If someone creates a destroy-the-world button, is only the person who pressed it responsible for the destruction of the world? That’s an absurd example, of course, but the point is that you can’t just classify something as a “tool” and then leave all outcomes of the existence of that tool as a matter of personal responsibility, that’s just cessation of thought. You have to actually think about who is empowered by a tool and in what way. And if a “tool” largely and greatly empowers fakers, grifters, political actors with little respect for truth etc. and the value for most people is largely nil to negative, then I’d say the “tool” is very much part of the problem.
It seems weird to suggest that the supposed legitimacy of the AI hype bubble is caused by anything other than people with a lot of economic and political leverage using that leverage to will something that doesn’t really exist into existence. Which isn’t that hard given the people they need to convince of its existence are some of the gullible people on Earth, and they do have a product that, while not what they claim it is, does have the veneer of it being that. If a company’s shareholders are convinced that AI can replace many of the company’s workers (or are convinced that the other shareholders are convinced that it can), then the executives can fire thousands of people and it will just increase the shareholder value. Sure, it will sabotage the long-term health of company, but by that time the locust will have had their payday and moved on to the next grift.
Now of course, this sort of thing has been happening since long before LLMs and the like were a thing, but a key difference is that before, there’s been at least some connection between the executives’ and shareholders’ fortunes and the company actually doing something, given workers at least some leverage to gain and enforce their rights. But now the existence of AI allows them to keep up the pretence that workers have no leverage at all for a good while, so so much for workers’ rights. It’s not actually AI doing this of course, but the existence of a strategic weapon is still a problem even if the weapon is never deployed and even if it’s just a box of firecrackers and pinball machine parts. And that’s putting aside all the ways AI is being used as a tactical weapon, undermining education and democracy.
AI doesn’t have to be directed to make the world a worse place. That’s a choice made by people. There are tools that don’t have good applications (e.g. nukes), but AI certainly isn’t one of them. Blaming the tool when you should be blaming the people gives the people an out. Shall we ban hammers because they can be used as weapons?
You’re basically making a “if only people would just…” argument, but people are not going to “just”. There’s no world out there in which “AI” (again, using a pretty strict definition) exists, but there is no search results polluted to the brim with slopsites, idiots using AI as though it was a reliable source of information, automated propaganda, moguls trying to gaslight the world into thinking workers and artists have no leverage, deepfake porn, chatbots encouraging suicidal thoughts etc. etc. So you need to weigh the costs and the benefits. And the cost-benefit analysis of AI looks considerably different from the hammer’s.
Well, I say all that, but it’s not as though I believe the world can’t be made a better place. If we can set up society so that these bad behaviours aren’t incentivised to begin with, it would mitigate some of the worst problems associated with AI (though I would argue that such a society wouldn’t waste its resources on such a worthless application of the technology in the first place). But when is that going to happen, tomorrow? Worse yet, AI empowers the people who don’t want society to change in that way far more than it does the people who do. So until we finish fixing society with our hands tied to our backs, we’ll just have to suffer through all of AI’s problems, and for what? So you can feel smug about misunderstanding a sentence in a scientific paper, because you were in no position to determine whether the rephrased sentence an AI ejaculated accurately conveyed the information in the original sentence, because if you were, you wouldn’t have needed the sentence to be rephrased in the first place?
If you believe there’s no world in which the majority of people are thoughtful and well intentioned, I don’t think we’re on the same page regarding what would make the world a better place. AI, like all technology, enables people who exercise their agency. I’m saying “if only people would just” blame the actors instead of the technology we might be able to have the benefits of the technology and hold the actors accountable for the detriments they create. I understand your argument that there are always going to be bad people, but I believe in holding people accountable for their actions.
AI is a god damn programming package that the whole world has decided to flip out over when there’s only been like five niche applications for it. I don’t get it. Why do I have to lose a programming package because everyone - for no real reason - started blaming it for the reason they’re assholes to each other as if they hadn’t been jerks to each other before. It’s stupid.
Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn’t are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there’s not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there’s just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
AI is a god damn programming package
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
Why do I have to lose a programming package because everyone - for no real reason - started blaming it for the reason they’re assholes to each other as if they hadn’t been jerks to each other before. It’s stupid.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that’s all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase “personal responsibility” so you can just stop thinking about it. But that’s not good enough.
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data. There’s nothing “agentic” AI can do that isn’t done just as well by a generic pipeline – except perhaps ignore garbage information and interface with non-coders. If you’re being automated away, it was going to happen anyway.
And here we get to the crux of the matter…
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
Honestly I don’t understand what’s so hard about arguing for labor laws or demanding proper accounting in SEC filings or any of the other zillion things we should’ve been doing for the last fourty years, but if you’d rather act like fancy program ruined world I guess whatever man. I don’t think it’s gonna help anyone, but you do you.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what “AI” has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it’s responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
“Agentic” (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with that, I’m pretty sure I already made it clear that it’s not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
It’s not just that line, everything you’ve been saying suggests that’s what your view is. You’ve acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it’s the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn’t even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the “lulz” etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you’ll have to excuse me that I’m not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing? And how is executing a series of functions often dependent of previous output not a pipeline? Okay, whatever, we’re on the same page that AI doesn’t take jobs and is used as an excuse – that’s great.
despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it
No, I don’t think the problems should be tolerated.
we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy
Yes, this. Do this. No, it’s not easy, but it never has been because…
How is AI itself not part of the problem here? … Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed.
