"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
To me, the single biggest argument against LLMs and generative AI is this:
It is a technology whose sole purpose, by design, is to persuade humans to accept what it has produced, with no regard for correctness. Bottom line, that's mechanically how the technology works. An automated grifter, thief, liar, and manipulator.
And it's so disturbingly effective and in widespread use that our very sense of reality and truth under attack.
Current LLM's make me think of Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes, as CEO of Theranos, made billions of dollars and publicly stated that their mini-lab could successfully perform 60 tests off a single drop blood. Even though it was a fraud, their machine did work on a handful of tests, but it's basically impossible to do what she claimed the mini-lab could do with a single drop of blood.
LLM's, at this point, are very, very good at simple tasks. They are going to eliminate some of the bullshit jobs that exist in the world because of it, but this is an invention that is so buggy they had to create a whole new marketing term so they wouldn't have to use the word 'bug': Hallucinations.
It's not hallucinating. It's not thinking. It's just not capable of doing what the CEO's say it can, and being that these models have trained on the whole of human knowledge and still can't perform up to promises, I don't think the future they're promising is necessarily going to materialize.
LLM's are just reasonably well-trained digital parrots.
I wouldn't even call it a bug. It's doing exactly as it is trained to do - guess the next word based on training data. If it has no concept of truth/falsehood, how can falsehoods be bugs?
Gota love ed!! He speaketh the truth !
I mean, when has ~~Facebook~~ Meta ever been wrong about what’s the next hot technology?
Never. That's why I'm talking to you here with an avatar that has no legs and roams around like a free-repeating vapour here in this Metaverse.
If you look at the tech it is the same ML algorithms from the 90s with an LLM slapped onto it.
It was made to trick people, that's what it was made to do, trick you well enough that you would assign value to it and give money to the companies that marketed it.
There has not been any technological advancements made by combining a ML algorithm with an LLM.
I judge tools for their usefulness and as a consumer tool, AI has been absolutely useless. Yes, there are practical and useful applications for it in some avenues of science, but the shit being thrust upon the masses is straight up fucking garbage.
It helps my dyslexia with writing resumes and emails. But that’s about it. Sure I could write everything. But the speed up is the only benefit I find from it.
It's pretty simple. "AI" doesn't actually exist.
The internet exists. Electricity exists. I fucking hate cars but at least they exist.
There is no "AI". The various technologies that are falsely hyped as "AI" should be judged on their individual merits. It's completely wacko to judge the "AI" enabled genocide of palestinians and the "AI" enabled manufacturing of fantasy images by the same ruler. It's just more of the grift.
An invention is not judged on its naysayers. People dont think AI is bad because it has a lot of non believers. No invention is like the previous and every one has to be judged as its own thing. like electricity and many inventions of the past their usefulness is obvious in demos but with AI there are very few convincing usecases. Programming, art and video are the only one I've seen that are "good" and its still pretty shit when you actually sit down and use it and think about what you are actually doing.
Thats not enough to change the world these have been very accessibile for the past 20 years making it slightly easier is not comparable to electricity.