In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent
Yeah it’s almost like the AI is an unthinking machine trying to model what a person would answer to the question (prompt) provided to it.
I’m so goddamn tired of people (not you) acting like an LLM “knows” anything nevermind whether it’s right or wrong or could even tell you if it didn’t know the answer. It’s not like a person that can say, “I don’t have that knowledge so I know any answer is likely wrong” the machine is going to give you an answer every time. That answer will never be “idk” it’ll be whatever hallucination it’s confident enough is right based on the model and training.
I do think there are use cases for it and the technology is cool but the vision being sold and propping up our economy with a venture capitalist circle jerk is so far removed from reality.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
I teach what is correct, but the incorrect mainstream understanding is what AI provides. It’s the crux of the problem I focus on in my research.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
Not every class is debate. Plenty of courses are simply taught by an expert in their field, and students are graded on how well they learn from that professor’s instruction. Is it a perfect system? No. But that’s why we have experts. Some classes exist to simply establish a baseline of knowledge among the students. Such classes cannot be continuously derailed by engaging in rigorous debate about topics that experts in the field consider unambiguous and long-settled. Students are free to form their own opinions and whatever conclusions they want, but they need to demonstrate that they have at least learned the material as taught. You can believe the Universe is 6000 years old if you want. You cannot expect your astronomy professor to spend half the class debating with you about it.
A creationist student doesn’t have to believe in evolution to get an A in an evolutionary biology class. But they do have to demonstrate mastery or at least competence in the principles of evolutionary biology as taught by their professor. If they want to view the whole course as “a silly exercise in memorizing the lies of evolutionists,” well they’re free to do so. It’s a free country. Believe whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean they can just write, “God did it” to every answer on the final and still receive a passing grade.
You’re free to believe or reject anything a teacher or professor teaches you. That doesn’t mean you get out of learning the lesson entirely.
I’m pretty sure the fucking economist you’re replying to is not “teach(ing) something different from the mainstream” that’s the whole point of their post.
The whole point is the AI tools are hallucinating* completely incorrect answers and that students trying to use them as study aids and tools to learn with are going to have a lot of fake and wrong information to sort out and good luck to them knowing what is or isn’t incorrect or wrong when they’re just trying to learn a subject they know nothing about.
The only reason you or I or anyone else knows when AI hallucinates in its output is because we know stuff from our prior knowledge and can catch it that way. If you’re ignorant to a subject and trying to learn stuff you’re not going to know off hand the AI is lying to you if it sounds convincing enough for a layperson to accept.
*which I kind of hate that term because to the AI there’s no difference between truth and hallucination - it’s just output as far as the robot is concerned
he expects to debate every professor he encounters, which brings up other quesitons about his motives.
I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.
It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.
This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.
AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):
- The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini and so on. )
- the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
- People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)
and so on…
and AI should stay as a “TOOL”, not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.
edit 1:
i forgot to mention AI is a big contributer to the AI crisis.The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid
Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)
not trained on copyrighted data
A lot of really good data is copyrighted - there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place. Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
People did not use AI mindlessly
Good luck with that one.
Do a little research. AI power usage isn’t that much of a problem yet.
Okay.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/pollution-musk-unpermitted-xai-power-100200381.html
https://www.fastcompany.com/91229319/ai-data-centers-could-make-your-electric-bill-go-up-by-70
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-power-ai-data-centers-eminent-domain/
Power usage from AI data centers has already eclipsed power usage from all other data centers combined. If you can come up with a scenario where AI hasn’t doubled in scale by 2030 by belching smoke into the atmosphere, I’ll concede the point.
A lot of really good data is copyrighted
Yeah, and that’s too fucking bad. If the people who made it don’t want it to be used for AI training (and I don’t think I’ve ever met a creator who has done the research on AI who does, even if they got paid), it shouldn’t be.
Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)
but… but… i saw news about AI causing power grid issues,though i did also hear a power company shut down ai datacenter(s?) to free up electricity used .
i also forgot to add AI causing the ram crisis thing.there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place.
exactly,also good idea.
Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
i think its about making people own the AI??
Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
i think its about making people own the AI??
It’s modeled somewhat on the Alaska permanent fund, which is compensating Alaskans with profits from the oil being extracted from their state.
