Ask Lemmy

I use it daily as a glorified search engine. Ever since Google decided that showing ads is more important than showing search results ChatGPT is much better.

It will continue to improve function wise. Its innevitable. Its cannot currently and may never be able to replace humans but can act as one heck of an assitant. Its scary as heck as already the training is not being done in an optimized, deliberate way that makes it as high quality as possible and those who control it when doing deliberate things are likely to do it in a way that is good for them but not for all. Im worried we won't get the very good training in the same way software is often done badly because once it can do good enough, even inefficiently, then it will ship. Our best options will be free/libre.

eh, we've been here before.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

It's what they'll use to decrease the population when workers aren't needed anymore

The technology is remarkable, the implementation is lame, the impact is happening too fast for us to adapt, the damage to artists and creatives is to cry for.

Someone posted a meme yesterday comparing it to The One Ring from LOTR and I think it's spot on.

What AI is not: Human connection. A creative.

What AI is: A very fancy search engine that gives human-like answers. Which includes the fallibility. People keep saying "you're better off reading the page"... are you tho? Why are we suddenly defending the academy of google and "doing your own research"? People who are hell bent on being idiots will continue to be idiots, AI or no. Though AI has some chance to exposing logical fallacies in one's arguments. If fucking anything, AI can help smart people with the exhausting task of dealing with gishgallop disinformation tactics in online discourse. And I mean SMART people, those who know better than to just have AI print a wall of text on their behalf, and who know the subject matter but don't have every piece of proof at their fingertips at any given time (of course an argument can be made that a smart person wouldn't get into this kind of argument in the first place - but ya'll know how you are).

Also, as much as I dislike Google, there's no viable alternative to YouTube. And Gemini is way better with YouTube searches.

And I'm happy to not be forced to go onto the garbage sites of Wikia etc. whenever I need to look something up in a videogame.

And it's an utility that can help with the more tedious tasks of projects. Which isn't an universally good thing since that usually implies more productivity, which implies more consumption. And we're already over-consuming. But AI can also help production of something actually life-enhancing, from people who actually care and aren't just looking to produce more to generate more profits.

It's a tool, and a toy. And unfortunately a lot of people aren't equipped to use it.

This is the largest technology con job right now. NFTs failed, the "metaverse" failed, now a badly trained AI is the "solution to humanity's problems". This is just as stupid as religion.

It's simultaneously awesome and overhyped.

Potentially useful for lots of thing, unfortunately, everyone seems fixated on stuff that is not ready for and probably wont be, or on hating everything involved.

Me? Mostly on the fence, hating most of what I see and hopeful for those useful applications.

I like how Yaron Minsky from Jane Street characterized LLM: "It is smarter than we expected it to be, but dumber than we needed it to be... It feels like something really dumb, but somehow memorized the entire internet."

This is kind of what I feel: despite all these impressive BAR and IMO achievements, in my work, I feel they do a great job at parapherasing the internet, but fails when you need it to do something mildly intelligent.

Does it improve my efficiency? yes, but only at some very tedious and specific taskes, once I go slightly out of scope, it comes up with inelegant solution that I will need to rewrite from scratch.

I think Alan Tudyck get fucked over because Will Smith couldn't handle not being the most likable character in a movie.

As soon as test audiences said they loved the robot, the cut back Tudyck's scenes and completely dropped him from promotion and intro credits.

Slop

Machine learning in general is pretty awesome. It solves many problems behind the scenes, but even that side is overhyped.

We hoped it would solve hard problems, but it can’t. It solves boring problems. We hoped you could implement it easily, but it isn’t that straightforward either.

Generative AI for text, audio, images, and video is here, but the same problems persist. It doesn’t solve hard problems, no matter how hard we want it to. Also, implementation is harder than expected.

Then there’s the misuse of LLMs. Oh boy what a dumpster fire.

for the average person, it just provides an objectively inferior result to reading the results on google. like I cannot imagine thinking "Wow I really want an incorrect and incomplete response to my query that doesn't even link me to additional context to fill in the gaps right now"

Tldr: I think current AI hype is trying to go to get to the moon by building a better ladder. It's useful but for a few select things.

I've managed to automate some boring tedious task (get measurements from a dozen different wikipedia article, do simple maths with them), something that would take about an hour to do manually took 15 minutes to argue with an AI and fact check after.

Creative stuff (stories, pictures, music) is amusing for a while but I suspect they are stuck in the same kind of uncanny valley robots have been in for a long time.

The only things it's good for are kinda evil.

It's OK in some instances where it's a tool that helps your hands. Once you start outsourcing your head to chatgpt, you're voluntarily letting your mental faculties rot for the sake of percieved comfort.

