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I feel like it's an unpopular take but people are like "I used chat gpt to write this email!" and I'm like you should be able to write email.
I think a lot of people are too excited to neglect core skills and let them atrophy. You should know how to communicate. It's a skill that needs practice.
I know someone who very likely had ChatGPT write an apology for them once. Blew my mind.
This is a reality as most people will abandon those skills, and many more will never learn them to begin with. I'm actually very worried about children who will grow up learning to communicate with AI and being dependent on it to effectively communicate with people and navigate the world, potentially needing AI as a communication assistant/translator.
AI is patient, always available, predicts desires and effectively assumes intent. If I type a sentence with spelling mistakes, chatgpt knows what I meant 99% of the time. This will mean children don't need to spell or structure sentences correctly to effectively communicate with AI, which means they don't need to think in a way other human being can understand, as long as an AI does. The more time kids spend with AI, the less developed their communication skills will be with people. GenZ and GenA already exhibit these issues without AI. Most people go experience this communicating across generations, as language and culture context changes. This will emphasize those differences to a problematic degree.
Kids will learn to communicate will people and with AI, but those two styles with be radically different. AI communication will be lazy, saying only enough for AI to understand. With communication history, which is inevitable tbh, and AI improving every day, it can develop a unique communication style for each child, what's amounts to a personal language only the child and AI can understand. AI may learn to understand a child better than their parents do and make the child dependent on AI to effectively communicate, creating a corporate filter of communication between human being. The implications of this kind of dependency are terrifying. Your own kid talks to you through an AI translator, their teachers, friends, all their relationships could be impacted.
I have absolutely zero beleif that the private interests of these technology owners will benefit anyone other than themselves and at the expense of human freedom.
AI is here to stay. Anyone who refuses to learn how to use it to benefit their lives will be hurting their future. I've used a dozen or so AI tools and use a couple regularly and the efficacy of just chatGPT is clear. There is no going back, AI is your future whether you want it or not. AI will become your user interface for consumer electronics similarly to how consumer electronics seem to all require smart phone apps these days. Your smart phone is now the intermediary, using whatever AI the hardware manufacturers allow, such as Apple and Google using their own LLM AIs.
Fuck that, anything “AI” worth anything is just algorithms we already had that were rebranded to take advantage of stupid people. My life is going just fine without its nonsense, thanks.
This entire argument is predicated on the assumption that it is a benefit to my life.
What if I believe that it's not? That it is an active detriment? That I can live my life better without it?
And this is not contempt prior to investigation. I've tried it, and I honestly believe that I can do things better without it.
You know people who connect their fridge to the internet, and their front door locks to the internet, and their central heating system to the internet?
What benefit does that give me? All it does is allow -- or potentially allow -- someone to hack into my fridge, my central heating and my front door.
Why would I do that? I mean -- that would be ridiculous. I have a front door lock that's an actual lock because it is almost certainly going to be more secure.
I can write my answers, my emails, my letters better than AI can. I can write proposals at work better than AI can.
I can manage my life better than AI can because based on everything I have seen there is nothing it can do that is anywhere near as competent as I am.
A good horse rider was once better than an automobile for traveling on the dirt roads that existed. I have avoided just about every novel and ridiculously useless tech trend for 20 years, but I do not believe this is the same. This is a foundational change on par with the internet or the smart phone. If you can't find a single use for AI in your life, then you will be left behind while others make significant improvements to theirs. More likely however, it we be unavoidable in the next decade as AI slowly becomes the user interface prefered by companies, which is already happening in customer service. Having used AI and LLM regularly for the last 3-4 months, there is no going back. You can choose to live in the past for as long as you able but your dependency on how you do things today will impede your ability to function in a future that makes those processes obsolete, especially as future generations grow up with AI from birth.