There are unlimited ways to screw it up, but if AI suddenly becomes ridiculously profitable, having 50% of those profits cycled into the general fund could pay for things like UBI…
thats sounds awesome
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.
We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.
Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.
I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?
I 100% agree. I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much. I just wanted to point out that AI and even LLMs absolutely do have valuable use cases. I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them. Are they overhyped? Probably. Are AI companies using public information that should belong to everyone in an unfair way to become rich and powerful? Absofuckinglutely. Is that how it should be? Definitely not. Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes. Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes. I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.
I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much.
Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent. “Sure, people are suffering because of this, but two friends of mine are better off for it” – is that really worth it?
I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them.
Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.
Are they overhyped? Probably.
LLMs in particular, and dangerously so. People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing. They deliver a convincing imitation, but there have been too many instances of that imitation not holding up to any reasonable standard. For a more benign example, Ford had to hire back its fired engineers because it turned out that GenAI can’t actually do their job. Less benign are things like giving harmful “health advice” or reinforcing their users’ delusions and psychoses to the point where they commit violence against themselves or others.
They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.
Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes.
This is where we need to specify just what we mean by AI.
Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient. Specialised models may make decent assistants for certain types of specialists.
They certainly aren’t capable of the type of “nobody has to work any more” utopia that conmen like Musk and Altmann are selling to the gullible. They’re fundamentally unreliable and their consumption of resources dwarfs their sloppy utility.
So while some form of AI might hold a key to a radically better world, LLMs and generative AI aren’t it.
Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes.
Probably? Have you taken a look around or read the whole list you replied to? The hype already is destroying lives, and there’s a slew of experts calling out the fraudulent scheme they’re pulling on the stock market.
The one point I’ll concede to the scammers is that it has fundamentally altered our world.
Just not for the better.
I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.
It starts with being honest and clear about what “this” actually is, understanding what it isn’t and not making excuses for a deeply destructive technological complex just because the mathematical parrot emits some useful responses now and then.
First of all, thank you for your extensive response. I think discussions like this are important. Here’s my 2 cents, sorry if I’m not that eloquent - I’m not a native English speaker so some of this is a bit hard to put into words for me.
Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent.
Well, surely my two friends can’t be the only people AI has helped, that would be highly unlikely. So I do think it is a valid point along the other ones - AI does create value. Otherwise there would be no hype. I just think it’s dishonest to claim that AI is completely useless. If we want to turn this into something positive, we have to be honest about all the aspects.
Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.
Of course it’s not. We’re totally on the same page here. I just think it’s not a matter of the technology itself, it’s how those companies (are allowed to) act. That doesn’t seem like an AI problem to me, it’s a capitalism problem. We might have different perspectives on this btw because I live in the EU. People don’t lose their home or water supply here because of AI companies.
People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing.
Yes. And I do think AI companies are at fault here for marketing their products dishonestly to people who don’t understand how the technology works. They exploit stupid people, and mostly stupid people in positions with too much power.
They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.
I think we might fundamentally disagree on this. Advice from a human is nothing but a multivariate combination of things that person has learned in the past. It’s way more complex - brains are orders of magnitude more complex than an artificial neural network - but I don’t see a fundamentally and qualitative difference here unless you believe in something like a soul that somehow magically gives more value to a human advice. If you understand that an LLM is a mathematical tool and not a human, you can use it in very efficient and helpful ways. Some questions actually better answered by something that has gathered a wide range of information from thousands or even millions of sources. Some questions that require fast answers are also better answered by AI (just yesterday I asked ChatGPT for a python script for a certain task - it took about 20 seconds and provided a perfectly working ~500 lines python script that I could use; no human could ever do that). Lots of other questions - questions that require emotional connection, personal experience, specialized knowledge - should be left to humans, of course. The amount of shitty and wrong advice I’ve gotten from people, even doctors and other experts, is immense btw. The crucial thing is that you need to learn how to test and evaluate advice that you get - from people AND from LLMs. Many people would profit from learning that skill - maybe using LLMs might even teach them that, even if it will probably usually be the hard way.
Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient.
