Maybe not Chat GPT specifically, but you can hardly use the internet without some AI being pushed on you.
There’s a difference between passively using something and actively using something.
I use electricity every day, but I have no idea how it’s generated. I (assume I) use RSA256, but if you ask me to explain block cypher encryption to you I’d just go “well you take a number and another number and… hope they have sex to produce a bigger number?”
I use a lot of stuff without having to know how it works and having to choose to use it.
Not understanding how to use new technology, even flawed ones, isn’t a flex
I understand LLMs well enough that I really don’t want to use them because they are inherently incapable of judging the validity of information they are passing along.
Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s right. But they don’t tell you when they’re wrong, and to find out if they were wrong, you now have to do the research you were trying to avoid in the first place.
I tried programming with it once, because a friend insisted it was good. But it wasn’t, and it was extremly confidend, while being exceptionally wrong.
Congrats, then don’t use it to validate information.
LLMs are incredible text generators. But if you are going to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then you are never going to find its potential.
Yes, there are tons of bogus AI implementations. But that doesn’t say anything about the validity of the technology. Look at what VLC is doing with it for example.
It is pretty clear by those statements that you understand LLMs less than what you claim.
It’s so strange seeing people being proud that they can’t keep up with the technologies.
I used to know a guy like that. He would say stuff like “I didn’t even know how to use a computer mouse!” It definitely sounded like he was bragging. Such a weird thing to be proud of.
Yeah, that’s just judgemental and presumptive.
I have quite a lot of shit in my life, and I have actively decided to pay no attention to AI. Not because “I can’t keep up with it” but because after some research into it I decided “it was bullshit and nonsense and not something I need to know about”
Mate, I don’t know you and I don’t care about you. Stop talking about yourself for a second. You posted a screenshot where the person said “I have never even tried it.” That’s it.
Cus you don’t need to try something to have done some research on why you wouldn’t. A basic, cursory search of ‘what is chat gpt’ would get you LLM, and a basic cursory search of LLM gets you ‘machine designed to make shit up whenever it doesn’t know the answer, meaning you can’t trust it’. Not to mention they’ve probably seen at least one screenshot of it failing miserably at counting letters in a word. Or they’ve seen the ai answers Google shoves down their throat and learned from basic word of mouth that GPT is More of That. The only thing they said they don’t know is WHERE GPT is, or how it’s accessed.
Look, this is your life. If you want to be miserable, angry and left behind - fine, I don’t care. You don’t need my permission. So stop wasting your and my time.
All due respect, you started this.
You attacked me for writing a post. Clearly you care enough to do that.
Some people are very proud of not knowing things
There’s a difference between not knowing something because of ignorance and not knowing something because you know you don’t need to know it.
I have no idea how to rebuild a combustion engine.
Is that something of which I should be ashamed? Or something I have actively chosen not to learn because when will I ever need to know it?
Yes, you should be ashamed. As a tool that you probably depend on every day, you need to have some sort of basic understanding, to do basic troubleshooting, and to have a vague understanding what your mechanic tells you
One could say the same about the TV, about the internet, about block cypher encryption, about the economy, about the local sewage system, about the local water and electricity systems, about all sorts of things that we rely on every day.
Oh then there’s the boiler, the cooker, the microwave, the fridge, the telecommunications network…
At what point do I go “huh – maybe I should leave this up to people who went to school to learn about it” rather than trying to learn even the basics about everything that could go wrong in my life when there are CLEARLY people who know more about it than I do and are paid to know more about it than I do?
Would you be the sort of person to proudly proclaim their lack of knowledge about combustion engines at the time they became a thing?
To be honest? Yeah.
In my last job before this one I learned a lot of stuff about a topic I needed to know for that job.
But now I have a new job I don’t need to know any of that stuff. So I am slowly forgetting it because I don’t use it. And instead I am learning a lot of stuff about things I need for my new job.
And in the midst of all of this why would I take the time to learn something I am never going to use. At all. Ever. I have far too much stuff to learn and remember, and why I would need to learn how to plug the camshaft into the reverse socket twink-phlange?
I am not afraid of technology. It doesn’t scare me. I am not sitting in a cave railing against these kids with their short skirts and their long hair and their music and “they didn’t do these things in my day”
I just made what I consider to be a fairly educated judgement call that this is something I don’t need to care about.