AI can be useful for certain things, I just think the majority of people are using it for shit that’s not actually making their life better. For example, students using it to write essays, summarize paragraphs for notes, etc. It makes their short-term work easier, but it doesn’t actually help them learn. Yeah, taking notes is annoying, but being able to read/hear something and then put it in your own words helps develop critical thinking and teaches you to synthesize information. I get companies having AI chatbots for answering simple questions that direct you to a real person if your question is too complicated or specific. But LLMs aren’t search engines and shit like a lot of people use them as
you’re not going to get anywhere with these people.
i’m fairly certain most people are much too threatened on a fundamental level by these technologies to be rational about it. we can sit here throwing data and studies at them if we want, showing they are objectively wrong but it won’t do anything effectual.
the way i see people like this discussing the technology reminds me a lot of schoolyard behavior. the feelings it inspires in them are too much to discretely express so we get obviously incorrect quips and jabs instead of thoughtful discussion, to the roar of the crowd
I hear ya, but I can't stop. I believe this change is significant and I don't want to see them blindsided by their inability to see it today. One day imt he not so distant future, they won't be able to avoid it and better that they are armed with some information for the day they can no longer avoid it.
so, i don’t necessarily disagree that a lot of AI shit on the market rn is useless, trite bullshit but then again so was almost every tech product between 2000 and now. some people preferred to live their lives like they did before the digital revolution. you don’t really see people claiming the internet is useless anymore, tho, do you?
sure, you believe you can do things better without it. and that might be true. unfortunately, some others believe (correctly) that they can handle a larger cognitive workload using these tools, which is their purpose. regardless of your opinion on AI, anyone well educated enough in the actual industry knows that there is an additive, non-zero nootropic benefit that can be achieved. we would say the same thing about giving someone access to Google on a school test, of course they perform better! except with AI i think there is a lot of emotionally driven thinking causing people to not come to the obvious conclusions here. just because some people can figure out how to make use of these tools in a beneficial manner and you cannot doesn’t mean the tools themselves are bad.
the anti-AI horde always likes to harp about “b-b-b but my 6 fingers” and “it only can write in corpo-speak,” amongst other things. truthfully speaking, the sheer volume of work an AI is capable of doing vastly outweighs the fact that it makes mistakes in negligible proportions. i see these techs derided as “averaging-machines,” people with a straight face seriously saying this as if something that does average on virtually every cognitive task at all times isn’t already handily outcompeting its human counterparts. sitting here performatively acting does nothing to counter the fact that the most significant minds in this field of research can all at least agree that this won’t remain the status quo for long. these technologies are in a position to vastly outpace any human being’s individual economic output, like it or not.
you are in direct competition with these individuals and technology. i, honestly, hope you understand the “pro-AI” sentiment being directed at you is less a commentary on your choice surrounding the matter and more a warning that in the future you are going to be handily outcompeted by those who do choose to use these tools and exploit them to their full benefit. it’s easy to toss stones from the comfort of the present, but, when you’ve been jobless for 5 years because no one hires the “old” kind of worker maybe you will reconsider at least keeping up with the times. i don’t mean that as scorn, truthfully. it’s a fair warning.
100% agree. I wish people weren't so dismissive because I don't want to see them hurt because of their failure to see the future in the present.
I’m 100% with you on this. There isn’t a single thing that generative AI can do better than a traditional method or by myself.
AI code is pretty much useless, as you spend 2-4x the time debugging and fixing the code as you would have writing it from the ground up.
AI Search is useless because it regularly and predictably gives bad and/or incorrect results. A well built traditional search engine is so much better, but have disappeared with Microsoft and Google going all in on AI search.
AI art isn’t art, and I would never support anyone who uses it, let alone makes money from it. It fundamentally is missing three of the core pillars of art, which are creativity, uniqueness and the human experience.
AI chat bots are ruining human connection and consistently perform worse than human support reps.
show me a so-called ai that doesn't fuck up all the goddamn time and maybe I'll use it for something simple. except it fails the simplest things all the time. does it so much that they have cutesy names for it. it's not libel, it's hallucination. it's not murder, it's mortality manifestation. fuck ai. get back to making tools that actually work.
