It’s perfectly ok to use a new tool to do your work faster, more efficiently, and with greater precision if these improvements are justified by the cost of the tool. But if that tool is a coal-fired, water hoarding, ophan crushing, billionaire-owned kleptobot, your results need to be better than pure gold to be worth the true cost of using it.
Yeah, but your compiler wasn’t made with massive copyright infringement, stealing much needed water and rampant corruption, was it?
“the kind of expectations i have is that people do their best and i expect people to understand what they are doing.”
my immediate response to some idiot thinking i accuse him of cheating because i voiced concerns over his methodologies: “look, if you want to drink mercury while writing code and dont see any problems with that, fine. go ahead. waste away your health. but at least have the decency of sitting under the venting hood and stop making it everyone elses problem.”
I don’t care about Linus, Stallman’s opinion is the interesting one.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI, you just write a sentence. Then it “creates” a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same, even if you always use the same model and prompt. Not to mention all of the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it. On top of this, all AI models were trained on unfathomable amounts of stolen information.
cognitively speaking
That’s not what the damn study says.
People who wrote an essay with an LLM did not show signs of having having written it themselves, on account of, they hadn’t. Just like I couldn’t tell you the remainder of a long division I put in a calculator, because it went straight to a mantissa. I didn’t lose the ability to to math. (At worst, I don’t wanna, now that I have a calculator.)
The only long-term aspect of this study was a dozen people coming back months later and switching sides. So even pretending it’s asking the right questions, the tabloid interpretation should expect to see the brain-only essayists fumble it and the LLM essayists sharper than ever. But that’s plainly not what happened.
They didn’t even measure essay quality. It was just about EEG activity, incidental recall, and self-reported degree of ownership. But that nerd shit doesn’t get clicks, so every fucking headline is like Does chatbot is brain damage?! or Permanent cyber-psychosis ten minutes!! or If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. It is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
Oh sorry, that last one was Plato arguing against the detrimental cognitive effect of books.
You constructed an entirely fictional argument about a study that you quoted. That’s not what I was referring to. It’s a pointless discussion though. None of these AI companies are financially sustainable (except for the shovel sellers, obviously).
Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y’all keep repeating, because I haven’t seen that shit. Every time I go searching for some dire evidence of dain bramage from spicy autocomplete, it comes back to one of three poorly-designed studies that fail to distinguish this new tool from any other tool and categorically do not match their pearl-clutching news coverage.
It’s a pointless discussion though.
This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense. You can’t make some damning claim, glibly dismiss an effort to explain you’re mistaken, and then gallop toward some other topic entirely. That’s working backwards from a conclusion and failing to update your beliefs.
No shit these companies are boned. Local models will survive and proliferate on their demonstrable merits. Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.
We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won’t give you a lobotomy.
Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y’all keep repeating, because I haven’t seen that shit.
This names a few. Also, I can speak from personal experience and from what other people using AI tell me. It does indeed negatively impact your ability do the thinking on your own. If you don’t feel that impact, maybe in your case there wasn’t much to lose in the first place :) If you “haven’t seen this shit” then maybe you should take off the blindfold.
This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense.
Not at all. It’s just another very relevant part of the argument. The stealing machine is power and money hungry af and it’s not being fed. It will die.
failing to update your beliefs.
Beliefs are unrelated. It’s the reality of these companies’ numbers. Show me at least ONE of them that isn’t selling hw and is profitable.
Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.
Were is this decentralized development you speak of? Also, training an AI to create porn is pretty different than one trained to do coding, writing, research, etc.
We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won’t give you a lobotomy.
Talking about facts as if you knew the future, lol. Is that way Coreweave is going down the drain? It won’t give you a lobotomy but it will make you dumber and also use any data you provide it.
That article mentions five papers, three of which are the exact poorly-designed studies I already referenced. The last one is literally the one you just dismissed.
The math exam one pretends that yanking away a trivializing tool for the home stretch of an exam renders people “less able”… instead of just surprised and unmotivated. We’d observe the same effect if some students had a calculator yanked away, without warning, for the last three questions. This is the most blatantly confounded study, and it does not stop articles from screaming ‘ten minutes with a chatbot will melt your brain!’