Yes, that’s exactly my point. We need to educate the recipients. That is actually one of the most important things imo. AI and LLMs aren’t going to go away, they’re here to stay. Just look at how it already penetrated all kinds of scientific disciplines. We urgently need to regulate what companies can do with it and we need to educate people on how they work and how to use them, and especially how NOT to use them. And by the way, I wish we had never made the jump from calling it deep learning to calling it AI - I think that might have prevented a lot of problems und misunderstandings.
Look, I think ultimately our views aren’t even that different. That’s why discourse is important. I just don’t think screaming “AI is bad” is going to get us anywhere (and that’s essentially what the original comment that I replied to was doing imo). We need to be specific about what the problem is: the problem is not AI, the problem is that some people are getting super rich on the expense of almost everyone else. THAT is what we need to stop. You can’t fight technological and scientific progress, what you need to fight is malicious use of technology and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few. I’d say we might actually in an “industrial revolution” kind of situation. Back then, workers rights and communism became a thing. We might need something as fundamental as that to deal with today’s problems. We’ll need all the social sciences now that we’ve cut funding for over the last decades because MINT was just more important to us (I say that as a MINT scientist btw).
I think discussions like this are important.
I find that writing out and defending my position helps me refine it. Sometimes, my perspective on things shifts just by trying to explain it. Discussions are the whetstone by which arguments are sharpened.
I’m not a native English speaker so some of this is a bit hard to put into words for me.
That makes two of us :D
Sometimes, these discussions help expand my Engish skills too.So I do think it is a valid point along the other ones - AI does create value.
Yesn’t. It’s a text generator that predicts a likely series of words, based on the language patterns it learned from its training material. It doesn’t so much create value as aggregate the value of other people’s work into a weighted reproduction.
However, those weights are biased by quantity, not quality. It has no way to assess which responses are good, only which ones are likely. The average value it (re-)produces is an average of the value of the training material. Models trained on a wide variety of content (such as ChatGPT) will inevitably include a lot of material of little value to specialised topics.
Hence my argument: It can get lucky and predict a high-value response, but the problem is that it isn’t guaranteed to do so. A layperson doesn’t have the expertise to tell the difference. That not only dilutes the value, it invites false confidence in the results. In cases where accuracy is critical, this may actually produce negative value if people consult an unreliable model rather than a specialist.
And that’s the critical difference to human advice: human experience is shaped by a number of factors beyond just language. We create semantic connections to abstract concepts and attach specific meaning to certain words and patterns.
LLMs don’t have that abstraction. They can predict sequences of text that sound plausible and might coincide with something describing reality, but they can’t tell whether it’s accurate.
Advice has to be grounded in reality to be useful, and that’s what LLMs are missing.
They’re perfectly suitable for tasks where correlation is enough, but if the task requires actual understanding, LLMs aren’t equipped for it.
Otherwise there would be no hype.
Hype doesn’t always need a solid reason. In this case, a lot of hype stems from the hope that we may one day have the type of Artificial General Intelligence that SciFi has long dreamed of, the illusion that they may be able to do our work for us and the promise to company managers that they may be able to save money by replacing human employees with AI.
The various executives of the big AI vendors are obviously capitalising on that, stoking the hype with grand and utopic visions because they want to sell their product.
It’s not that it’s useless. It’s that the utility is far less than the lofty promises made by people milking the hype for all it’s worth. And that little utility comes at a terrible social, economic and ecologic price.
We might have different perspectives on this btw because I live in the EU. People don’t lose their home or water supply here because of AI companies.
I’m in the EU too, I just read a lot of US news. I don’t think we should dismiss the consequences our use of US infrastructure has. Worse yet, I don’t think we should dismiss the political dependencies that creates.
We need to be specific about what the problem is: the problem is not AI, the problem is that some people are getting super rich on the expense of almost everyone else.
I think that’s only a part of the problem. The second part is the lack of understanding you mentioned, and the resulting mis- and overuse. I’ve seen people trying to argue with experts because “ChatGPT said” because they genuinely do not understand that ChatGPT is a parrot, not an expert.
And the third part, again, is the disastrous effect on our world.