That's entirely on you for using it for what its bad at and then claiming its bad at everything. I use it an LLM literally every day for work and it's a time saver. I had to learn what its good for and what it's not though. I also use the better available versions, not the publically available ones. Asking it questions about vague and subjective things isn't where its best. Asking it to make an excel formula that does a thing without needing to even know a function exists to do that? Priceless.
why do i have a feeling if i asked you to tell me what hallucinations are in a technical sense i would get a regurgitated answer from google?
being blind to the obvious doesn’t help anyone, man. anyone who has genuinely worked on or even just with these tools knows that they are capable of producing quality outputs. sometimes they mess up, sure, but it also can work 1000000x faster than you can. the energy problem in turn is a valid discussion but this is just being oblivious to the obvious.
why do you guys all mistake the climate of early tech adoption as an indicator of the technology itself being bad? were you not alive for the rise of the internet or something? i think you guys all just hate corporatism, not AI, but for some reason can’t take the logical step to that conclusion.
I don't know why you have that feeling because you definitely wouldn't get a regurgitated answer from google, since I don't give a shit what it is in a technical sense. guess what, if I buy a phone that might catch fire every once in a while, I don't need to know how or why it does that in a technical sense to confidently say that it is shit and not worth my money or time.
"sometimes they mess up" is not good enough, and no, the output is not "quality".
i was alive for the rise of the internet and the analogy doesn't work. llms are fundamentally useless for 90% of what they're currently being used for, which is mostly generic assistance. assistance needs knowledge and actual skills not a glorified autocomplete for everything.
I've tried a few GenAI things, and didn't find them to be any different than CleverBot back in the day. A bit better at generating a response that seems normal, but asking it serious questions always generated questionably accurate responses.
If you just had a discussion with it about what your favorite super hero is, it might sound like an actual average person (including any and all errors about the subject it might spew), but if you try to use it as a knowledge base, it's going to be bad because it is not intelligent. It does not think. And it's not trained well enough to only give 100% factual answers, even if it only had 100% factual data entered into it to train on. It can mix two different subjects together and create an entirely new, bogus response.
It's incredibly effective for task assistance, especially with information that is logical and consistent, like maths, programming languages and hard science. What this means is that you no longer need to learn Excel formulas or programming. You tell it what you want it to do and it spits out the answer 90% of the time. If you don't see the efficacy of AI, then you're likely not using it for what it's currently good at.
Developer here
Had to spend 3 weeks fixing a tiny app that a vibe coder built with AI. It required rewriting significant portions of the app from the ground up because AI code is nearly unusable at scale. Debugging is 10x harder, code is undocumented and there is no institutional knowledge of how an internal system works.
AI code can maybe be ok for a bootstrap single programmer project, but is pretty much useless for real enterprise level development
It's definitely not good for whole programs in one go or complex programming. Businesses hoping to replace coders isn't really happening. But for bite sized code sections like a simple function or non-coders who need something that does a bespoke task in their life? It seems pretty effective. I don't know a programming language but decided to try and automate my trading strategies and in a month I'd written a program in Python that automatically trades my opening strategy. I would never have been able to do that without chatGPT. It has effectively reduced the time it takes to have functional code significantly, especially as I need to use APIs which AI has been phenomenal at providing without needing to dig through the documentation.
It isn't replacing engineers but it definitely helps save time and can empower non engineers to make useful programs without needing years of schooling.
Oh hey it's me! I like using my brain, I like using my own words, I can't imagine wanting to outsource that stuff to a machine.
Meanwhile, I have a friend who's skeptical about the practical uses of LLMs, but who insists that they're "good for porn." I can't help but see modern AI as a massive waste of electricity and water, furthering the destruction of the climate with every use. I don't even like it being a default on search engines, so the idea of using it just to regularly masturbate feels ... extremely selfish. I can see trying it as a novelty, but for a regular occurence? It's an incredibly wasteful use of resources just so your dick can feel nice for a few minutes.