The cancer one says doctors had access to a tool that made them much better at detecting tumors, but then we took that away and hey look they got marginally worse at eyeballing the charts. Like that’s the important part of this story. People stopped practicing an expert ability, for months, and got slightly worse at it! How unique! Naturally the article summarizes this small and temporary dip by saying doctors “lost their ability to detect cancer independently.” Like the devil sucked it out their ear.
The other two are interesting but disagree with each other on the part that matters. The fake-news study says AI helps people spot bullshit (positive, surprising) without them learning that skill independently (neutral) but leaves them feeling confident they have (genuinely terrible). Except the data workers survey says users don’t feel like they’re thinking critically when using an LLM, and lacked confidence in the model’s output. You could pick at the assumption 'the model is usually right except in my area of expertise, but… that’s pretty god-damn far from the article’s claim that “their critical thinking skills deteriorated.” That’s simply not what it fucking says.
The stealing machine
Fuck copyright.
Beliefs are unrelated.
You believe the chatbot is rotting people’s brains despite the people doing the studies explicitly telling you otherwise. Pretending I was referring to these doomed companies, immediately after calling that tangent unrelated, is why the pivot is bad faith. You’re suddenly talking about something else, therefore my ongoing disagreement must also be a defense of that, somehow. It’s “so you hate waffles.”
Your read on the whole thing is so skewed that I see no point in continuing the conversation. You want to believe that the stealing machine that is fucking up people, the world and the entire economy is good. Fine, it’s stupid but you’re free to be as stupid as you want. It’s still economically a sinkhole and it will die. So have fun while it lasts I guess.
If this whole technology is so wonderful, why hasn’t a single non-hw company been able to make a profit? And what will happen once they have to pay for all of the information they used? Food for thought, my genius friend.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
RNG is pseudorandom. Every computer program is deterministic in some sense, even if the seed is obfuscated or dependent on ephermal environment variables. Being able to predict the output is very different from determinism.
But that’s a static algorithm. It will always “optimize” the code the same way. Hence, it IS deterministic by definition. Maybe you should look up what the word means.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
And he’s been 100% consistent with that since the start.
With an undercurrent of being polite but firm toward mistakes from newbies, while occasionally telling oldheads ‘You should fucking know better!’
I guess Linus doesn’t care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I’m not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it’s environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.
This isn’t an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.
I say fuck off with that noise, I don’t have e to accept anything.
as a pro-AI, anti-cloud nerd? All of these problems disappear when we address the real problem of Capitalism.
there are abandoned tech certs for building datacenters that produce 110% of their own electricity. these are distinct from the data mines these useless nerds want to build.
without capital, the surveillance state dies.
intellectual property is a capitalist myth invented to hold us back and induce rents, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
oh no, you fired me from a job I’d rather not have to do and I still get to survive because we slew capitalism? ahhh, how will I cope with the blow to my identity?
there are abandoned tech certs for building datacenters that produce 110% of their own electricity.
Do you have any sources for this I could read?
search for CompTIA “GreenIT” and you may find something.
The CompTIA Green IT certification ensures knowledge and skills necessary to implement environmentally sound techniques within an organization’s IT infrastructure. The certification enhances existing IT credentials to incorporate emerging technologies that shape the global green IT industry.
As far as I can tell, this is just a (defunct) set of standards and practices for companies to follow if they want to be environmentally friendly. It doesn’t speak at all to the engineering and economic problem of how to build megawatt-scale data centers that produce more energy than they consume.
Can wildlife live in the datacenters? Do forests grow on their roofs? The problem is human overshoot.
No, no and no. The two first do not support the third. Environmental demand is not independent of the mode of production.
What are you producing lol?
I do not see why information about my labour and its products is useful for anything. I am at least not afflicting the internet with latent ecofascism in my comments. That would surely be a waste of energy and natural resources you supposedly care so much about…
Lol. There’s not gonna be any humans if we kill everything else, my friend.
I mean we all know that driving combustion engine cars is an absolutely terrible idea and incredibly inefficient from both a physics and a societal viewpoint. Yet, even most people that accept that fact don’t go around breaking up contact with their families or boycotting any business that uses ICE cars.