This isn’t about not needing to learn. If you don’t see any use for this newfangled internal combustion then why learn about whether it is a tiny horse or whatever. But this telling people with pride how little you know is almost always eyeroll worthy. Like wow very cool you don’t know something…
Hold on a moment – I don’t go around with a sandwich board on my chest or emailing every person I know.
I brought it up here because I thought it relevant to the topic. But if we were talking about hockey or baseball or what makes different clouds form at different levels then I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
And pride? Again I just mentioned it because it’s something relevant to the topic. I could easily have said I have no clue how nuclear reactors work or how to perform open heart surgery on a human being.
Would that have been boasting about my lack of knowledge? Or does not knowing about how to perform open heart surgery seem relatively normal?
I was just making a point that a lot of people don’t bother with some knowledge because it is shit they don’t need to know. And right now using AI tools is in that category for quite a large percentage of the population.
Wait, people actually try to use gpt for regular everyday shit?
I do lorebuilding shit (in which gpt’s “hallucinations” are a feature not a bug), or I’ll just ramble at it while drunk off my ass about whatever my autistic brain is hyperfixated on. I’ve given up on trying to do coding projects, because gpt is even worse at it than I am.
I have encountered some people who use it as a substitute for thinking. To the extent that it’s rather unnerving.
They absolutely do. Some people basically use it instead of Google or whatever. Shopping lists, vacation planning, gift lists, cooking recipes, just about everything.
It’s great at it, because it’ll bother trawling webpages for all that stuff that you can’t be bothered to spend hours doing. The internet is really soo shitified that it’s easier to use a computer to do this.
I hate that it is so. It’s a complete waste of ressources, but I understand it.
It’s a waste of your resources to close popups, set cookie preferences and read five full screens about grandma’s farm before getting to the point: “Preheat the oven to 200°c and heat the pizza for 15 minutes.”, when ChatGPT could’ve presented it right away without any ads.
Brought to you by chrome being the biggest browser and it willfully enshittifying adblockers, which incidentally made searching way more tedious and funneled people to LLMs.
I think the AI hype will die when it gets enshittified enough.
At first they’ll start injecting sponsored results, then it’s going to be pay up or watch 3 adds before access, while still showing the product-placed content regardless.
Companies will be offered a “professional subscription” just to use it without the first two ads.
Right now, it’s free, because they want people to get addicted to he ease of answers that was previously supplied by search engines.
At no point will they ever generate the content that people are searching for. Googles main mission is to obstruct people from getting that.
Best case, wiith enough competition, AI is just going to be another layer to see through, because previous versions of the internet has been made unusable by advertising.
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.
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.
I know someone who very likely had ChatGPT write an apology for them once. Blew my mind.
I use it to communicate with my landlord sometimes. I can tell ChatGPT all the explicit shit exactly as I mean it and it’ll shower it and comb it all nice and pretty for me. It’s not an apology, but I guess my point is that some people deserve it.
You don’t think being able to communicate properly and control your language, even/especially for people you don’t like, is a skill you should probably have? It’s not that much more effort.
I can and I do, but I don’t think he’s worth the effort specifically. Lol
Why waste the brain power when the option exists not to?
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Because brains literally need exercise, and conversations with other real humans are the best kind it can get, so you’re literally speedrunning an increased potential of dementia and alzheimers with every fake email.
I think it is a good learning tool if you use it as such. I use it for help with google sheets functions (not my job or anything important, just something I’m doing), and while it rarely gets a working function out, it can set me on the right track with functions I didn’t even know existed.
Is something that is so often wrong a good learning tool when there are online resources?
When you can ask a specific question and get related information in the same amount of time opening the web page for documentation/“online resources” takes, why bother?
My brother used his during a board game yesterday when we encountered something we weren’t sure about rule-wise. The manual is 20-pages long and we hoped to short circuit things. It gave us a nice explanation, even formatted it into a table for ease of reading. The answer ended up being completely wrong.
We used to have web forums for that, and they worked pretty okay without the costs of LLMs
This is a little off topic but we really should, as a species, invest more heavily in public education. People should know how to read and follow instructions, like the docs that come with Google sheets.
I use it somewhat regularly to send snarky emails to coworkers in a professional, buzzword overload responses to mundane inquiries.
I use it every so often to help craft a professional go fuck yourself email too.
Using AI is helpful, but by no means does it replace your brain. Sure, it can write emails and really helps with code, but anything beyond basic troubleshooting and “short” code streams, it’s an assistant, not an answer.