You can’t fight technological and scientific progress […]
I’d say we might actually in an “industrial revolution” kind of situation.I’m not fighting it. I’m trying to pull it out of the pit that the current obsession with imitation has dug. When college students, the next generation or scientists, trades their scientific understanding for the convenience of high-tech parrots, that is the opposite of progress. It’s stagnation, fostered by those few people that are happily trading our future for their present profits.
That’s the mirage of this “industrial revolution” analogy: They’ve built something in the shape of a steam engine, promised the functionality of Spinning Jenny, sold fabric factory owners on the idea who fired their workers to buy these machines. The people they fired were promised that they’d have to work less, but weren’t told that they would be paid less too.
Now these machines turn out to not actually provide the smooth, spinning motion required for spinning thread. Factories are facing expensive production outages, compounding the expenses of getting these machines installed and can’t afford to hire all the workers back.
The machine shops built to produce these Sloppy Jennies or their parts will eventually find it harder to sell their iventory. Once they go under, their workers will also become economic casualties.
We’re at the point where we need to reinforce worker protections. We need to push for a system where our livelihood isn’t contingent on the amount of work we do. Only then can that utopia even manifest. And to actually make progress:
We’ll need all the social sciences now that we’ve cut funding for over the last decades
Yes.
We’ll need to understand the social dynamics of such technology to better prevent the disastrous side-effects. We’ll need to compare historical developments with present circumstances and plans to account for future developments. We’ll need to study the psychological effects of interacting with human-like machines to be able to correct course where needed.
Whatever control mechanism is supposed to prevent machines from producing harmful output will need heuristics based on those disciplines to assess the dangers of that output.
I’d include philosophy too. We don’t need neural networks that are a lesser version of human ones, nor just scaled-up variants that also replicate all the human inefficiencies, errors and biases. Those are the pure MINT approach to the problem, and it’s clearly coming up short.
We need to find a rigorous mechanism for representing semantic knowledge in digital systems that don’t just imitate, but surpass human cognition. We need a workable philosophical grounding for logical and mathematical approaches to modelling knowledge of concepts rather than just language.
We need to get over the error that LLMs are “thinking” or “just like humans”. They’re not, but as long as we’re stuck on the idea, we can’t fix it.
Also, we really, really should spend less time thinking about whether we could and more about whether we should.
I find that writing out and defending my position helps me refine it. Sometimes, my perspective on things shifts just by trying to explain it.
Same here. It’s the best way to test my current views and beliefs and reshape or refine them.
That makes two of us :D Sometimes, these discussions help expand my Engish skills too.
Ah yes, hello there, fellow German. :D winkt fröhlich auf Deutsch ;)
It’s a text generator that predicts a likely series of words, based on the language patterns it learned from its training material.
Yes and no. While I do absolutely agree about the problem of reliability and false confidence, I do not agree on the general understanding of LLMs. You make it sound like it’s merely a predictor of likely words, like your phone keyboard may suggest words you usually use in sequence. But it is really not that simple. I disagree with the - especially here on Lemmy - very widespread “parrot” analogy in the sense that imho people have a very oversimplified idea of what large language models actually are. They don’t just count statistics of word sequences and then spit out the most likely combination. The amount of text they learn from is so big and their structure is complex enough that they can actually learn underlying patterns about WHY words are usually arranged in a certain pattern. That way, they can absolutely learn concepts and “skills” like logical reasoning, to a certain extent. The exact patterns they learned aren’t even fully understood, but obviously it does work. Even early GPT models learned to do arithmetic - there are publications that show that GPT was able to calculate arithmetic problems that were not in the training data, although it did make mistakes. Funnily, the mistakes seemed similar to mistakes humans usually make, like forgetting carryovers in additions or subtractions. Still, it had apparently learned the concept of arithmetics, just by seeing examples (and maybe explanations - we don’t really know). Modern LLMs absolutely capable of a certain level of logic. You can give ChatGPT a task it’s never seen before and chances are it can solve it. Even if it can’t - that doesn’t make its reasoning qualitatively different from how a human brain works. My argument is that humans learn how to think “logically” by seeing examples too - and they fail at logic all. the. damn. time. Go to a city center and ask people logic puzzles - see how many will be able to solve them correctly (and maybe compare the result to an LLM). I wouldn’t even be surprised if by now, even asking medical questions to doctors would, on average, yield worse results than a state-of-the-art LLM. I did a PhD in computer science a few years ago and I can tell you, I would probably rather trust the latest ChatGPT model on most questions regarding my field than myself. It has just become that incredibly good. I’m absolutely not saying it’s perfect, it still makes stupid mistakes and you have to be aware of that, but so do people. I have not seen a single convincing argument why the concept of logic or reasoning that humans have is fundamentally different from that of LLMs. Most people suck at logic. And most men in my life regularly spit out false knowledge with a confidence only a mediocre white man and an LLM can have. ;P
In all seriousness - LLMs lack sensorimotor interaction with the world, and even if we give them robot bodies, they will never know what it’s like to be human. In that sense, they will not replace us, and they will never be human. I would even agree that they will probably never be conscious (although of course we can’t be sure, especially since we haven’t understood consciousness yet in the first place). Their biases and their “way of thinking” will also most probably always be different from humans, and they will make different mistakes than humans make and we will have to learn about the ways they work different from human brains. But I do not agree that they cannot be “intelligent” in a logic/reasoning sense and that they are merely “statistical parrots”.
