60 pointsby tobr5 hours ago17 comments
  • JSR_FDED3 hours ago
    It’s crazy. Literally the only valid thing you can say about LLM use is “in the hands of an experienced person LLMs can be a force multiplier”.

    But no, we have to replace entire companies with it. All the problems of LLMs stem from inexperienced people using it (by inexperienced I mean not skilled in the domain in which the LLM is being applied).

    • vkou2 hours ago
      That's not the problem.

      There are two[1] problems. One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.

      The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs. These users were producing good to passable work for years before LLM slop started flooding the world.

      It's because their jobs - their bosses - can't (or don't care to) tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage. If the computer said it's ok, ship it.

      ----

      [1] These two problems are not an exhaustive list by any means.

      • dotancohen2 hours ago

          > One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.
        
        You might want to read about the history of the term sabotage then. This actually is precedented.

          > The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs ... bosses can't tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage.
        
        The bosses usually can. However, there is no quick, objective way to do that. The boss would likely literally have to do the work over from scratch to know if the current result is adequate.

        I'm familiar with a firm that does government required safety inspections for clients - big factories and the like. There is a huge push inside the company to use AI to write the reports. I don't want to tell you how many times the LLM fills in the report with the most common string "everything is fine" even though the specific future report checkbox has been left unchecked. Only a single engineer is fighting this within the company, and fears for her job because of it.

  • jstummbillig2 hours ago
    Contrary to the chorus, I find this mad episode in our history has been going surprisingly well. I mean, it's a lot to process and the speed is ludicrous. What did we expect? What is the baseline? 80% approval in face of unprecedented uncertainty?

    We are adjusting, we talk about things. I hope we will keep doing that.

    • ashfTq62 hours ago
      AI has ruined blogs, programming, killed girls in Iran and is used as an excuse for firing people. And you think it is going surprisingly well?

      It isn't. People are beginning to wake up now from their propaganda-induced sleep during the first three years. It is always the same. People are trusting and initially believe the con artists.

      • AlecSchueleran hour ago
        Don't forget deepfake harassment and spreading misinformation.
        • bdangubic2 minutes ago
          both around waaaay before LLMs
  • october81402 hours ago
    Hank Green has had the best take I've heard which is AI is definitely something but everyones still figuring out what it is. It will likely end up being nothing like it is today.
  • jeiscan hour ago
    Technology is a side effect and distraction from the real problems of matter and the ones which matter. Democracy is not a guarantee of making the right choices nor is theocracy nor is any form of government. We are driven blindly ever forward by our nature to survive the following common factors: hunger, thirst and exposure.
  • apt-apt-apt-apt2 hours ago
    I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art.

    An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work.

    People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.

    But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that she's ultimately still responsible for the creative direction and result, this seems like something AI is greatly help for.

    Example hate video and comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495VOuAnCJM

    • ashfTq62 hours ago
      Bringing up Neuralink or medical use of LLMs is not an argument for allowing the theft. Anthropic etc. are free to start a prosthetics company and scrap their regular offerings.

      You are then allowed to use AI with a prescription.

      • sevenzero2 hours ago
        This. As an artist I wouldnt have an issue with AI if it wouldnt be just generative generating full, fleshed out pieces. If AI is used allowing actual artists to use a brush or pen again and actually allows them expressing themselves through their own work, it would be great.

        People seem to think generating art from stolen pieces by typing 4 sentences in a prompt window is equal to this. It isn't. It is not true expression as it takes humanity out of the piece.

        • apt-apt-apt-apt2 hours ago
          If a human can learn from existing art and information, how is that different from an AI learning on the same? Or replace AI with a new sentient being that is discovered.

          What one does with the learning seems to be the issue. If a human exactly reproduced anothers' artwork, that'd be copying.

          • sevenzero2 hours ago
            Yes and actual artists acknowledge copies. Art is a craft and if the copy is well made by actual human skill you can value it. AI artists act like printing out the Mona Lisa is their own art, skill and expression.
    • kaoD2 hours ago
      > I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art.