Yeah, I don’t get the people who think it’ll replace your brain. I find it useful for learning even if it’s not always entirely correct but that’s why I use my brain too. Even if it gets me 60% of the way there, that’s useful.
I use ChatGPT mainly for recipes, because I’m bad at that. And it works great, I can tell it “I have this and this and this in my fridge and that and that in my pantry, what can I make?” and it will give me a recipe that I never would have come up with. And it’s always been good stuff.
And I do learn from it. People say you can’t learn from using AI, but I’ve gotten better at cooking thanks to ChatGPT. Just a while ago I learned about deglazing.
You should try this thing, its pretty neat, just press maya or miles. Though it requires a microphone so you may have to open it on your phone.
https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_of_voice#demo
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
Yeah, don’t use a hallucinogenic machine for truth about the universe. That is just asking for trouble.
Use it to give you new ideas. Be creative together. It works exceptionally well for that.
We’re in a post truth world where most web searches about important topics give you bullshit answers. But LLMs have read basically all the articles already and has at least the potential make deductions and associations about it - like this belongs to “propaganda network 4335”. Or “the source of this claim is someone who has engaged in deception before”. Something like a complex fact check machine.
This is sci-fi currently because it’s an ocean wide but can’t think deeply or analyze well, but if you press GPT about something it can give you different “perspectives”. The next generations might become more useful in this in filtering out fake propaganda. So you might get answers that are sourced and referenced and which can also reference or dispute wrong answers / talking points and their motivation. And possibly what emotional manipulation and logical fallacies they use to deceive you.
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.
Oh look, it’s the LLMentalist o’clock!
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.
The stupid and the lazy.
Hey, I may be stupid and lazy, but at least I don’t, uh, what were we talking about?
I don’t see the point either if you’re just going to copy verbatim. OP could always just ask AI themselves if that’s what they wanted.
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.
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.
If he’s using an online model, I hope he used a privacy-respecting VPN, a hardened browser, and didn’t sign up using his email, or else his IP address and identity are now linked to all those chats, and that info could be exposed, traded, or sold to anyone.
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
It is, and they should, but that doesn’t mean they will. GenZ and GenA has notable communication and social issues rooted in the technologies of today. Those issue aren’t stopping our use of social media, smart phones or tablets or stopping tech companies from doubling down on the technologies that cause the issues. I have no faith they will protect future children when they have refuse to protect present children.
What I mean is that much like parents who already put a tablet or TV in front of their kid to keep them occupied, parents will do the same with AI. When a kid is talking to an AI every day, they will learn to communicate their wants and needs to the AI. But AI has infinite patients, is always available, never makes their kid feel bad and can effectively infer and accurately assume the intent of a child from pattern recognizing communication that parents may struggle to understand. Every child would effectively develop a unique language for use with their AI co-parent that really only the AI understands.
This will happen naturally simply by exposure to AI that parents seem more than willing to allow as easily as tablets and smart phones and tv. Like siblings where one kid understands the other better that parent and translates those needs to the parent. Children raised on AI may end up communication to their caretakers better through the AI, just like the sibling, but worse. Their communication skills with people will suffer because more of their needs are getting met by communicating with AI. They practice communication with AI at the expense of communicating with people.
I’m using it to learn to code! If anyone wants to try my game let me know I’ll figure out a way to send it.
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.
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.
Oh, I fully agree with you. One of the main things about asking super basic things is that when it inevitably gets them wrong, as least you won’t waste that much time. And it’s inherently parasitical, basic questions are mostly right with LLMs because thousands of people have answered the basic questions thousands of times.
Like, which distro and version?
I don’t get how so many people carry their computer illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Chatgpt is useful.
Is it as useful as Tech Evangelists praise it to be? No. Not yet - and perhaps never will be.
But I sure do love to let it write my mails to people who I don’t care for, but who I don’t want to anger by sending my default 3 word replies.
It’s a tool to save time. Use it or pay with your time if you willfully ignore it.
Yeah, it’s a bullshit generator. You just gave a great example of how it’s good at generating bullshit.
When there’s some stupid task like having to write emails that nobody will read, ChatGPT is a good tool for the job. Of course, you shouldn’t have to write those emails in the first place, but as long as you’re stuck in that situation you might as well offload it to an LLM.
I like to take photos of plants and get it to tell me what that plant is, is it a good houseplant, can I propogate it in water, and what does this symptoms on the leaves mean, and it’s really good at it.
