Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn’t are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there’s not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there’s just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
AI is a god damn programming package
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
Why do I have to lose a programming package because everyone - for no real reason - started blaming it for the reason they’re assholes to each other as if they hadn’t been jerks to each other before. It’s stupid.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that’s all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase “personal responsibility” so you can just stop thinking about it. But that’s not good enough.
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data. There’s nothing “agentic” AI can do that isn’t done just as well by a generic pipeline – except perhaps ignore garbage information and interface with non-coders. If you’re being automated away, it was going to happen anyway.
And here we get to the crux of the matter…
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
Honestly I don’t understand what’s so hard about arguing for labor laws or demanding proper accounting in SEC filings or any of the other zillion things we should’ve been doing for the last fourty years, but if you’d rather act like fancy program ruined world I guess whatever man. I don’t think it’s gonna help anyone, but you do you.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what “AI” has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it’s responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
“Agentic” (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with that, I’m pretty sure I already made it clear that it’s not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
It’s not just that line, everything you’ve been saying suggests that’s what your view is. You’ve acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it’s the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn’t even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the “lulz” etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you’ll have to excuse me that I’m not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing? And how is executing a series of functions often dependent of previous output not a pipeline? Okay, whatever, we’re on the same page that AI doesn’t take jobs and is used as an excuse – that’s great.
despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it
No, I don’t think the problems should be tolerated.
we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy
Yes, this. Do this. No, it’s not easy, but it never has been because…
How is AI itself not part of the problem here? … Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed.
It has nothing to do with AI. Literally every problem “associated” with AI is just a pre-existing problem repackaged. They’re hiding behind an excuse and for reasons I do not understand you’re buying into it, making yourself look like a Luddite, and letting them claim to be on the side of historical progress. You and I both know it’s nonsense to let them claim that, but rather than be dismissive of the technology and critical of the people you’re blaming it:
But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve.
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon. AI has done very little in any direction. Aside from all the hype, the actual effect good or bad has been marginal. Something like 3% of job cuts occurred due to automation, and I’m not even sure if that’s lower or higher than on a normal year.
You want to complain about data centers, fine, but complain about political corruption and talk about how we shouldn’t centralize power in singular mayors rather than full consensus councils, or how we need multi-candidate ranked lottery voting systems with recall mechanisms, or how we should heavily tax political donations and political advertising and use a portion of those funds to provide the public with factual information campaign ran with a similar ranked lottery electorate consulting with technical experts, or how we should regulate or socialize utilities. – None of it’s easy, but if you want a world worth living in that’s the work you have to put in.
Screaming regulate AI leads to politicians creating internet ID laws and mass surveillance because you didn’t bother to build consensus about what you meant when you said regulate AI and politicians doing as they do took it upon themselves to reinterpret what you think you meant into something that they or their billionaire donors wanted.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing?
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
No, it’s not easy, …
That’s my whole point: if it’s not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let’s say you’re in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it’s easier to resolve by talking it out: when they’re unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon.
I don’t understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don’t give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it’s the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you’re not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that’s only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you’ve been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Screaming regulate AI
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
Your point about technology enabling people is well made. While I think it’s pretty clear that AI can have positive effects, your point about it’s use in propaganda and misinformation is legitimate. Even if I don’t think it’s the underlying issue, I can’t deny that it enables it. That said, this comment chain is long enough that I’m losing the plot. I tried to read back, but I don’t know what your stance in all this is.
Screaming regulate AI
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
I don’t know what “a third AI winter” means. I can’t tell if you’re saying you want AI to die out or if you’re sarcastically saying you want an AI nuclear apocalypse or maybe both. If you genuinely aren’t calling for regulation, I don’t know what you’re calling for.
Like for regulation – like gun control – I sympathize with your concerns; however, there’s not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going to advocate for only the government (have you seen governments these days?) to choose who does or doesn’t get AI.
If you genuinely don’t want regulation, are you just saying it shouldn’t have been made in the first place because it enables the evil people more than the good people? I’m not sure that’s true in regards to what the actual technology does and I’m not comfortable blaming the technology for the grifts associated with it. Propaganda and misinformation have always been an aspect of class warfare and typically the rich and elite have had bigger budgets and a greater effect. Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda - I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills. Misinformation is clearly a bit more built into the technology, but even with that it gives people access to a lot more information a lot more easily (e.g. finding algorithms or new terms to search). The tech itself seems to favor the people.