The various executives of the big AI vendors are obviously capitalising on that, stoking the hype with grand and utopic visions because they want to sell their product. It’s not that it’s useless. It’s that the utility is far less than the lofty promises made by people milking the hype for all it’s worth. And that little utility comes at a terrible social, economic and ecologic price.
Agreed. I’m fascinated by how far AI has become, but it just isn’t where marketers claim it is, and we can’t be sure it will get there anytime soon.
I don’t think we should dismiss the consequences our use of US infrastructure has. Worse yet, I don’t think we should dismiss the political dependencies that creates.
True. Political dependencies are a serious problem and I’m pretty sure they play a big role in why the US actually lets AI companies get away with all the shit that they do.
I’ve seen people trying to argue with experts because “ChatGPT said” because they genuinely do not understand that ChatGPT is a parrot, not an expert.
Yeah. The point is: ChatGPT will not make you an expert. ChatGPT may act as an expert and even provide accurate information, but citing its answers will not magically make you an expert yourself. That is something that needs to be hammered into people’s heads.
I’m not fighting it. I’m trying to pull it out of the pit that the current obsession with imitation has dug. When college students, the next generation or scientists, trades their scientific understanding for the convenience of high-tech parrots, that is the opposite of progress. It’s stagnation, fostered by those few people that are happily trading our future for their present profits.
Fair enough. We need to find ways to use AI as a useful tool, not a tool to make people lazy and stupid. Tbh, I think it will happen. It happened with Google as well. People used to use Google wrong all the time when it was still new. They clicked the first search result and believed absolutely everything it said. I’m kinda old, I remember that time. :P I’m pretty sure it will be similar with LLMs. By using them, we will learn their limitations and shortcomings, and many of us will learn the hard way. The marketing strategies of AI companies are NOT helpful with that.
We’ll need to understand the social dynamics of such technology to better prevent the disastrous side-effects. We’ll need to compare historical developments with present circumstances and plans to account for future developments. We’ll need to study the psychological effects of interacting with human-like machines to be able to correct course where needed.
I absolutely 100% couldn’t agree more. AI has already had a lot and probably will have even more impact on us, on other technologies like medicine, biotechnology, probably chemistry, material sciences, and loads of other key technologies. We will have a LOT of trouble keeping up with that acceleration of technological progress as a society. In a world where even the existence of the internet doesn’t seem to have been digested fully, AI has the potential to completely wreck everything. And certain people will do all they can to exploit that to gain power and money. And we will have to be faster than them.
In that sense, I agree that
Also, we really, really should spend less time thinking about whether we could and more about whether we should.
is probably right. The EU’s AI Act is a good first step, but the world is in this together, and with the current geopolitical situation I honestly don’t see us working together here for the good of humankind. So maybe trying to somehow decelerate technological progress really can be a reasonable way to take pressure out of that system. I’m not sure it’s possible though.
Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.
I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don’t use the not-actually-AI “AI” tool.
Just use it for pointless reasons. Burn tokens the way they want you to. Money is the only language they speak, and models are getting expensive.