Now imagine growing up where using your own words is less effective than having AI speak for you. Would you have not used AI as a kid when it worked better than your own words?
Wdym “using your own words is less effective than having AI speak for you”? Learning how to express yourself and communicate with others is a crucial life skill, and if a kid struggles with that then they should receive the properly education and support to learn, not given an AI and told to just use that instead
Using it for porn sounds funny to me given the whole concept of "rule 34" being pretty ubiquitous. If it exists, there's porn of it! Like even from a completely pragmatic prespective, it sounds like generating pictures of cats. Surely there is a never ending ocean of cat pictures which you can search and refine, do you really need to bring a hallucination machine into the mix? Maybe your friend has an extremely specific fetish list that nothing else will scratch? That's all I can think of.
He says he uses it to do sexual roleplay chats, treats it kinda like a make-your-own-adventure porn story. I don't know if he's used it for images.
The amount of times I've seen a question answered by "I asked chatgpt and blah blah blah" and the answer being completely bullshit makes me wonder who thinks asking the bullshit machine™ questions with a concrete answer is a good idea
This is your reminder that LLMs are associative models. They produce things that look like other things. If you ask a question, it will produce something that looks like the right answer. It might even BE the right answer, but LLMs care only about looks, not facts.
A lot of people really hate uncertainty and just want an answer. They do not care much if the answer is right or not. Being certain is more important than being correct.
Why not just read the first part of a wikipedia article if they want that though? It's not the end all source but it'd better than asking the machine known to make things up the same question.
Because the AI propaganda machine is not exactly advertising the limitations, and the general public sees LLMs as a beefed up search engine. You and I know that’s laughable, but they don’t. And OpenAI sure doesn’t want to educate people - that would cost them revenue.
I was finally playing around with it for some coding stuff. At first, I was playing around with building the starts of a chess engine, and it did ok for a quick and dirty implementation. It was cool that it could create a zip file with the project files that it was generating, but it couldn't populate it with some of the earlier prompts. Overall, it didn't seem that worthwhile for me (as an experienced software engineer who doesn't have issues starting projects).
I then uploaded a file from a chess engine that I had already implemented and asked for a code review, and that went better. It identified two minor bugs and was able to explain what the code did. It was also able to generate some other code to make use of this class. When I asked if there were some existing projects that I could have referenced instead of writing this myself, it pointed out a couple others and explained the ways they differed. For code review, it seemed like a useful tool.
I then asked it for help with a math problem that I had been working on related to a different project. It came up with a way to solve it using dynamic programming, and then I asked it to work through a few examples. At one point, it returned numbers that were far too large, so I asked about how many cases were excluded by the rules. In the response, it showed a realization that something was incorrect, so it gave a new version of the code that corrected the issue. For this one, it was interesting to see it correct its mistake, but it ultimately still relied on me catching it.
Spent this morning reading a thread where someone was following chatGPT instructions to install "Linux" and couldn't understand why it was failing.
Hmm, I find chatGPT is pretty decent at very basic techsupport asked with the correct jargon. Like "How do I add a custom string to cell formatting in excel".
It absolutely sucks for anything specific, or asked with the wrong jargon.
Good for you buddy.
Edit: sorry that was harsh. I'm just dealing with "every comment is a contrarian comment" day.
Sure, GPT is good at basic search functionality for obvious things, but why choose that when there are infinitely better and more reliable sources of information?
There's a false sense of security couple to a notion of "asking" an entity.
Why not engage in a community that can support answers? I've found the Linux community (in general) to be really supportive and asking questions is one way of becoming part of that community.
The forums of the older internet were great at this... Creating community out of commonality. Plus, they were largely self correcting I'm a way in which LLMs are not.
So not only are folk being fed gibberish, it is robbing them of the potential to connect with similar humans.
And sure, it works for some cases, but they seem to be suboptimal, infrequent or very basic.