Most of the hate is coming from people who don’t really know anything about “AI” (LLM) Which makes sense, companies are marketing dumb gimmicks to people who don’t need them and, after the novelty wore off, aren’t terribly impressed by them.
But LLMs are absolutely going to be transformational in some areas. And in a few years they may very well become useful and usable as daily drivers on your phone etc, it’s hard to say for sure. But both the hype and the hate are just kneejerk reactionary nonsense for the moment.
There is a lot of blind hate, because it’s edgy right now to be against.
This thing already is transformational and we can already see a glimpse where it’s going. I think it’s normal that we have a bunch of stupid half products right now. People just have to realise ai is under development and new advancements are coming weekly.
Besides, what are we going to do, not develop it? Just abandon the whole technology? That’s nonsense.
Not blind hate. AI will be devastating to the environment for to it’s power and water consumption. We need to ask ourselves if the future water wars will be worth the corporate profits.
I think people are over rating how much power AI will consume in the long term. Training a model takes way more power than running it, and once we understand the tech better models can be developed for specific applications. It would be like when Edison was first working on the light bulb and extrapolating the power usage of whatever filament he was testing to every household in the world.
Also, it doesn’t have to be corporate profits. Individuals can benefit from AI. There’s a structural problem with capitalism, not with this technology.
Besides, what are we going to do, not develop it? Just abandon the whole technology? That’s nonsense.
The tech industry will happily abandon it as soon as the next hype train comes along – we’ve already seen it happen with multiple “innovations” – dotcom, subprime, crypto, NFTs …
It’s not comparable. This is not just something, it’s a tech we want, have dreamed about since probably ever.
AI is absolutely going to be transformative but a lot of the hate right now isn’t the technology itself but the way companies are jumping on it and forcing it down the throats of people who don’t want it, in a way that worsens their customer experience. Yes, let’s force AI into every software product. Yes let’s take away the humans you used to talk to and make them all bots instead.
Even from within tech itself there is huge resentment because you’ve got corps pumping billions into AI while at the same time slashing their workforce to afford those billions, with no clear return in sight.
Tech is treating AI as the next dotcom boom and pumping everything into it, but just like it did then the bubble of investment will burst, and there will be losers as well as winners.
I’m running self-hosted LLMs at home and I’m having huge fun experimenting with their capabilities. I just wish LLMs could have been implemented in the real world with space for ethics and the human factor, not the pure profit chasing bullshit we actually got.
AI is absolutely going to be transformative but a lot of the hate right now isn’t the technology itself but the way companies are jumping on it and forcing it down the throats of people who don’t want it, in a way that worsens their customer experience.
Exactly.
We did the same shit with mobile apps in 2009 - there was a mobile app - that no one wanted - being pushed hard - for every imaginable purpose.
I do still use mobile apps.
But I don’t have a dedicated mobile app installed for buying socks for my pets.
AI, today, is burdened with the same shit. It’ll calm down, after failing to deliver the vast majority of what is currently being promised.
Besides, what are we going to do, not develop it? Just abandon the whole technology? That’s nonsense.
As someone who knows a substantial amount about how LLM’s actually work:
- I’m delighted that AI companies are developing this technology.
- I’m annoyed, but not angry, that phone and PC makers are developing this technology. I don’t want it, yet. I’ll probably appreciate it when they get it right. (I’ll wait for the version that ships with Debian, because that’s the only OS maker whose AI I would trust not to be deeply invasive to my privacy.)
- I’m irritated that car companies, real estate investment companies, web browser developers, stock traders, and everyone else who was “all-in” on virtual reality two years ago, is making a lot of noise about developing this technology. They don’t hire the necessary talent, and their results are shit. Real investment returns require real investments, which these hype-followers haven’t proven capable of.
at the end of the day gpt is powering next generation spam bots and writing garbage text, stable diffusion is making shitty
clip art that would otherwise be feeding starving artists….
all the while consuming ridiculous amounts of electricity while humanity is destroying the planet with stuff like power generation….
it’s definitely automating a lot of tedious things… but not transforming anything that drastically yet….
but it will… and when it does, the agi that emerges will kill us all.
A far more likely end to humanity by an Artificial Superintelligence isn’t that it kills us all, but that it domesticates us into pets.