You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it, but I actually think that’d be a great idea in some second year coding course or something both to build their resistance to the negatives and to give them more capabilities once people get over the nonsense drama with it.
Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn’t are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there’s not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there’s just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that’s all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase “personal responsibility” so you can just stop thinking about it. But that’s not good enough.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data. There’s nothing “agentic” AI can do that isn’t done just as well by a generic pipeline – except perhaps ignore garbage information and interface with non-coders. If you’re being automated away, it was going to happen anyway.
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
Honestly I don’t understand what’s so hard about arguing for labor laws or demanding proper accounting in SEC filings or any of the other zillion things we should’ve been doing for the last fourty years, but if you’d rather act like fancy program ruined world I guess whatever man. I don’t think it’s gonna help anyone, but you do you.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what “AI” has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it’s responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
“Agentic” (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with that, I’m pretty sure I already made it clear that it’s not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
It’s not just that line, everything you’ve been saying suggests that’s what your view is. You’ve acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it’s the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn’t even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the “lulz” etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you’ll have to excuse me that I’m not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing? And how is executing a series of functions often dependent of previous output not a pipeline? Okay, whatever, we’re on the same page that AI doesn’t take jobs and is used as an excuse – that’s great.
No, I don’t think the problems should be tolerated.
Yes, this. Do this. No, it’s not easy, but it never has been because…
It has nothing to do with AI. Literally every problem “associated” with AI is just a pre-existing problem repackaged. They’re hiding behind an excuse and for reasons I do not understand you’re buying into it, making yourself look like a Luddite, and letting them claim to be on the side of historical progress. You and I both know it’s nonsense to let them claim that, but rather than be dismissive of the technology and critical of the people you’re blaming it:
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon. AI has done very little in any direction. Aside from all the hype, the actual effect good or bad has been marginal. Something like 3% of job cuts occurred due to automation, and I’m not even sure if that’s lower or higher than on a normal year.
You want to complain about data centers, fine, but complain about political corruption and talk about how we shouldn’t centralize power in singular mayors rather than full consensus councils, or how we need multi-candidate ranked lottery voting systems with recall mechanisms, or how we should heavily tax political donations and political advertising and use a portion of those funds to provide the public with factual information campaign ran with a similar ranked lottery electorate consulting with technical experts, or how we should regulate or socialize utilities. – None of it’s easy, but if you want a world worth living in that’s the work you have to put in.
Screaming regulate AI leads to politicians creating internet ID laws and mass surveillance because you didn’t bother to build consensus about what you meant when you said regulate AI and politicians doing as they do took it upon themselves to reinterpret what you think you meant into something that they or their billionaire donors wanted.
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
That’s my whole point: if it’s not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let’s say you’re in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it’s easier to resolve by talking it out: when they’re unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
I don’t understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don’t give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it’s the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you’re not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that’s only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you’ve been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
Your point about technology enabling people is well made. While I think it’s pretty clear that AI can have positive effects, your point about it’s use in propaganda and misinformation is legitimate. Even if I don’t think it’s the underlying issue, I can’t deny that it enables it. That said, this comment chain is long enough that I’m losing the plot. I tried to read back, but I don’t know what your stance in all this is.
I don’t know what “a third AI winter” means. I can’t tell if you’re saying you want AI to die out or if you’re sarcastically saying you want an AI nuclear apocalypse or maybe both. If you genuinely aren’t calling for regulation, I don’t know what you’re calling for. Like for regulation – like gun control – I sympathize with your concerns; however, there’s not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going to advocate for only the government (have you seen governments these days?) to choose who does or doesn’t get AI.
If you genuinely don’t want regulation, are you just saying it shouldn’t have been made in the first place because it enables the evil people more than the good people? I’m not sure that’s true in regards to what the actual technology does and I’m not comfortable blaming the technology for the grifts associated with it. Propaganda and misinformation have always been an aspect of class warfare and typically the rich and elite have had bigger budgets and a greater effect. Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda - I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills. Misinformation is clearly a bit more built into the technology, but even with that it gives people access to a lot more information a lot more easily (e.g. finding algorithms or new terms to search). The tech itself seems to favor the people.
You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it, but I actually think that’d be a great idea in some second year coding course or something both to build their resistance to the negatives and to give them more capabilities once people get over the nonsense drama with it.
What do you think we should do about it?