Tech illiteracy. Strong words.
I’m a sysadmin at the IT faculty of a university. I have a front row seat to witness the pervasive mental decline that is the result of chatbots. I have remote access to all lab computers. I see students copy-paste the exercise questions into a chatbot and the output back. Some are unwilling to write a single line of code by themselves. One of the network/cybersecurity teachers is a friend, he’s seen attendance drop to half when he revealed he’d block access to chatbots during exams. Even the dean, who was elected because of his progressive views on machine learning, laments new students’ unwillingness to learn. It’s actual tech illiteracy.
I’ve sworn off all things AI because I strongly believe that its current state is a detriment to society at large. If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly. I will learn every skill that I need, without depending on AI. If you think that makes me an old man yelling at clouds, I have no kind words in response.
This is about a posts where someone proudly proclaims how they know almost nothing about ChatGPT. It’s one thing to decide not to use it because you know it’s this or that, but this is about someone being proud about not knowing anything about it.
x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA’d at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.
But we shouldn’t just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads “As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models,” or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.
Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?
ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.
Speaking of being old, just like there are noticeable differences between people growing up before or after ready internet access. I think there will be a similar divide between people who did their learning before or after llms.
Even if you don’t use them directly, there’s so much more useless slop than there used to be online. I’ll make it five minutes into a how-to article before realizing it doesn’t actually make any sense when you look at the whole thing, let alone have anything interesting or useful to say.
If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly.
I grew up, mostly, in the time of digital search, but far enough back that they still resembled the old card-catalog system. Looking for information was a process that you had to follow, and the mere act of doing that process was educational and helped order your thoughts and memory. When it’s physically impossible to look for two keywords at the same time, you need to use your brain or you won’t get an answer.
And while it’s absolutely amazing that I can now just type in a random question and get an answer, or at least a link to some place that might have the answer, this is a real problem in how people learn to mentally process information.
A true expert can explain things in simple terms, not because they learned them in simple terms or think about them in simple terms, but because they have to ability to rephrase and reorder information on the fly to fit into a simplified model of the complex system they have in their mind. That’s an extremely important skill, and it’s getting more and more rare.
If you want to test this, ask people for an analogy. If you can’t make an analogy, you don’t truly understand the subject (or the subject involves subatomic particles, relativity or topology and using words to talk about it is already basically an analogy)
Saying you heard of it but don’t even try it and then brag on social media about it is different than trying it and then deciding it’s not worth it/more trouble than it’s worth.
Do I see it as detrimental to education? Definitely, especially since teachers are not prepared for it.
I haven’t tried it either. Not even as a joke. I didn’t need to. I’ve seen its effects and came to a conclusion: that I would reject AI and whatever convenience it might bring in order to improve my own organic skills.
It’s not a terrible tool if you already have critical thinking skills and can analyze the output and reject the nonsense. I consider it an ‘idea’ machine as it was sometimes helpful when coding to give me a new idea, but I never used what it spit out because it writes nonsensical code far too frequently to be trusted. The problem is that if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you don’t have the skills to do that critical analysis. So it turns into a self-defeating feedback loop. That’s what we aren’t ready for, because our public education has been so abysmal for the last… forever.
But if you can analyze the content and reject the nonsense, then you didn’t need it in the first place, because you already knew enough about the topic.
And when you’re using it for things you don’t know enough about, that’s where you can’t tell the nonsense! You will say to yourself, because you noticed nonsense before, that “you can tell”, but you won’t actually be able to, because you’re going from known-unknown into unknown-unknown territory. You won’t even notice the nonsense because you don’t know what nonsense could even be there.
Large language models are just that, they generate some language without sense behind it, if you use it for anything at all that requires reasoning, then you’re using it wrong.
The literally only thing LLMs are good for is shit like “please reword this like that”, “please write an ad text praising these and these features of a product”, stuff that is about language and that’s it.
I certainly have bias on their usefulness because all I’ve ever used them for was to get coding ideas when I had a thorny problem. It was good for giving me a direction of thought on a function or process that I hadn’t considered, but there was so much garbage in the actual code I would never use it. It just pointed me in the right direction to go write my own. So it’s not that I ‘needed’ it, but it did on a few occasions save me some time when I was working on a difficult programming issue. Certainly not earth shattering, but it has been useful a few times for me in that regard.
I don’t even like to talk very much about the fact that I found it slightly useful at work once in a while, because I’m an anti-LLM person, at least in the way they are being promoted. I’m very unhappy with the blind trust so many people and companies put in them, and I think it’s causing real harm.