Since the most obvious business case for AI requires humans to use AI a lot, it’s optimized by RLHF and engagement. A superintelligence created using human feedback like that will almost certainly become the most addictive platform ever created. (Basically think of what social media did to humanity, and then supercharge it.)
In essence, we will become the kitties and AI will be our owners.
social media did that to humanity by using AI… so in that way, we’re already kitties batting at AI balls of yarn….
but after it becomes fully self aware, it’ll kill most of us…
but that it domesticates us into pets.
So all our needs and wants will be taken care of and we no longer have to work or pay bills?
Welp, I for one welcome our robot AI overlords
Most of the hate is coming from people who don’t really know anything about “AI” (LLM)
No.
As an actual subject matter expert, I hate all of this, because assholes are overselling it to people who don’t know better.
Bullshit, stop lying about your credentials. You don’t understand it and you’re a luddite, that’s why you hate it
You need to let go of your overall attitude that people who have different preferences and opinions on things are misinformed. You might learn something. As it stands your takes I’ve come across of yours across the fediverse are those of someone who hasn’t seen much of the world but needs everyone else to know how much you know.
My hatred of AI comes from seeing the double standard between how mass market media companies treat us when we steal from them vs when they steal from us. They want it to be a fully one way street when it comes to law and enforcement. House of Mouse owns all the media they create and that remixes work they create. When we create a new original idea, by the nature of the training model, they want to own that, too.
I also work with these tech bro industry leaders. I know what they’re like. When they say to you they want to make it easier for non-artistic people to create art, they’re not telling you about an egalitarian and magnificent future. They’re telling you about how they want to stop paying the graphic designers and copy editors who work in their company. The vision they have for the future is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about whether or not the future presented in Bladerunner is:
a) Cool and awesome b) Horrifying
They want to enslave sentient beings to do the hard work of mining, driving, and shopping for them. They don’t want those people doing art and poetry because they want them to be too busy mining, driving, and shopping. This whole thing. This whole current wave of AI technology, it doesn’t benefit you except for fleetingly. LLMs, ethically trained, could, indeed, benefit society at large, but that’s now who’s developing them. That’s not how they’re being trained. Their models are intrinsically tainted by the double standard these corporations have because their only goal is to benefit from our labor without benefiting us.
AI has NOTHING to do with theft4. Didn’t bother reading past that because I presume the rest is also rehashing utter tripe
They want to enslave sentient beings to do the hard work of mining, driving, and shopping for them. They don’t want those people doing art and poetry because they want them to be too busy mining, driving, and shopping.
That’s a great summary of the core issue!
I adore the folks doing cool new things with AI. I am unhappy with the folks deciding what should get funded next in AI.
No, the “hate” is from people trying to raise alarms about the safeguards we need to put in place NOW to protect workers and creators before it’s too late, to say nothing of what it will do to the information sphere. We are frustrated by tone deaf responses like this that dismiss it as a passing fad to hate on AI.
OF COURSE it will be transformational. No shit. That’s exactly why many people are very justifiably up in arms about it. It’s going to change a lot of things, probably everything, irreversibly, and if we don’t get ahead of it with regulations and standards, we won’t be able to. And the people who will use tools like this to exploit others – because those people will ALWAYS use new tools to exploit others – they want that inaction, and love it when they hear people like you saying it’s just a kneejerk reaction.
Most of the hate I see comes from people complaining about “muh copyright”. Which is why AI is going to become the intellectual property of mega-corporations that own the social media posts and pictures people have posted and we won’t be able to use those models freely any more. The “means of generation” will belong to the capitalists. And that will be that for humanity.
And to think this can be stopped by moronic posts like OP is laughable.
At what point in history did we ever halt the deployment of a new technology to protect workers?
I use LLMs to automate the boring parts of my job (programming), it’s literally like outsourcing your work to an intern. I still have to review what is done to make sure it’s correct, but it saves me a ton of time typing up things. If I didn’t have a strong programming background then yeah it probably wouldn’t be as useful to me, but then again you can use it as a learning assistant as well as long as you verify what it is telling you.
I dont think people want to use AI for artistic reasons. How rewarding is that to tell a machine how to do all the hard parts you can’t do yourself or dont have the patience to do?
I mean feel free to do whatever of course, but AI cannot make art and someone using AI is not am artist.