What tf are tokens?
When you send a message to a chatbot, it cuts it up to little pieces made up of a few letters, assigns numbers to them, does math, and gives you back a bunch of other numbers that it translates back to pieces and puts together into a sentence.
You pay for the chatbot by the amount of little pieces in and little pieces out. The little pieces are the tokens.
I wonder if they make a fortune off engagement padding.
Oh definitely. The whole “reasoning” thing was just sending the answer back as a prompt a few times in different structures, and it was of course all billed
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.
This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.
Nothing is helpful until you need help. The fact that you think AI is helpful for you don’t have to force me to use AI. If you pay me $100k+ per year and you force me to use your tools to do my job why you even hired me ? To force this cult on me or to do the job ?
Honestly if they hired someone who refuses to use AI in 2026 it’s on them.
Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it’s literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don’t see good AI. It’s like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don’t. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
Since that was a lazy question I decided to be lazy and just copy paste it into Gemini. Enjoy! I have no idea what the point of this is!
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a single technology; it has been a massive umbrella term since the 1950s. Broadly, it means creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.
If LLMs are just one tiny branch on the tree, here is what the rest of the tree looks like:
Machine Learning (ML): This is the engine driving most modern AI. Instead of a human programmer writing strict "if/then" rules, we feed the computer massive amounts of data and let it figure out the rules itself. This is what powers your Netflix recommendations, credit card fraud detection, and the algorithm deciding what you see on social media. Computer Vision: Teaching computers to "see" and interpret the visual world. This is how self-driving cars identify stop signs versus pedestrians, how your phone unlocks when it sees your face, and how medical software spots anomalies in X-rays faster than human doctors. Robotics: The physical application of AI. This isn't just mechanical engineering; it is the software that allows a machine to navigate the unpredictable, physical world. This covers everything from the Roomba vacuuming your floor to automated factory arms and those creepy, dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics. Natural Language Processing (NLP): This is the branch focused on understanding and generating human language. LLMs live here, but so do older, simpler technologies like spellcheck, Google Translate, and the early versions of Siri or Alexa. Expert Systems & Rule-Based AI: This is the older, "classic" AI. It relies on a massive database of human knowledge programmed as logical rules. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997, it wasn't using an LLM; it was using raw computational power to calculate millions of possible moves and their outcomes based on strict rules. Predictive Analytics & Optimization: The invisible math running the modern world. This is AI used by logistics companies to find the absolute most efficient routes for delivery trucks, or by hedge funds to execute high-frequency stock trades based on market micro-fluctuations.I asked the question to demonstrate something. You didn’t want to participle in the discussion and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean the question is “lazy”
I didn’t provide you with an answer to your question?
I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.
But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It’s just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.
That’s good. It also means that a real job can’t be “done by AI”.
It’s another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.
It accelerates the most things that shouldn’t be done at all. Boilerplate code that’s written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.
That’s useful, one can’t do everything by hand.
Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one’s own life for like 20 years - that they can’t do. And that’s what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn’t matter.
I have a few examples of people replaced by AI.
Photoshop slop cheap ads on the streets and TV are mostly AI slop now.
Content creators, publishers, media, music industries are all heavily affected.
The company I know paid $2K for wireframe UX design instead of standard $10K UX + UI. UI part was done by AI ($8K in human labor was replaced by AI)
I know a few companies stuck with ancient software that have been paying salaries to generations of programmers, this software is being replaced by AI, quite fast too.
I know positions which are in essence “receive a fax and type it into the system” right now being replaced by AI.
This is neither pro- nor anti- AI stance. Saying that a chatbot will ultimately replace humans is lying — they need to justify trillions in valuations.
Saying that AI is not severely changing our society is ignorance and head in the sand tactics.
The majority of Internet traffic are bots. I’m terrified of the upcoming elections with all the deepfakes and bot campaigns.
Yes, cheap slop made by humans being made by generative models - that I can see too.
And when all UI design is the same squares-and-shadows sad thing, doing that with a generative model makes sense too.
Unoriginal tasks are being optimized.
That happens with every technology, nothing unexpected, if your expectations of the future were formed by philosophy and science fiction, and not specific courses in school or university or job experience.
