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).
I think of inexperienced people using power tools. Power tools theoretically make your life easier, but beginners will strip screws or snap bolts right and left. Or with ikea furniture the screw threads in the "wood" get pulled right out.
With screws or LLMs, craftsmen can speed up and do the finer details by hand.
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.
> 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.
> You might want to read about the history of the term sabotage then. This actually is precedented.
Yes, history.
History reveals time and again that dislodging the powerful via lawlessness is not a sweet prelude to a better world. To be precise, even in the best case, at least a generation goes through hell before things stabilize.
I am not a big fan of "solutions" that dramatically introduce much bigger deeper problems.
Corruption is generally solved with more order. Not more disorder.
Cynicism borne out of frustration is not our friend.
Thank you for the blunt response. I was not advocating for sabotage - rather I was demonstrating that the current situation has precedent and giving GP a starting point from where to read. Thank you for pointing out that interpretation.
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.
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.
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.
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
abstract thoughtslop I've been thinking about about this:
Because most people predicting the future don't like whats coming, and there's not many people interesting in actual predicting, I think the act of having a good idea of what's next makes the future less known.
(As I understand it), on the stock market, making a better day-trader bot makes the short-term squiggles of the price more random. Generalizing, if you know with really good odds what's going to happen a few months from now, and want to profit from it, I think there might be a similar effect. I'm not talking about insider trading or knowing which policies are going to be enacted, I mean just people who just forecast better with public info, that the act of better knowing what's going to happen makes the world more complex. (coordination issue?) I also think if like 70+% of the population was better/motivated at/to forecast stuff we would be better off.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a thing that exists. There are many tools and workflows that let you sketch out something and then use a model to iterate imagery based on the draft, one small area at a time.
Unfortunately, this is not how most self proclaimed AI artists use it though. They generate slop and cry about not being taken seriously by actual artists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It would be toxic in that environment but I’ve never personally been lucky enough to work at an outfit like that, so I find it difficult to believe the reactive version isn’t more common than the spontaneous you describe
>> "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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 and a place to put their natural ambition
- 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?
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.)
The Luddites were able to destroy the mechanical looms because they were right there, in the buildings they worked in, doing the work in front of them. And, of course, because they were fairly straightforward and moderately fragile mechanical devices.
It takes much more bravery—and much more than bravery—to first figure out which datacenters are actually hosting Gemini (or Claude, or ChatGPT, etc), then travel across the country or across the world to where they are, break into what's likely a guarded building, and finally...I guess blow them up? With explosives that are almost certainly illegal just to possess, in contrast to the tools that could be used to break the looms.
And even if they were able to succeed in all this, that would be one datacenter. For one LLM. And its owners would simply be able to route around the damage, and (at least from the sounds of things) there'd be three new datacenters to replace it already scheduled to finish the next week.
So tell us about how much "bravery" it should require to deserve the title of Neo-Luddite.
My reply was aimed at this board.[1] The people who are unhappy about it but “can’t” to anything about it because there are no Sprint points to be awarded for “smashing the machines.” So they resign themselves to technological determinism. Nothing can stand in the way of Progress.
But really this is a subversion or reversal of the stupid, idiotic, decades-old meme of the Luddite-as-insult. It takes no courage, or even thought (see my original reply), to chant that Progress is More Good when that Progress is being lead by the most powerful Capital forces and their collaborators. So that’s why I dismissively replied that I haven’t seen anyone, HERE, that deserves such an honor as to be called a Neo Luddite.
And is it really material if I have in actuality seen one, or two, or five, on Here that deserve this name, when the point is so rhetorical?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
> from inexperienced people using it
I think of inexperienced people using power tools. Power tools theoretically make your life easier, but beginners will strip screws or snap bolts right and left. Or with ikea furniture the screw threads in the "wood" get pulled right out.
With screws or LLMs, craftsmen can speed up and do the finer details by hand.
Ive seen skilled specialists use it in their domain (badly)
We can also say the world is worse off when its in the hands of the oligarchy unconstrained by regulation.
We can say that, it's very easy and history has proven this many times.
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.
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.
> You might want to read about the history of the term sabotage then. This actually is precedented.
Yes, history.
History reveals time and again that dislodging the powerful via lawlessness is not a sweet prelude to a better world. To be precise, even in the best case, at least a generation goes through hell before things stabilize.
I am not a big fan of "solutions" that dramatically introduce much bigger deeper problems.
Corruption is generally solved with more order. Not more disorder.
Cynicism borne out of frustration is not our friend.
Thank you for the blunt response. I was not advocating for sabotage - rather I was demonstrating that the current situation has precedent and giving GP a starting point from where to read. Thank you for pointing out that interpretation.
Well, I am relieved we are on the same page!
It is all so dicey.
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.
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.
Don't forget deepfake harassment and spreading misinformation.
both around waaaay before LLMs
Transportation was around way before container ships and diesel powered lorries.