We all know what AI is doing to the workforce

Do we?

https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs

Summary

While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative. The picture of AI’s impact on the labor market that emerges from our data is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level. While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies, it is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs. The lack of widespread impacts at this early stage is not unlike the pace of change with previous periods of technological disruption. Preregistering areas where we would expect to see the impact and continuing to monitor monthly impacts will help us distinguish rumor from fact.

*The narrative that AI's are causing job loss is a marketing strategy performed by the AI companies to boost their recognition through fear.

No, it's made it worse. I already automated the work "AI" could do before gpt was released.

Now when someone suggests a change there is always hallucinations of settings that don't exist.

Over hyped trash.

From an engineering perspective: Agents are great if you are building prototypes or are flushing out an area of your stack that is heavily standardized (i.e. the AI has had a lot of examples to learn from, e.g. simple authentication flows, simple database singletons, basic QA automated testing, etc); However, if you are building new stuff or stuff the AI has not trained on, it is absolutley, infuriatingly prone to output garbage.

edit: it's no secret either, spin up a new project and you'll be greeted with this don't trust me billboard right from the get-go:

It broke me out of a broken mindset at least, since no human would actually talk to me in a wise way, this therapy-pilled bot did that job instead.

It really is a good search engine, provided you check sources. It's a good way to get around the enshitified google searches.

Good for bouncing ideas off, and low-effort stories where you play whatever role your friends would not put up with. In other words, a fun game.

However, it's been taking more time than it's been saving whenever I tried to get it to do more. Agentic frameworks rarely work beyond "add this bit of text to my notes while I work", so you don't have to search up and find certain documents. Or "tell me what my document says about so and so topic". If you expect it to code for you, or manage your files properly, or not delete it's own components, forget it. More effort than it's worth.

I actually shut down my VM, as I currently have no use for it whatsoever, and I don't like using non-local AI models, for several reasons, I will only use them when necessary.

I use LLMs to break down huge tasks into small pieces because I'm too lazy to do anything. I also use them to write emails. Basically everything that I think is bullshit, that I don't have to do by myself.

There are some minor tools for small work that have been helpful, but overall it is intrusive slop.

Windows updates keep trying to add back ai.exe and aimgr.DLL to my office folder. Which I delete, because otherwise it randomly hogs CPU and bogs down the computer.

Then every damn app has a new AI panel that is garbage.

It's invaluable.

It has already saved me so much time and allowed me to do things I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

I'm sold on it.

Generative fill saves me a bunch of time in Photoshop.

My thoughts are that basic things such a using a neural network and such to train a video game enemy on how to use terrain is okay, as long as it's all simulations run on your own hardware/servers. Things like that that won't take up an oceans worth of water in a day are fine by me. Things like using machine learning to sort through data with at least a couple humans to verify there was no errors? Okay in my book.

It's when these brain dead companies push generative ai ( genai ) onto us like it's somehow comparable to sci-fi super ai that solves every problem with 100% accuracy and without massive environmental destruction that I hate, alongside the terrible product. Same with any person willing to use them while also blindly trusting everything it outputs. Normally I give people a baseline amount of respect when I am first introduced to them, but no matter what, my level of respect for someone who willingly uses and trusts genAI is never going to rise unless they give up the genAI and start on the path of regaining their humanity.

I especially wanna see anybody using genAI for anything education related ( besides studying the dangers of it ), bug bounties/open source, and any kind of art reform themselves and go onto the path of regaining their humanity. I know it'll never happen since those people were brainless before genAI, but a beaver can dream.

I have zero sympothy for those who have gone into psychosisms because of it or have had similar issues caused by it. They lacked the will power and critical thinking to save themselves.

Edit:

I used to be a genAI user but then I took to the path of regaining my humanity, returning to being a person who believes the past, present, and future will be human ( so long as humans exist ) no matter what. It may seem hard and may take a lot of work to avoid genAI slop, but it is very rewarding IMO. I know I am on the right path because I know supporting your fellow man is infinitely more rewarding than letting genAI take away your brain and more importantly your humanity. I believe in a very human world and refuse to believe genAI has any use in it.

I desperately want human intelligence in machines but llm's are not that, and the economy is going to plummet to prove it.

It's amazing. I use it as part of my work as a software developer, I get good advice from it regarding my personal life, and I can talk to it about topics that interest me but don't interest my friends. Everything is great right now but I'm genuinely worried about the near future, when it might be able to do the entirety of my job better than I can. At least I got this far - I wonder whether my friends' kids who were born recently will live in a future where they'll never be capable of contributing anything valuable.

I guess I’m one of the few that has leaned into it and would be grumpy if the tools were suddenly taken away.

My thoughts are best summed up by the well-known Gamers Nexus video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qbylbEek-M