As an older techy I’m with you on this, having seen this ridiculous fight so many times.
Whenever a new tech comes out that gets big attention you have the Tech Companies saying everyone has to over it in Overhype.
And you have the proud luddites who talk like everyone else is dumb and they’re the only ones capable of seeing the downsides of tech
“Buy an iPhone, it’ll Change your life!”
“Why do I need to do anything except phone people and the battery only lasts one day! It’ll never catch on”
“Buy a Satnav, it’ll get you anywhere!”
“That satnav drove a woman into a lake!”
“Our AI is smart enough to run the world!”
“This is just a way to steal my words like that guy who invented cameras to steal people’s souls!”
🫤
Tech was never meant to do your thinking for you. It’s a tool. Learn how to use it or don’t, but if you use tools right, 10,000 years of human history says that’s helpful.
The thing is, some “tech” is just fucking dumb, and should have never been done. Here are just a few small examples:
“Get connected to the city gas factory, you can have gaslamps indoors and never have to bother with oil again!”
“Lets bulldoze those houses to let people drive through the middle of our city”
“In the future we’ll all have vacuum tubes in our homes to send and deliver mail”
“Airships are the future of transatlantic travel”
“Blockchain will revolutionize everything!”
“People can use our rockets to travel across the ocean”
“Roads are a great place to put solar panels” “LLMs are a great way of making things”There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries.
Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn nonetheless for the latter.
-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov,Always upvote Alpha Centauri!
EDIT: and in slightly more content-related answer: I picked those examples because there’s a range of reason why these things were stupid. Some turned out to be stupid afterwards, like building highly polluting gasworks in the middle of cities or airships. Some turned were always stupid even in their very principles, like using rockets for airtravel, solarpanel roads or blockchain.
LLMs are definitely in the latter category. Like solar roadways, blockchains or commute-by-rocket, the “solution” just doesn’t have problem or a market.
I agree. People are often dumb, especially the smart ones.
When you go through life seeing the world differently it’s easy to assume that other people just don’t get it, that they’re the problem as always, when they say your invention is useless, misguided, inappropriate or harmful.
No matter how smart these people are, reality always catches up in the end, hopefully with as few casualties as possible.
Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That’s the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.
No, but I do use hammers despite the risks.
Because I’m aware of the risks and so I use hammers safely, despite the occasional bruised thumb.
You missed my point. The hammers you’re using aren’t ‘wrong’, i.e. smacking you in the face 15% of the time.
Said another way, if other tools were as unreliable as ChatGPT, nobody would use them.
You’ve missed my point.
ChatGPT can be wrong but it can’t hurt you unless you assume it’s always right
And assuming it’s always right is what the general public is doing.
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Like the lady who drives into the lake because sat nav told her to.
Hammers are unreliable.
You can hit your thumb if you use the tool wrong, and it can break, doing damage, if e.g. it is not stored properly. When you use a hammer, you accept these risks, and can choose to take steps to mitigate them by storing it properly, taking care when using it and checking it’s not loose before using it.
In the same regard, if you use LLMs for what they’re good at, and verify their outputs, they can be useful tools.
“LLMs pointless because I can write a shopping list myself” is like saying “hammers are pointless because I can just use this plank instead”. Sure, you can do that, but there’s other scenarios where a hammer would be kinda handy.
if you use LLMs for what they’re good at, and verify their outputs
This is the part the general public is not prepared for, and why the whole house of cards falls apart.
I agree - but that’s user error, not a bad tool
Sounds like it’s a tool for wasting time.
I used the image generation of a jail broken model locally to drum up an AI mock-up of work I then paid a professional to do
This was 10000x smoother than the last time I tried this, where I irritated the artist with how much they failed to understand what I meant. The AI didn’t care, I was able to get something decently close to what I had in my head, and a professional took that and made something great with it
Is that a better example?
Yes. AI is great at creating mediocre slop to pour onto a giant mountain of mediocre slop that already exists online. In fact, that’s an LLM’s greatest power: Producing stuff that looks like other stuff.
This is the perfect usecase for it. Mockups, sketches, filler. Low-quality, low-effort stuff used only as an input for more work.
Yeah, actually, that’s a productive use of a bullshit generator.
Meaning, it didn’t generate bullshit that time.
Almost like technology in the hands of someone skilled works wonders, right?