Sometimes we can be loud about the terrible impacts of a technology and demand stricter regulation while also leveraging the benefits ourselves. Maybe we can do a little bit ourselves. Like not owning a car or at least an EV. Or by being considerate about token use and using smaller or even local models for the lighter tasks.
No one driving a car today was alive when the gasoline powered car was invented, and none of the people who were were able to anticipate the terrible consequences of mass adoption of the technology.
The people driving cars today are doing so because they were born into a society that had already completely reorganized itself around cars, and that all but requires the ownership of a car to participate in that society. Meanwhile EVs have been prohibitively expensive to own for the majority of people (although that’s finally changing) and so most people who wanted an alternative did not have one available.
Contrast that situation with AI where the terrible consequences are immediately obvious, cheap alternatives already exist and have for centuries, and the “benefits” of using AI are only marginal at best and only in some niche circumstances.
I already own an EV. And there definitely are people who are very vocal about the issues with ICE engine cars. Personally, I’d rather we go back to smaller communities within biking distance, but that’s just me.
Ethics of using AI are different than the efficacy of using AI. Both are included in Impact of using AI, but some people need to tease the two apart.
If Linux kernel isnt using AI, the hackers certainly will. Moreover there are ethically trained models as well.
(Doing a whatabout ism, couldn’t find a good analogy) Wrt environmental impact, I don’t see an outrage against eating red meat, over fishing, fast fashion to be as prominent despite their well studied negative impact. Part of it is because they are culturally tied or impossible to escape. AI has become like that for most coding tasks specially around security.
ethically trained models
Are there “ethical” models for people who believe the mechanization of creativity is an attack on human dignity?
Let’s not perfection be the enemy or progress. See my examples. Caring about climate can be taken to arbitrary lengths as well. Are you eating red meat? No? Are you vegan? No? Are you eating sustainably grown food?
The depth to which one can argue are endless. IMO, ethical models are a great first step. They change the equation and give some agency to people. Would you rather homestead or install rooftop solar offset your state’s goal heavy electricity? It’s a continuum and having choices pushes the entire frontier forwards
Also llms are built on plagiarism. If you use llms, you are a plagiarist.
Edit: ah, you already mentioned it. Oh well.
Intellectual property is an imperialist tool for exploitation and oppression. I see you are a fanatic zealot defending it. And you think we should just accept that?
BTW most tokens today are sold in China and mostly and increasingly produced with nuclear or renewable energy. China is also the country with the most, fastest and most sensible regulations on AI. You’re blaming the ills of neoliberal capitalism on AI.
Therefor you are shielding capitalism from critique, and are preventing any sensible regulation on AI and any changes to the system that actually leads to our downfall. You people clearly have given up belief in democracy or revolution and just accept that this helpless and brainless zealotry is the only thing you can do now. Preach hate against your common man instead of the oppressors that make the decisions about how AI is used. So if you want to talk ethics, sniff your own butt first.
Is that really all you got from that? AI is stealing people’s art, their video games, music, etc. I’m not talking about large companies. I’m talking about Joe down the street who’s spent the last 4 years making a game, just to have an AI try to rip a slop version of his game 2 days after he released it.
I don’t give a shit about Microsoft, or any other corporation for that matter, and the fact that you came in here with this aggressive long ass rant reply to me without even so much as asking a clarifying question says more about you than it does me.
A sob story about the poor widdle smol bean petit bourgeois, making a proprietary closed source game to rent seek off of.
Why should I care about this class enemy?
You class traitors never care about actual working class people.
Dude, this isn’t a story about a closed source game dingus. Have you ever even tried to make a game? Most games can be decompiled or reverse engineered pretty easily. And as long as we live in a capitalist society, you have to play the game, even if you don’t want too.
Dunno why you come in here with comments like that…oh, a .ml account that explains it. Can’t even engage with people in good faith. Do you seriously go around calling people class traitors everywhere you go? Bcz that ain’t going to make you any friends. I am about as far left as it gets, so I find it funny that you are calling me a class traitor.
I am basically an anarchist in my political views, or a socialist, so, yeah, super funny to me to be calling me a class traitor.