It has nothing to do with AI. Literally every problem “associated” with AI is just a pre-existing problem repackaged. They’re hiding behind an excuse and for reasons I do not understand you’re buying into it, making yourself look like a Luddite, and letting them claim to be on the side of historical progress. You and I both know it’s nonsense to let them claim that, but rather than be dismissive of the technology and critical of the people you’re blaming it:
But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve.
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon. AI has done very little in any direction. Aside from all the hype, the actual effect good or bad has been marginal. Something like 3% of job cuts occurred due to automation, and I’m not even sure if that’s lower or higher than on a normal year.
You want to complain about data centers, fine, but complain about political corruption and talk about how we shouldn’t centralize power in singular mayors rather than full consensus councils, or how we need multi-candidate ranked lottery voting systems with recall mechanisms, or how we should heavily tax political donations and political advertising and use a portion of those funds to provide the public with factual information campaign ran with a similar ranked lottery electorate consulting with technical experts, or how we should regulate or socialize utilities. – None of it’s easy, but if you want a world worth living in that’s the work you have to put in.
Screaming regulate AI leads to politicians creating internet ID laws and mass surveillance because you didn’t bother to build consensus about what you meant when you said regulate AI and politicians doing as they do took it upon themselves to reinterpret what you think you meant into something that they or their billionaire donors wanted.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing?
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
No, it’s not easy, …
That’s my whole point: if it’s not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let’s say you’re in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it’s easier to resolve by talking it out: when they’re unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon.
I don’t understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don’t give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it’s the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you’re not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that’s only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you’ve been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Screaming regulate AI
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
Why do I have to lose a programming package because everyone started blaming it
I like to imagine a 1950s oil baron saying something like this because laws say he can’t dump waste into the river. It’s very fun. It’s a fun world in my head.
If you believe there’s no world in which the majority of people are thoughtful
MAGA:
People who are pro pointing a gun to their head and pulling the trigger, but anti the bullet crushing their skull and killing them. Yeah, I’m sorry, I don’t believe in that world.
If someone creates a destroy-the-world button, is only the person who pressed it responsible for the destruction of the world? That’s an absurd example, of course, but the point is that you can’t just classify something as a “tool” and then leave all outcomes of the existence of that tool as a matter of personal responsibility, that’s just cessation of thought. You have to actually think about who is empowered by a tool and in what way. And if a “tool” largely and greatly empowers fakers, grifters, political actors with little respect for truth etc. and the value for most people is largely nil to negative, then I’d say the “tool” is very much part of the problem.
It seems weird to suggest that the supposed legitimacy of the AI hype bubble is caused by anything other than people with a lot of economic and political leverage using that leverage to will something that doesn’t really exist into existence. Which isn’t that hard given the people they need to convince of its existence are some of the gullible people on Earth, and they do have a product that, while not what they claim it is, does have the veneer of it being that. If a company’s shareholders are convinced that AI can replace many of the company’s workers (or are convinced that the other shareholders are convinced that it can), then the executives can fire thousands of people and it will just increase the shareholder value. Sure, it will sabotage the long-term health of company, but by that time the locust will have had their payday and moved on to the next grift.
Now of course, this sort of thing has been happening since long before LLMs and the like were a thing, but a key difference is that before, there’s been at least some connection between the executives’ and shareholders’ fortunes and the company actually doing something, given workers at least some leverage to gain and enforce their rights. But now the existence of AI allows them to keep up the pretence that workers have no leverage at all for a good while, so so much for workers’ rights. It’s not actually AI doing this of course, but the existence of a strategic weapon is still a problem even if the weapon is never deployed and even if it’s just a box of firecrackers and pinball machine parts. And that’s putting aside all the ways AI is being used as a tactical weapon, undermining education and democracy.
AI doesn’t have to be directed to make the world a worse place. That’s a choice made by people. There are tools that don’t have good applications (e.g. nukes), but AI certainly isn’t one of them. Blaming the tool when you should be blaming the people gives the people an out. Shall we ban hammers because they can be used as weapons?
You’re basically making a “if only people would just…” argument, but people are not going to “just”. There’s no world out there in which “AI” (again, using a pretty strict definition) exists, but there is no search results polluted to the brim with slopsites, idiots using AI as though it was a reliable source of information, automated propaganda, moguls trying to gaslight the world into thinking workers and artists have no leverage, deepfake porn, chatbots encouraging suicidal thoughts etc. etc. So you need to weigh the costs and the benefits. And the cost-benefit analysis of AI looks considerably different from the hammer’s.
