I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.
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.
I can’t offer anything other than armchair hypothesising, but Tezuka Osamu, the most important person when it comes to making manga and anime what it is today, and whose influence can also be felt in video games (e.g. Mega Man clearly taking influence from Astro Boy), liked to do things like having a character rip out the gutter between panels and break it in half in a fit of anger. So these kind of meta-hijinks have been part of modern Japanese popular media since the beginning.
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 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.
I don’t really understand it. What’s the appeal? Personally, at least, the moment I realise that there’s nothing I can do in a game that affects whether I win or lose, I lose interest in it completely. Well, it’s not like I’m completely oblivious to the mechanisms here, I also get a little dopamine boost when, for example, I get a critical hit in a video game and disappointed when an attack misses, even though I can only vaguely influence the probabilities of those things happening, but that only works as a little constant pleasure differential as seasoning to keep you on your toes, it would be completely pointless as something that cumulates into a single climax.
The closest I’ve come to understanding the appeal is that the thrill of not just possibly winning money but also the risk of losing the fruits of your labour (i.e. “real stakes”, even if small), is pleasurable to some people…? But if that’s what it is, quite frankly, that’s seems less like seeking simple pleasure and more in the realm of depravity.
Anyway, I do think gambling is one of the dumbest dumbass dumb-dumb thing a person can do that doesn’t involve scooping out your eyeballs with a dirty plastic spork. Even putting aside that the odds are never in your favour and so, it isn’t rational thing to do, someone who starts gambling may not know they have the kind of addictive personality that gets them sinking into a bog, because that part of their character may have never surfaced, or only in low-stakes situations. So they’re not just gambling with money, they’re gambling with the very quality of their life.
Also, betting is just an inherently corrupting force. Even if you’re only making small bets, even if you’re not pressuring competitors to throw the match (if you even have the means to do so) or throwing banana peels into the ring to get the person you bet against to slip and fall or something, you’re contributing to the payout to the people who are, incentivising that behaviour. There’s no high payout for betting against the odds (and then working to make the unlikely the inevitable) if there’s not enough livestock contributing to the pot.
Well isn’t that cute…
I knew it as Dommel, but the English version appears to be called Wowser.
I still sometimes use the phrase “Let the archeologists sort 'em out!” from the Terrible Thunderlizards part of the show.
Kami meaning god and kami* meaning paper do have different pitch accent patterns, but that’s never kept Japanese speakers from doing wordplay. In fact, the pun works even better in Japanese than it does in English. However, I think they would be confused why someone would want to name it that for a couple of reasons:
*) It becomes “gami” in “origami” because it’s the second part of a compound word, but the word on its own is “kami”.
EDIT: I just realised something: the company making these is called AirKamuy. “Kamuy” is the Ainu word for god. So if you squint real hard, it does kind of invoke kamikaze. Probably not intentional, though.
Reminds me of pattens, except they’re for shoes that already have soles.
Even without the social issues (some of which aren’t really solvable), there are still the matters of the lack of control and predictability, qualities that make it very valuable to fakers, but pretty much worthless to serious artists.
Kind of looks like a bamboo shoot.
The etymology is a bit different from that. Otaku does mean “your house” (important distinction: it’s always the second person’s house, not your own), but it’s also used figuratively as a formal way to refer to your family or just you. There was a culture, at least in the 70s and 80s, for enthusiasts in non-mainstream fields of interests, whether that be TV manga anime, science-fiction, wargaming etc., to talk to each other in a weirdly formal way, so they kept calling each other “otaku”.
In my pockets, my keys (including a NitroKey for accessing my passwords), which are literally chained to my trousers, my phone and a little towel the size of a handkerchief.
I also carry a little, what to call it, pochette? It’s a little carrying thing around the size of my hand, that is either clipped to the strap of my messenger bag or carried on its own with a shoulder strap. It contains my passport, public transit pass, bank pass, just-in-case-cash, pen, mechanical pencil, cloth for wiping glasses, and a folded ecobag.
As for the messenger bag, it contains a carbon steel folding umbrella, which folds down to around the size of a glasses case and is very light, a larger ecobag, notebook, headphones, a bunch of USB cables and adapters, a USB memory stick, and a teeny-tiny nail clipper. Not for actually clipping my nails, but you know how sometimes a little triangle of skin around the corner of a nail gets loose and all hard and annoying? It’s for that sole purpose. Also, I typically carry the bag when traveling a longer distance (like my commute to work), so there’s usually a book and a 3DS in there.
Doesn’t that make them in violation of truth-in-advertising laws? If they’re marketing it as a serious productivity tool, but legally it’s “for entertainment purposes only” , then their ads claim its something that it’s not.
What is there to check? All the information that wasn’t in the prompt, right or wrong, is information that didn’t come from the user. This is important especially in this case where it’s a book review and most of the information is supposed to be this guy’s opinion, making information that didn’t come from him worthless. So if he did actually write down the information that is valuable, because it would have been in the prompt and whatever parts of the review he wrote himself, what is there to check in the worthless information produced by the LLM?
Of course, in most cases it’s a journalist’s job to relay information, not to be the source of it. But I’d say that part of that job is understanding that information well enough so that they can relay it responsibly. And one of the most effective ways of both confirming for yourself that you understand it and to deepen that understanding, is to think about how to put it in words, i.e. write it down. It’s not perfect, and many journalists have been screwing up this part long before LLMs were a thing, but it’s certainly better than checking whether whatever an LLM regurgitated matches your shallow understanding.
The Earth is blue, and full of girls kissing.
–Yuri Gagarin
This looks less like a highway and more like a provincial road, though, which is pretty likely to have its own separated bicycle path.
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.