Seriously? Joe down the street? Lol. That’s a myth. Poor joe down the street that this despicable Linus is trampling on! He was going to make a living with his indie game! Oh the humanity! Hahaha
It’s not a myth. It’s a huge issue people having been dealing with in the Indie dev space, which you would know if you were a game developer. Anyway, I’m done here. You’re either a bot, or an extremely unpleasant person, and I don’t have the mental energy to engage with either today.
bot
Scratch a copyright advocate, and a dehumanizer bleeds.
What are you even trying to say? I am not advocating for copyright, maybe ask questions first instead of calling people names. Man, I am so tired of this space always being filled with people shitting on eachother for not being the correct type of leftist, or not far enough left.
I am basically an anarchist in my political views, or a socialist
You’re not being shit on for being the wrong kind of leftist, you’re being shit on for thinking vaguely vibing with progressive politics makes you a leftist. You are a capitalist defending copyright from a capitalist perspective.
deleted by creator
Yeah, former…fuck off. Stop replying to me or I will block you.
Go look at their post history, then block them anyway :) Your Lemmy experience gets substantially better after you block a couple dozen trolls.
I’ve thought since the beginning of all of this that the biggest mistake was calling all of these LLMs and other tools that they smashed together “AI”. It’s misleading and ruins the reputation of all of the tools. If someone had made a coding tool that ONLY did what “AI” does with coding, no one would give a shit. But now because an LLM spelled “Strawberry” with too many “r’s” well that means it’s all slop and it’s all shit.
As for the people throwing shade for ethics, EVERYONE breaks their ethics for consumption and EVERYONE has their justifications. I’m not saying that environmental issues aren’t important, they very much are, but giving others shit for their choices when half of your clothing and your phone partly relies on slave labor and stripping of the environment weakens your attempt. It’s easy to sit on a high horse and judge others for their use of AI. It’s much more difficult to understand the nuances of why they do. Just like you would want someone else to try to understand the nuances of why your shoes cost $150 and the 9 year old who made them was only paid 2 cents.
The point that I’m trying to make here, is that you can complain about AI without shitting on others.
Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
Linus become like one of the boomers excited by some dumb ai slop on Facebook
But worse he doesn’t care about how unethical is the present ai
I lost respect for this guy
I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.
The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.
The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?
He doesn’t get it… Have the big corpo-shilling libertarians rotted his brain?
Like, imagine if using “AI” consisted of whatever big corpo SaaS you subscribe to sending your prompt off to someone to work on then send the result back to you. Isn’t that an idiotic dependency to have? And why the fuck even go through the middleman? Oh they have the “best workers?” Fuck that. Nvidia makes the best cards, but you don’t see me buying from them.
Do people like Linus not realise how silly it is to offload your work to some middleman service that just steals work from people who do not consent to sharing their labour? Who are desperately throwing insane, GDP-level boatloads of cash at it this unknown technology in the hopes that they’ll somehow get people hooked on their particular chatbot?
The intentions of these companies are not good. Their entire valuation is not based on being a “force multiplier” or whatever bullshit, but on being able to threaten or fire workers if they don’t slot themselves into the newest enunciation of hype-based capital.
Anything you do to willingly boost or massage these corporate services is enabling actually vile companies to continue puffing air into their stupid pointless bubble until it bursts and the next generation has to eat tuna helper sans tuna just to be able to afford to live.
Does Linus support steaming artwork and a fascist surveillance state? Because using and supporting and entrenching the technology use is exactly that.
Weird, i disagree with Linus.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it “as a tool”. Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.
Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).
A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.
Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.
This exactly what I was thinking. This doesn’t even mention the ramification of AI outside the digital space such the environmental costs, the replacement of labor and the complete disregard of copyright or even preservation. I understand people can use many things as a “tool” but when the tools cause some much untold harms as a side effect, is it truly just a tool? It’s something used at the expense of another. I know there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but AI is one of those things you could personally avoid if you wanted to. One of the things you technically shouldn’t be forced to use. The fact that it is pushed everywhere is so you devalue everything else along with it. For me, it started as being anti-AI in terms of art and academics alone but it has evolved to being anti-AI in general.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction
I totally agree. I’m watching people lose their drive to create and it’s so sad. They’re getting high off the satisfaction of “creating” without the work.