      I'm surprised you're surprised.

      Giant corpos steal work from millions of independent artists and the State ruled that IP laws didn't apply to them, only to us common mortals.

    • paganel2 hours ago
      > People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.

      Yes, we, humans, generally believe that.

  • gherkinnn2 hours ago
    LLMs as a technology are neutral and largely act as amplifiers.

    Now, there is not an ounce of decency between our SV overlords and I have zero trust they will choose to amplify the right things. On the contrary, their apparent ideal state is a vast swath of technoserfs force fed ever more content and ads and more content, getting by on Uber-for-everything, where you spend what little money you have saved up being a delivery boy on things you don't own. We will stumble about in barren apartments, living a fake life through VR goggles, watering virtual plants with virtual water, all of which we pay for of course. All the while Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel are tucked away on the moon, their vile hands clinging to a last hope of immortality, just as hopeless as the people below.

    • mchaver2 hours ago
      I don't agree with the repeated mantra that technology is neutral because the creation, maintenance and promotion of technology requires lots of resources and a lot of choices. A lot of conscious effort goes into creating things, and to change the thing after someone uses it. Make it better, make it safer, make it easier to use, etc. That doesn't feel neutral to me.
  • falcor843 hours ago
    I'll just put the Willy Wonka tunnel clip here - https://youtu.be/Xkg7dp1QY9k
    • taffydavid15 minutes ago
      Is there any better metaphor for AI than that scene? Everyone is terrified at the speed of movement and then it turns out it was all a grift and they were barely moving at all
  • KronisLV2 hours ago
    > tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

    We’ve reinvented Java Applets. I mean, I do like the idea behind that sort of stuff, it’s just that all sorts of little things break along the way. For example, I asked Claude to put together a specific recipe, it could do that, I got my Artifact/cooking widget/whatever. It even let me switch between metric and imperial (and didn’t save that preference) and let me change the quantity and updated the ingredient amounts (except the phone going to sleep led to it all resetting).

    Sometimes I feel like we are very much stuck in being able to produce things but they simply aren’t high enough quality (which might take years or decades more of model training and efficiency improvements) and also that maybe we’re doing things a decade too soon. Imagine trying to build AI data centres with 2010 or 2000 hardware and how limited the models you’d be able to run would be. Maybe that’s also why the current outcomes are sometimes shitty. The other theory is that there’s simply not enough high quality data to train truly good models and we’ll plateau and model collapse in training will be common.

  • devsda2 hours ago
    The commencement/graduating speeches including AI in the video at the end are infuriating. The message from people giving those speeches is literally "deal with it" and how tone deaf do they have to be to patronize those booing students with "I understand your fear".

    The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage" is the worst.

    I believe the main value of AI comes not from its productivity gains but because AI will increasingly become a tool for evading responsibility and accountability for actions in economic, social and worse even military functions.

    • rhubarbtree2 hours ago
      I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.”

      I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. OTOOH quit social media and try to address some of the issues you have. It’s very hard to know where the balance between sympathetic arm-round-the-shoulder and tough-love-develop-some-grit should lie.

      • silver_silver2 hours ago
        This reads like an avocado toast critique. Businesses which respect their staff, particularly junior staff, are few and far in between. Why should anyone not “silently quit” when the attitude of their employer is to extract as much value for the lowest cost before a round of layoffs?
        • rhubarbtree20 minutes ago
          Well, the workplace I referred to was very kind and supportive of staff. Even people who left later sent messages saying it was the best treatment they’d ever had.

          So not the reason in this case.

          And I personally know another company that seems similar.

        • throwthrowuknowan hour ago
          because they do it even when they have a good job with ample pay and respect
      • pjc502 hours ago
        >> "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage"

        This is .. not quiet, but extremely noisy, quitting of the bargain by the management/authority class.