Well, I say all that, but it’s not as though I believe the world can’t be made a better place. If we can set up society so that these bad behaviours aren’t incentivised to begin with, it would mitigate some of the worst problems associated with AI (though I would argue that such a society wouldn’t waste its resources on such a worthless application of the technology in the first place). But when is that going to happen, tomorrow? Worse yet, AI empowers the people who don’t want society to change in that way far more than it does the people who do. So until we finish fixing society with our hands tied to our backs, we’ll just have to suffer through all of AI’s problems, and for what? So you can feel smug about misunderstanding a sentence in a scientific paper, because you were in no position to determine whether the rephrased sentence an AI ejaculated accurately conveyed the information in the original sentence, because if you were, you wouldn’t have needed the sentence to be rephrased in the first place?
If you believe there’s no world in which the majority of people are thoughtful and well intentioned, I don’t think we’re on the same page regarding what would make the world a better place. AI, like all technology, enables people who exercise their agency. I’m saying “if only people would just” blame the actors instead of the technology we might be able to have the benefits of the technology and hold the actors accountable for the detriments they create. I understand your argument that there are always going to be bad people, but I believe in holding people accountable for their actions.
AI is a god damn programming package that the whole world has decided to flip out over when there’s only been like five niche applications for it. I don’t get it. Why do I have to lose a programming package because everyone - for no real reason - started blaming it for the reason they’re assholes to each other as if they hadn’t been jerks to each other before. It’s stupid.
Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn’t are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there’s not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there’s just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that’s all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase “personal responsibility” so you can just stop thinking about it. But that’s not good enough.
No, it literally is a programming package + some data. There’s nothing “agentic” AI can do that isn’t done just as well by a generic pipeline – except perhaps ignore garbage information and interface with non-coders. If you’re being automated away, it was going to happen anyway.
First of all let’s not act like my exasperation with the world’s stupidity is some sort of lapse in my judgement. I’m getting the ability find algorithms and debug faster to write better code, and occasionally asking it for terms I can search for to find information. That’s it. I’m not revealing some deep political bias you can use to ignore my underlying argument.
Honestly I don’t understand what’s so hard about arguing for labor laws or demanding proper accounting in SEC filings or any of the other zillion things we should’ve been doing for the last fourty years, but if you’d rather act like fancy program ruined world I guess whatever man. I don’t think it’s gonna help anyone, but you do you.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what “AI” has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it’s responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
“Agentic” (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with that, I’m pretty sure I already made it clear that it’s not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
It’s not just that line, everything you’ve been saying suggests that’s what your view is. You’ve acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it’s the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn’t even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the “lulz” etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you’ll have to excuse me that I’m not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
How does text prediction have nothing to do with programing? And how is executing a series of functions often dependent of previous output not a pipeline? Okay, whatever, we’re on the same page that AI doesn’t take jobs and is used as an excuse – that’s great.
No, I don’t think the problems should be tolerated.
Yes, this. Do this. No, it’s not easy, but it never has been because…
It has nothing to do with AI. Literally every problem “associated” with AI is just a pre-existing problem repackaged. They’re hiding behind an excuse and for reasons I do not understand you’re buying into it, making yourself look like a Luddite, and letting them claim to be on the side of historical progress. You and I both know it’s nonsense to let them claim that, but rather than be dismissive of the technology and critical of the people you’re blaming it:
Only if you buy into the idea that it’s something we have to move the world for. You claim you can see how little an effect it has had, but you simultaneously seem to think it’s a big bad demon. AI has done very little in any direction. Aside from all the hype, the actual effect good or bad has been marginal. Something like 3% of job cuts occurred due to automation, and I’m not even sure if that’s lower or higher than on a normal year.
You want to complain about data centers, fine, but complain about political corruption and talk about how we shouldn’t centralize power in singular mayors rather than full consensus councils, or how we need multi-candidate ranked lottery voting systems with recall mechanisms, or how we should heavily tax political donations and political advertising and use a portion of those funds to provide the public with factual information campaign ran with a similar ranked lottery electorate consulting with technical experts, or how we should regulate or socialize utilities. – None of it’s easy, but if you want a world worth living in that’s the work you have to put in.
Screaming regulate AI leads to politicians creating internet ID laws and mass surveillance because you didn’t bother to build consensus about what you meant when you said regulate AI and politicians doing as they do took it upon themselves to reinterpret what you think you meant into something that they or their billionaire donors wanted.
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
That’s my whole point: if it’s not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let’s say you’re in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it’s easier to resolve by talking it out: when they’re unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
I don’t understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don’t give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it’s the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you’re not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that’s only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you’ve been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
I like to imagine a 1950s oil baron saying something like this because laws say he can’t dump waste into the river. It’s very fun. It’s a fun world in my head.
MAGA:
People who are pro pointing a gun to their head and pulling the trigger, but anti the bullet crushing their skull and killing them. Yeah, I’m sorry, I don’t believe in that world.
I’m just waiting for when it becomes obvious that the owners of the compute used for AI models aren’t going to make the money from AI.