…and then they lose access to their wündertool and they can’t do anything.
These things are certainly made addictive by design, like TikTok, YouTube, and modern social media.
And even if the Internet itself is useful, these addictive-by-design stuff is so harmful that it is likely that the net effect is negative.
Is Google Maps also an addiction? I’m entirely certain it’s reduced or even eliminated peoples ability to navigate to places by memory, eye or even the stars.
Fucking Socrates was against writing, because people would become lazy and not remember stuff and not discuss stuff and not listen, because they could just read it.
It is a fucking tool, because every person gets to decide how it’s used. You see lazy idiots use AI without knowledge or skill, and then assume the problem is AI, instead of the people. These people copy pasted Stack Overflow before, they didn’t change.
Why remove a tool from everyone, just because some idiots exist?
Because the “tool” is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?
Also if “only” 99% of people use the autocomplete bot for nefarious/harmful uses, i fully believe the 1% should be deprived of the technology for the betterment of society. Id rather wait an extra 10 years for (insert pro ai talking point here) than let it continue to fuck every aspect of society including health, the economy, and entertainment.
I think that percentage could get as high as 33% “good actors” and 66% ignorant usage and still be valid.
All ai users are bastards, or something (obviously excluding high level STEM research, but even that is kinda sketchy; see mathematics atm)
Because the “tool” is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?
Pivoting to other complaints entirely is not a sincere argument. You made a claim - someone countered it - you don’t get to pick another argument and maintain the same conclusion. That’s pretense.
agreed, a tool that you have to actively fight to do something well is a garbage tool. it’s like trying to cut some chicken meat with a knife that’s magnetically drawn to living beings. You can make some nice diced chicken with it, but it is way more likely that you’ll slip up and cut off your finger than with an actual knife.
regardless of the original intention, the purpose of generative “AI” is to become a manager that’s out of touch with the actual creation process, so at best no one will know how something works, at worst no one will be able to fix it if it breaks.
The same argument can be made about calculators.
A calculator isn’t a sycophant text extruder offered by megacorps via predatory tactics and doesn’t require half a little of water to operate last time I checked
A calculator that produces incorrect output from some input is broken. An LLM that produces broken code from a precise description is working as advertised.
You could say the same about a compiler
Sure, but, like, you wouldn’t.
Linus friggin’ Torvalds just did.
I have it create things for me that I would otherwise never have. I wanted an app for dream tracking. They were either pay walled, didn’t have the features I wanted, or both. Ai created what I wanted in a weekend. That’s just one example. I’ve created many single use apps as well.
If I’m at a takeaway store I take a photo of the board and it makes me an interactive menu that totals the price of what everyone wants and let’s us browse without trying to see the board and get in people’s way.
I don’t expect anyone else to use these. I don’t expect anyone else to want to use them. Though they’re welcome to. But if I can have a thing create exactly what I want and use it why not?
“but what if it has a bug and you lose a year of journals”. Well it created me manual timestamped backups as well as automatic timestamped backups to oauth Dropbox in a dedicated folder without the app having access to the rest of my Dropbox. It could crash everything and I would have every single thing safe in 2 places up to the most recent entry. And they’re just text files. I could take them anywhere if AI disappeared and the app broke tomorrow. I could just continue writing in notepad in the worst case until I found something else. But the app looks nicer and does interesting things.
The alternative to this isn’t me learning to code and spending months creating them. The alternative is them never existing.
I think AI is a tool but very advanced tool. AI is great tool but very unpredictable in many cases. I think it should be used because it makes coding more effective but as you say it kill every fun in coding. As Linus said tool is not important if code is great. If you used AI and its good then why not. Sometimes you can write worse code then AI. But on other side yes it can be hard for repository owners when they must reject tons of shit code created with AI. So it have advantages and disadvantages and when do you want some fun (or maybe some security stuff) don’t use it.
An unpredictable tool is a useless tool. A hammer does what it says it will: apply force at the head. AI straight up lies, is objectively wrong, or doesnt work. Thats a garbage tool.
