r/trueanon comment section defending "AI" (old.reddit.com)

submitted 2 days ago by trompete@hexbear.net to c/slop@hexbear.net

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The post itself is making fun of r/LeftistForAI, but then I veer into the comments and there's a lot of "AI would be good actually if weren't for capitalism."

First of all, people seem to be under the impression these so-called "AIs" can do a bunch of things they cannot do, which is really frustrating.

But my critique of the thing is so much more fundamental:

Anything worthwhile or interesting, whether it be written words, music, a game, whatever, is characterized by someone making an effort. Like they actually tried, they actually thought about it. They tried to look at the big picture as well as the details. Decisions were made about many things, should this be this way or that way? Things were tried, sometimes thrown out, sometimes kept. Someone went over it again and again.

Prompting a fucking LLM, or music generator or whatever, to just make a thing means that doesn't happen. Why would I engage with a thing that the "creator" didn't even bother engaging with?

Is nobody else feeling this way? They're all just missing the forest for the trees! WTF is going on?

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[-] trompete@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago

In computer science, starting in the 50s, there was a discipline called "artificial intelligence". Despite some interesting things coming out of that, by the 90s/2000s it was widely decried as being vaguely defined, over-promising and under-delivering. It was a good idea then to ditch the "artificial intelligence" label if you wanted funding. Better to do "machine learning", a more defined field (slash rebrand), focusing (mostly) on approximating functions using large amounts of sample data.

For example, one might feed it 100 000 scans of hand-written digits (from postal codes), and that would result in a function that could tell you whether some scan of a hand-written digit was a 1 or a 2 or any other digit. This was an early application, used to automatically sort letters for the postal service.

The "GenAI" version would be that in reverse, i.e. you tell it draw a 1, and it will generate something that looks like a hand-written 1.

"Deep leaning" just refers to the use of so-called "artificial neural networks", one of these "machine learning" algorithms, which has now taken center stage. The "deep" here refers to the many layers of the "neural net". The word "neural" here is misleading. There is a very superficial similarity between this and biological neurons, as they do differ in pretty much every imaginable way.

Neural nets are used in LLMs, but they are also widely used in e.g. image recognition. So one might call both of them "deep learning". If you wanted to sell a drone that autonomously dive-bombs a tank, that may very well use an "artificial neural net" to identify the tank. But it's not in any way "generative", so you can't call it "GenAI". You could call it "deep learning" or "AI" though, if you were a marketing person.