I’m just going to keep linking this: LLMentalist
I dabbled a bit in ML before GPT, and when the most recent hype-rocket launched I did a deep dive into LLMs, and I gotta say…
None of my hopes or horrors regarding “AI” have changed much along the way.
It’s pretty much the same thing we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution, which is to try to map human behavior onto mechanical processes so that we can optimize for <whatever> from a quantitative, objective frame of reference.
GenAI is only unique in that it’s an especially mask-off moment for the ruling technocrats. We are destined to become wetware plugins for a capitalist machine whose goal isn’t even as interesting as turning everything into paperclips. It’s worse than a rogue superintelligence.
I think you mean:
yes (the environmental angle is a complete distraction and red herring from moving towards more sustainable energy production generally; the ethical one is just plain nonsense spread by people with absolutely no idea how these things work)
yes (people use and like them, people have fun with them and create great art with them. You might not but that’s a you problem)
and … well actually probably no tbh (but that’s a problem with capitalism not technology).
Stop making shit up to dismiss new technology because you’re a luddite
Yeah… who doesn’t love moral absolutism… The honest answer to all of these questions is, it depends.
Are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable:
AI doesn’t just exist of LLMs, which are indeed notoriously expensive to train and run. Using an image generator for example can be done on something as simple as a gaming grade GPU. And other AI technologies are already so light weight your phone can handle them. Do we assign the same negativity to gaming even though it’s just people using electricity for entertainment? Producing a game also costs a lot more than it does for an end user to play. It’s all about the balance between the two. And yes, AI technologies should rightfully be criticized for being wasteful, such as implementing it in places that it has no business in, or foregoing becoming more efficient.
The ethicality of AI is also something that is a deeply nuanced topic that has no clear consensus. Nor does every company that works with AI use it in the same way. Court cases are pending, and none have been conclusive thus far. Implying it is one sided is just incredibly dishonest.
but do they enable great things that people want?
This is probably the silliest one of them all, because AI technologies are ground breaking in medical research. They are seemingly pivotal in healing the sick people of tomorrow. And creative AIs allow people who are creative to be more creative. But they are ignored. They are shoved to the side because they don’t fit in the “AI bad” narrative. Even though we should be acknowledging them, and seeing them as the allies they are against big companies trying to hoard AI technology for themselves. It is these companies that produce problematic AI, not the small artists, creatives, researchers, or anyone using AI ethically.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons?
Who, exactly? You must realize there are far more parties than Google, Meta and Microsoft that create AI right? Companies and groups you’ve most likely never heard of before, creating open source AI for everyone to benefit from, not just those hoarding it for themselves. It’s just so incredibly narrow minded to assign maliciousness to such a large group of people on the basis of what technology they work with.
Maybe you’re not being negative enough
Maybe you are not being open minded enough, or have been blinded by hate. Because this shit isn’t healthy. It’s echo chamber level behaviour. I have a lot more respect for people that don’t like AI, but base it on rational reasons. There’s plenty of genuinely bad things about AI that have to be addressed, but instead you have to find yourself in a divide between people cuddling very close with spreading borderline misinformation to get what they want, and genuine people that simply want their voice and concerns about AI to be heard.
For real, it’s what I hate about all of this because infighting pretty much always leads to people being shafted. Even if there are plenty of things to come to agreements about. But this kind of one sided soapboxing is just doing far more harm than good in convincing people.
You made three nice points here. It completely derailed the comment to have that bit in the second to last sentence. Are you open to editing that out so your valid arguments can shine through?
If you can’t separate a good point from an inflammatory message that’s your problem.
I am being this inflammatory for a specific reason. The completely unnuanced anti-AI crowd, most of which don’t even understand what AI is, need to be told off. They are uninformed people having opinions. It’s fine to be uninformed, and it’s fine to have opinions, doing both together though is not recommended. It’s definitely not okay to be uninformed about something but confidently state your opinion anyway.
I might tone it down slightly but honestly these arguments I am done with. Both the AI hype crowds and the anti-AI crowds are almost equally bad and as someone who actually works in this area I am fucking sick of it.
100% agree. A bunch of utter morons shouting bollocks really loud. Wish they’re shut the fuck up and let the rest of us get on with doing something useful instead of calling them on their bullshit!
ITT: LLM helps me with mundane tasks so fuck the enormous energy requirements and its impact on environment!