Eventually youre going to ask it to do something you dont know how to do, and you wont be able to fact check it. Thats when the harm happens (or just mild inconvenience, but in my professional case, harm).
If the linux kernel breaks due to a bug introduced by AI or built on a pile of code no one truly understands, we’re set back anyways. Better to avoid that and make sure all code is human written/understood
Early compilers sucked, and still beat using raw assembly.
How does this calculus work if AI finds a bug introduced by humans?
Yes its hard to work with unpredictable tool but not every AI is completely unpredictable, it can be only bad prompt or stupid model or something similar but that is problem for people who use AI (or use AI incorrectly). If you want use AI you must force AI to do what you want and this is part of doing things with AI. If you don’t want this you shouldnt use AI.
I think its not “AI is stupid shit” or “AI is awesome, it can do things faster”. Its something between. For some case is AI good like for brainstorming but for others not like psychology but this is very questionable…
I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.
I like the car analogy. I never had a car, and the last time I called to use one, I had had eye surgery and needed to get home.
There are many aspects of the analogy that match quite well:
- some types of motor vehicles like ambulances and trucks are clearly useful but most uses are not
- cars have a massive negative environmental impact (220 grams of CO2 per every kilometer, not to speak of toxic air pollution, photochemical smog, and particulate matter that appears to cause dementia)
- especially in cities, car feel much faster than they effectively are
- cars destroy cities and walkable communities, to such a degree that European cities like Paris come to new life after restricting cars
- cars are extremely convenient, such that they become an addiction quickly, and after a while you don’t even believe you can’t walk two miles on your feet. You even lose your sense of walking distances.
- cars massively increase the daily distance you travel, because of Marchetti’s constant (humans have a time budget of one hour travel a day), which changes your whole daily routines, leads to more distant work places, urban sprawl in housing, and after a while you are really physically dependent on them
- using cars is bad for your own health because it leads to lack of exercise, which leads to multiple common and deadly diseases
- cars do actually cost a lot of money which is sucked up by a corrupt industry and even more corrupt fossil fuel producers
The problem with “LLM requires skill to use correctly.” is that LLM’s are not being sold as a skill but rather the end of skill.
marketing departments have always lied
That is true but does not pertain to what I wrote.
To be more precise, LLMs’ present valuation in the market is not based on their being a skill so much as the end of skill.
Im not saying ai economy wont crash or anything like that, im just saying it’s a new tool that most people will use incorrectly just like they use old tools incorrectly too. We can still recognize correct uses.
Not really true.
LLM valuation in the market is aimed at several things, making unskilled people appear skilled is the smallest of them.
The most valuable position in the market right now is as a substitute of search enginesm
The second most valuable position in the market is as a tool to speed up work for already skilled people.
And I would argue that the third most valuable position in the market is a bot tool to substitute human iteration.
Unskilled people doing slop might be the most visible face of AI as it’s very annoying but it’s a minority of it’s market, just a very loud minority.
The most valuable position in the market right now is as a substitute of search enginesm
The second most valuable position in the market is as a tool to speed up work for already skilled people.
I perceive them as having equal value. In each case the technology is forced on users in a top-down way and results in worse outcomes.
I don’t expect you’ll agree; that’s not the same as what I wrote being “Not really true.”
I partially agree. If forced by stupid management results would clearly be worse.
Also people using LLM as search engines have a lot to do with internet entshitification. Surfing the web have become so obnoxious that asking an LLM the answer to something is easier.
This have two obvious conclusions from my point of view. First is that the best scenario would be a not entshitified internet. Second is that when LLMs, specially the big ones owned by big companies, get their dose of entshitification, users will be back on square one of not having a good way of extracting information out of this massive sea of information that we have built and which should be much easier to navigate.
Pretty good analogy because health damage from cars don’t just come from accidents, which are terrible and tragically visible, but from pollution which is a lot less visible yet kills even more.
That specifically might not on its own, but there are also a lot of other factors that definitely mean responsible people don’t drive. Even local LLMs map neatly onto EVs - they’re not as polluting day to day, but still require plenty of environmental damage to be built.
