of the ladder support types, but 5 years? 10? 15?
If your job is typing on a keyboard and then talking to someone else about all the typing you've done, you're directly at risk, eventually.
Mostly stupid stuff involving sailor moon for me, using the lie machine for anything but funny pictures seems like maybe a bad idea at the moment:
I use it to summarize things for me. Or rewrite something I’ve written a bit better. I usually need to spot check it, but it’s still nice to have.
Woah, that’s the biggest bummer of a reason I’ve seen for it. If you read good stuff and write stuff you’d get better at it.
It’s just like any tool.
I use photoshop for instance to edit photos rather than editing them in paint.
Sure I might be able to do the same thing without it, but it makes the process much faster.