A chatbot won’t replace humans making decisions or with roles in social hierarchy, it also won’t replace humans in anything inventive or artful. It can replace any human functioning as a detail in a mechanism.
Depends what you mean by “severely changing”, in some sense this is return to normalcy.
I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
On the contrary - the people who tell you AI doesn’t add any value and will disappear in a few years are either lying, dumb, or completely ignorant of what AI can already do.
I’m a software developer since the 90s, basically before the internet, we had some C books for reference and that’s it. I can tell you that I started last year to use copilot in vscode and some chatgpt on a web page, and it basically changed my world, and all my 50+ years old coworkers are amazed by what it can do really.
You are right it will not fade at all in software development.
Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.
An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.
In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).
LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).
Dumb people use their tools incorrectly. That’s all you’re describing.
I gave one example. In fact that’s one of the least bad examples. If that was the only problem with LLMs it wouldn’t really be that bad. But the actual reality is so much worse. But I was arguing to the point that the person I replied to made, which was about development. The problems I have with AI are not fixable without literally every government on earth taking a stand, which just will not happen.
Using LLMs for development is fantastic as long as you know how to use it, which is how it is for every tool.
The difference with LLMs and other tools is that anyone can use them easily and get incredible results……as long as you don’t look under the covers. The developers that use them well are getting results and code that are indistinguishable from code they’d write themselves.
The echo chamber on this site about AI is really quite something. Someone confidently told me Mythos probably didn’t exist and they were upvoted for it and I was downvoted for pointing out the existence of Project Glasswing.
Like, Mythos isn’t real? Fable has been out for like two months lmao
I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.
It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.
LLMs seem to be pretty bad at home improvement sort of questions in my experience. I suspect they don’t have a team of carpenters they use to RL the models, like they do for software engineers, etc
Software is easier because you can basically ‘inspect the house’ and the ‘home inspector’ via software.
Harder to do that with a house. Also a lot of different rules based on locality.
Reminder it doesn’t know anything.
It is just mimicking text it has been programmed for.
For it to be “good” at mimicking home improvement, it’s source needed to be full of home improvement talk. The best carpenters, plumbers, whatever aren’t on reddit, or wherever talking shop. They’re working, or making OSHA jokes at the bar.
How do people work? Are there ones born knowing how to use a hacksaw?
I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week!), but pretending that “AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
Corey Doctorow isn’t speaking to you, he’s speaking to the many, many people who have been fooled by the ai craze.
And often I wonder, how many people have been fooled, and how much of the enthusiasm and over the top fantasy is astroturfing by a few people incentivized to sway public opinion?
And how much of the doomerism is a campaign to keep the common man from using a revolutionary tool for, well, revolution, by alienating those most likely to do revolutionary things with it?
Once you look at the actual numbers for pollution, water usage, etc it becomes very clear that the issues are vastly overstated. So, why?
That’s one for the fooled side.
Yeah. I guess we’ll see.
EDIT: you should go on claude’s reddit and look at all of the tools people have built to keep companies and politicians accountable, to renegotiate billing, to improve their lives at the expense of capital. Or you can just go on thinking you’re right!
Fuck reddit but i have a friend who automated fooa requests with claude, sent foia requests to every county in the state and has all the tracking and everything automated. Only thing he needs to do is review the emails before they get sent. It’s amazing and he’s bring transparency to every corner of the state using ai.
Yeah I personally use it to analyze public data bases for fraud.
To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
Should they be? No. But that’s a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn’t change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
I think the comparison is acceptable with maybe a terminology clarification in the footnotes, because “AI” is the false term under which this current bullshit is being marketed.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI are so uneducated that they will probably neither understand the distinction to legitimate AI research, nor bother to read footnotes.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI
What does that mean? Transformers aren’t AI? What? I don’t think you understand this as much as you think you do.
Oh, has he had a change of heart? A few months ago he was being dragged on mastodon for telling everyone to stop complaining about AI.
link?
he’s been skeptical of at least the finance side of it since sept 2025: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27-econopocalypse-subprime-intelligence-e9a06136d109
I’m gonna go ahead and assume that Doctorow’s actual stance isn’t as idiotic as the title suggests.