        This is how we get the low trust dystopia where all the remaining human workers have to put up with a camera watching them at all times (backed by AI, of course) doing Taylorism on their eye movements.

      • dv_dt2 hours ago
        I believe that most people naturally want to work, to contribute and build in groups. They want to do it and should expect to do it with reasonable boundaries and benefits for their labor. Silent quitting is a response to ever increasingly extractive work relationships for fewer and fewer benefits and increasingly irrationally low levels of compensation.
        • rhubarbtree18 minutes ago
          Not sure I agree. People seem to lose sight of what the default is, and how fortunate they are.

          There are many systemic problems in society, but it’s rarely your direct employer’s fault.

      • adithyassekhar2 hours ago
        Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?
        • rhubarbtree18 minutes ago
          Was in the case I was referring to, and in similar cases I am familiar with.
        • tonyedgecombe2 hours ago
          Yeah, the general trend I’ve seen is people becoming more cynical about the workplace the older they get.
      • ramon1562 hours ago
        OTOOOH its very naive to think that "quitting social media" is the solution.

        The earth is rotting from us leeching from it, there is no future for these juniors, and we're on the verge of more war and destruction, fascism, et cetera.

        There is nothing for them to build towards, other than the typical House, wife and kids, which will be in the same boat.

        Knowing this, if someone comes up to you and says "yeah, well, you should just accept it", obviously people are not going to support this

        • pjc502 hours ago
          Also, it's not enough to quit on your own: all the voters and CEOs around you will still be on social media, making decisions it influences. Just like quitting alcohol won't prevent you being killed by a drunk driver.
        • throwthrowuknowan hour ago
          that attitude is a direct result of having your neuroticism farmed by social media
          • rhubarbtree16 minutes ago
            Catastrophising for sure, and unhelpful in that it obscures some of the more real issues young people face: unaffordable housing, student debt, employment market shifts, mental health problems caused by social media.
      • keybored2 hours ago
        I think Silent Quitting is some chattering class concoction feels-wrapping the observation that most workers have the incentive to work as little as possible.[1] Just like employers have the incentive squeeze as much productivity from their commodities (labor).

        What was the first instinct of the venerable business leaders (spoken a bit too publicly)? Great, we can get rid of labor. Do they need any excuse or reason beyond maximizing profit? They don’t. It’s just incentives.

        [1] And some workers can genuinely benefit from doing more than that, even as wage workers. “Some people have jobs; others have careers” as Chris Rock paraphrasedly said.

    • arowthway2 hours ago
      I know calling anti-AI people luddites was considered a shallow strawman in 2024 but now I can't help but feel this position of "we should maybe slow down the developement and adoption of new tech to protect jobs / social order / the old way of life" fits luddism well?
      • sweezyjeezyan hour ago
        I agree - but it's too easy to just 'call Luddism', and use the insult to not engage with all of the shared issues that make the comparison apt. Issues like:

        - no serious plan for mass unemployment

        - the risk of an underemployed middle class leading to violent outcomes as it has in the past

        - (many) humans wanting to be useful, to have purpose in life through that

        - concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of people, from a couple of countries making up 20% of the world population

        Luddism came from a place of genuine suffering and fear, which was not misplaced - the industrial revolution lead to amazing new jobs, but not for the Luddites themselves. With AI it's not even clear if those new jobs will come - it seems like the goal is a world where humans will not need to worry about thinking anymore.

        So is wanting this to slow down really such a ridiculous notion?

      • keybored5 minutes ago
        I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone who is brave enough to deserve to be called a (Neo) Luddite.

        People that have negative opinions about technological progress at least have the will to form an opinion backed by arguments. Contrast that with the faith order of dismissing negative opinions simply because they are negative about tech. Are technologist tech professionals? Or tech priests? (No wait, priests have to have a theological education where they are taught to make arguments. So can’t be that either.)

