491
On Exceptions
(pawb.social)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Sorry but you can deny and hate all you want, it’s not going anywhere
Neither is climate change, but we should still combat it where possible.
Funny, that. Fighting against AI could be seen as fighting against climate change, considering the large carbon footprint it has.
I think it's going to contract massively. Like nft's.
Texans are facing a water shortage due to over 900 MILLION gallons of water being used to cool AI datacenters. Do you think that's sustainable?
doesn't Texas exist because somebody invented air conditioning?
can't we cut down on texans if they use so much water?
Do you want me to list the techbrodude technologies that were "not going anywhere" in past decades that have effectively died outside of tiny die-hard communities still living a delusion?
Remember when the Metaverse was the next great thing that wasn't going anywhere? Remember when cryptocurrency was going to wipe out banking forevermore? Remember when NFTs were going to revolutionize artists getting paid for their work? Segway or its somehow-lamer cousin "hoverboards"? Augmented Reality? 3D TVs? Theranos? Google Wave?
Hell, just go visit the Google Graveyard for a list of "hot" technologies that withered and died on the vine. (And quite a few lame technologies that shouldn't have ever even been on the vine.)
Remember all that?
But this time the techbrodudes have it right, despite there not being a viable business model; despite every AI vendor in the world burning through money faster than dumping that same cash into a forest fire. It's not going anywhere!
Every grift has two parties: the grifter and the sucker. You're not the former.
sadly. I don't have enough money to turn this shit-hose off.
Gen AI is neat, and I use it for personal processes including code, image gen, llm/chat; but it is sooooo faaaar awaaaay from being a real game changer - while all the people poised to profit off it claim it is - that it's just insane to claim it's the next wave. evidence: all the creative (photo/art/code/etc) people who are adamantly against it and have espoused reasoning.
There's another story on my feed about a 10-year-old refactoring a code base with a LLM. Go look at the comments from actual experts that take into account things like unit tests, readability, manageability, security. Humans have more context than any AI will.
LLMs are not intelligent. They are patently not. They make shit up constantly, since that is exactly what they do. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the shit they make up is mostly accurate... but do you want to rely on them?
When a doctor prescribes you the wrong drug, you can sue them as a recourse. When a software company has a data breach, there is often a class-action (better than nothing) as a recourse. When an AI tells you to put glue on your pizza to hold the toppings, there is no recourse, since the AI is not a legal thing and the company disclaims all liability for its output. When an AI denies your health insurance claim because of inscrutable reasons, there is no recourse.
In the first two, there is a penalty for being wrong, which is in effect an incentive to be correct -- to be accurate, to be responsible.
In the last, as an AI llm/agent/fuckingbuzzword, there is no penalty and no incentive. The AI just is as good as its input, and half the world is fucking stupid, so if we average out all the world's input, we get "barely getting by" as a result. A coding AI is at least partially trained on random stackoverflow posts asking for help. The original code there is wrong!
Sadly, it's not going anywhere. But people who rely on it will find short-term success for long-term failure. And a society relying on it is doomed. AI relies on the creative works that already exist. If we don't make any new things, AI will stagnate and die. Where will we be then?
There are places AI/LLM/Machine-Learning can be used successfully and helpfully, but they are niche. The AI bros need to be figuring out how to quickly meet a specific need instead of trying to meet all needs at the same time. Think the early 2000-s Folding at Home, how to convince republicans to wear a fucking mask during covid, why we shouldn't just eat the billionaires*.
*Hermes-3 says cannibalism is "barbaric" in most cultures, but otherwise doesn't give convincing arguments.