Ah, then it's ok then.
didn’t say that :)
>> Don't forget deepfake harassment and spreading misinformation.
> both around waaaay before LLMs
Non sequitur. What's next? Are you going to tell me a musket and a machine gun are basically the same?
Previously, you had a tiny number of shitty, obvious photoshops. Now you have industrial nudification at scale.
Blogs haven't been ruined, we're commenting about a blog post right now!
Programming hasn't been ruined, at least for me. I'm building more than ever.
The military had way more collateral damage pre-AI, so I don't see why you're blaming AI and not the people who used it.
I think it's going great so far, tbh.
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.
I'll just put the Willy Wonka tunnel clip here - https://youtu.be/Xkg7dp1QY9k
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
abstract thoughtslop I've been thinking about about this:
Because most people predicting the future don't like whats coming, and there's not many people interesting in actual predicting, I think the act of having a good idea of what's next makes the future less known.
(As I understand it), on the stock market, making a better day-trader bot makes the short-term squiggles of the price more random. Generalizing, if you know with really good odds what's going to happen a few months from now, and want to profit from it, I think there might be a similar effect. I'm not talking about insider trading or knowing which policies are going to be enacted, I mean just people who just forecast better with public info, that the act of better knowing what's going to happen makes the world more complex. (coordination issue?) I also think if like 70+% of the population was better/motivated at/to forecast stuff we would be better off.
AI slop farms are churning out anti-AI data center memes on Facebook
https://www.fastcompany.com/91544842/ai-slop-facebook-conten...
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
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
> 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.
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.
History shows that blindly welcoming change just because someone promises you a better future is a dangerous thing.
There is a good chance AI will magnify the current problems, especially regarding inequality, poverty, hunger and environmental exploitation.
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
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
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
Dude, try not eating for a week and then publish your humble opinion on how good any change is.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a thing that exists. There are many tools and workflows that let you sketch out something and then use a model to iterate imagery based on the draft, one small area at a time.
Unfortunately, this is not how most self proclaimed AI artists use it though. They generate slop and cry about not being taken seriously by actual artists.
> 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.
> 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.
What's wrong with the Polish author example?
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.
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.
What if you're a poet and use a rhyming dictionary now and then?
I really wouldn't care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It would be toxic in that environment but I’ve never personally been lucky enough to work at an outfit like that, so I find it difficult to believe the reactive version isn’t more common than the spontaneous you describe
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because they do it even when they have a good job with ample pay and respect
Certainly true in this case.
>> "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.
Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?
Was in the case I was referring to, and in similar cases I am familiar with.
Yeah, the general trend I’ve seen is people becoming more cynical about the workplace the older they get.
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.
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
that attitude is a direct result of having your neuroticism farmed by social media
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.
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.
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?
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 and a place to put their natural ambition
- 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?
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.)
The Luddites were able to destroy the mechanical looms because they were right there, in the buildings they worked in, doing the work in front of them. And, of course, because they were fairly straightforward and moderately fragile mechanical devices.
It takes much more bravery—and much more than bravery—to first figure out which datacenters are actually hosting Gemini (or Claude, or ChatGPT, etc), then travel across the country or across the world to where they are, break into what's likely a guarded building, and finally...I guess blow them up? With explosives that are almost certainly illegal just to possess, in contrast to the tools that could be used to break the looms.
And even if they were able to succeed in all this, that would be one datacenter. For one LLM. And its owners would simply be able to route around the damage, and (at least from the sounds of things) there'd be three new datacenters to replace it already scheduled to finish the next week.
So tell us about how much "bravery" it should require to deserve the title of Neo-Luddite.
Any fighting back. Equipment sabotage not needed.
And what, exactly, does "fighting back" look like in this case?
Because people are already taking steps to try to poison the AI training data.
They're trying to create their own art and culture in spite of the machine.
They're protesting the political forces that are enabling the techbros.
They're unionizing in numbers not seen in decades.
What would actually count as "brave" to you, if this isn't it?
How great then.
My reply was aimed at this board.[1] The people who are unhappy about it but “can’t” to anything about it because there are no Sprint points to be awarded for “smashing the machines.” So they resign themselves to technological determinism. Nothing can stand in the way of Progress.
But really this is a subversion or reversal of the stupid, idiotic, decades-old meme of the Luddite-as-insult. It takes no courage, or even thought (see my original reply), to chant that Progress is More Good when that Progress is being lead by the most powerful Capital forces and their collaborators. So that’s why I dismissively replied that I haven’t seen anyone, HERE, that deserves such an honor as to be called a Neo Luddite.
And is it really material if I have in actuality seen one, or two, or five, on Here that deserve this name, when the point is so rhetorical?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119414
Wait a minute, the Future of Truth is a book by Werner Herzog... Did this guy published a book with the same title? Why?
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.