  • bronlund3 hours ago
    I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.
    • antfarm2 hours ago
      History shows that blindly welcoming change just because someone promises you a better future is a dangerous thing.
    • antfarman hour ago
      There is a good chance AI will magnify the current problems, especially regarding inequality, poverty, hunger and environmental exploitation.
    • antfarm2 hours ago
      The problem is that we are pushed forward, not going at our own pace.

      In his commencement speech that got booed by the audience, Eric Schmidt says, "When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. [...] Find a way to say yes."

      That's the billionaire class telling you where your place is in their plan for the world. Nobody asks if you even want to leave the planet, figuratively speaking.

      The last sentence in particular shows the contempt he has for the students in the audience, and is reminiscent of another (alleged) incident:

      https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/tried-to-convince-me-i-...

      The part of the speech I quoted is not in the video linked in the article, but you can watch it here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MYggR_PPRg

      • antfarman hour ago
        Also, don't forget what he said about "arrogant programmers". His plan is to make the (in his view inferior) human workers redundant, and I do not see why anyone who still has some idealism in them and is just about to enter the work force would applaud him for his tone-deaf speech:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZuTlm00X2E&t=121s

    • hydra-f2 hours ago
      You're saying the world is in a sad state today, but there never was a time more prosperous than today on a global stage. Almost everything reeks of prosperity

      If there's anything to blame, it's the various cultural revolutions, but even them are byproducts of the theater produced by the 8.3 BILLION (United States: 348,920,101; https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/world-popu...) people currently inhabiting the planet

    • dandanua2 hours ago
      Dude, try not eating for a week and then publish your humble opinion on how good any change is.
  • throwaway815232 hours ago
    AI slop farms are churning out anti-AI data center memes on Facebook

    https://www.fastcompany.com/91544842/ai-slop-facebook-conten...

    • hydra-f2 hours ago
      Anything can be ground for opportunism and the world has no lack of that. It seems clear to me that whatever the direction may be, it's a shitty direction nonetheless
  • myaccountonhnan hour ago
    AI companies keep repeating that AI will replace white-collar work, and that what they're building is a potential doomsday device. How did they expect graduates to react? Cheer them on? Feel hopeful?
  • ramraj073 hours ago
    What's wrong with the Polish author example?
    • xeyownt2 hours ago
      According to "experts", you have to suffer to make good art. She used a tool that reduced that suffering phase, so she's "garbage" now.

      I don't know about AI, but I think the main problem nowadays is that a growing number of people can only deal with binary categories, either it's godly or it's trash.

      To conclude, anything that is not written with a stone tablet is garbage.

      • grey-area2 hours ago
        Amazon books are now heavily infected with AI slop, I've yet to read a book which is detectably AI generated which is not garbage. When that stops being the case, perhaps people will stop objecting to it.

        This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.

        Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.

      • throwaway815232 hours ago
        What if you're a poet and use a rhyming dictionary now and then?
  • camillomiller2 hours ago
    Wait a minute, the Future of Truth is a book by Werner Herzog... Did this guy published a book with the same title? Why?
    • arjie2 hours ago
      This is not uncommon. Indeed, one should find it surprising if book names were routinely globally unique. Some famous dupes are Twilight, and Foundation, and Invisible Man.
      • camillomilleran hour ago
        I mean, I undersand that. I have two "on writing" on my bookshelf next to each other... but Werner Herzog's has the exact same topic and premise, plus is from a person that is immensely more famous than you, which means your book will be invisible with that title to any search.
    • 2 hours ago
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  • Lapsa2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • cubefox3 hours ago
    The world will get a lot crazier in the years ahead, on the path to superhuman intelligence. Disruptions caused by past inventions, like the printing press, the steam engine, electricity or the Internet, will look unremarkable by comparison.
  • KnuthIsGod2 hours ago
    If people want to work from home, I see no reason why their role

    cannot be outsourced to someone prompting an AI / LLM / whatever the next technology is / from Guntur or Wajir.

    Very few people are irreplaceable.