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It’s the same as the crypto-blockchain-NFT bullshit. A bunch of idiots with too much money put down on it, then when it doesn’t become the hit they expect they start with the propaganda about how it’s the greatest thing, and then when THAT fails they just take away other choices or try to cram it into everything anyhow
I’m reading AI Engineering by Chip Huyen and it’s an excellent read. As a technologist, I find the topic fascinating and would enjoy building AI agents. While not a silver bullet, generative models definitely represent technological progress and can boost productivity when used correctly. It’s just that as with everything else, the billionaires want to milk it for everything it’s worth and more to the point of crashing the economy and destroying supply chains for their own selfish interests. We just can’t have nice things.
And then everyone applauded.
The fact is though the average person is starting to replace their search engine with chatgpt, gemini, grok or whatever other llm and I have seen more and more small association using generative ai to make their posters instead of working with artist or doing it themselves.
Is this because LLMs are getting better, or because search engines are getting worse?
Because they are definitely getting worse. I get redirected to a brand new slopsite daily.
Search engines have peaked in early 2010s and hav been deteriorating ever since, becoming virtually unusable since ~2020.
Seriously, google has become unusabe without adding “site:reddit.com” to almost every search. I would like to see something like Perplexity be compared to a proper search engine - if it existed.
I never said llm’s or generative ai is good. I was talking about post just being wishfull thinking.
The fact is though the average person is starting to replace their search engine with chatgpt, gemini, grok or whatever
Yeah, and it makes sense for the average person to do that. Because Google, Bing, etc, have enshittified their search results so badly that the first few pages of results for any question are almost guaranteed to be AI-generated websites anyway. So you can take the answer the AI gives you, or you can click through to an AI generated website, which is just using the AI with extra steps. Or you can commit the extra time and energy to actually get a useful result written by a human being, which is significantly harder than it used to be, because the useful results are hidden behind decades of search engine optimization and the last few years of AI slop.
None of those options are actually good.
The ubiquity of LLMs hasn’t made search results better. It’s made people more willing to accept worse results.
Then everyone in class stood up and clapped.
It’s a meme, but at least in my childhood it did occasionally happen, the “whole class clapping” thing. One time I did really good in a second year Spanish class end of term activity. A girl proposed on the spot, and the whole class clapped. Intensely embarrassing but, as far as I can recall, it was not even sarcastic.
ALL the cool kids hate AI. You want to be cool, don’t you? Come on, everyone, let’s hate the latest marvel of technological innovation together!
It uses electricity, which nothing else does. It uses water, which is then destroyed forever and can never be used again after it’s been used once for AI. It’s occasionally wrong, which nothing else ever is. It makes billionaires richer, which nothing else ever does. It reduces your creativity, which everyone has in spades. It discourages you from thinking for yourself, unlike the mob mentality telling you to hate it.
Stop acknowledging the many positives and just accept instead that it’s only ever going to be horrible. Forever. Always in all ways. It’s time to turn off your brains and just hate AI with us. Woo! 🥳
Did you write this or just prompt it?
this post is real✅ and has been fact checked by true american patriots✅
The mudslide of AI slop on YouTube is like digital gangrene, the brainrot has gone down the stem into the organs. We’re done as a species.
And then everyone clapped.
Tears in their eyes
The name of those tears? Albert Einstein.
I do not hate AI, I am learning how to use it. AI is really great technology and like a calculator, you can be more productive when you know how to use it.
And then everyone clapped… Blah, blah, blah.
And, I do not like AI.
I hate these fake everyone clapped stories just as much as i hate AI
I only used Venice.ai because it stores everything in my browser (which I can erase immediately). It is just fun to get things off my chest and use a rubber ducky method for any issue I might be having, but it has been useless otherwise.
The fuck are all these comments? AI is shit, fuck AI. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
How does AI fuel billionaires?
who owns the datacenters?
Separate LLMs and AI.
Doesn’t work that way unfortunately. Ask a person on the street what AI is and theyll tell you whatever flavor slop generator they’re familiar with. You’re not going to see much pushback on ML around the Fediverse.
On the fediverse I think we can be more precise in our language.
LLMs are shit, fuck LLMs. They fuel billionaires, destroy the environment, kill critical thinking, confidently tell you to off yourself, praise Hitler, advocate for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
And AI is a pipe dream no one is close to fulfilling, won’t be realized by feeding LLMs all of the data in existence, and billionaires are destroying our economy in their pursuit of it.
You are referring to AGI not AI.
The broad category of AI is most definitely real.
Could you define that category? Or give us an example of a programme that fits under it and one that doesn’t?
Stuff like ML, Computer Vision, Alpha Fold?
AI contains LLMs and Machine learning and AGI.
My main point is that you shouldn’t throw out computerised protein folding and cancer detection with your hatred of LLMs.
OK, and my point is that people are using the term “AI” so loosely as to be indistinguishable from “algorithm”.
We’ll still have the statistical protein folding models after this bubble eventually pops, we’re just not gonna call it “AI”. It’s a trendy marketing department word, and its usefulness as a description in Computer Science is rapidly diminishing.
I would say it just got widespread use, I definitely heard of MS Word doing autofill as ‘AI’ at the time when deep learning was freshly invented thing. People tried to label a lot of things ‘AI’, with LLMs the label just stuck better
AI to a layman just means “LLMs and Generative AI that rich assholes keep trying to force me to use or consume the output of”. i dont think its worthwhile to split semantic hairs over this. call the “good” stuff CNNs or machine learning if you really feel the need to draw a distinction.
To a layman, yes I agree.
Not many laymen on lemmy. We can afford to be precise with our language.
So what is AI in your opinion because LLMs fall under that umbrella.
My opinion. AI is a way to improve a computer models accuracy over time based on new data.
I could even argue that ChatGPT etc. are not AI because the LLMs are not directly learning from the inputs they are receiving.
Change this out for any other technology that’s been innovated throughout human history. The printing press semiconductors the internet.
The anti-ai rhetoric on this platform is becoming nonsensical.
At this point it’s just bandwagon hate. These people don’t even understand the difference between llms and AIs and the various applications that they have.
Any other technology? How about 3D TVs, smart glasses, blockchain, NFTs, the Metaverse?
Yes. These all qualify. They’re all massively successful technologies.
Well, aside from 3D TVs and smart glasses. But they’re generally innocuous. Yes I also understand that smart glasses es have privacy issues but then again in this day and age what doesn’t.
If you think any of these are massively successful, I question what reality you are living in.
The blockchain nfts the metaverse aren’t successful?
These three things generate massive amounts of revenue. The metaverse especially is a billion dollar IP.
The word success doesn’t have a positive connotation to it in this case.
The metaverse had a billion dollars pumped into it, and yet for all they money they spent they have literally no users to show for it. Likewise for NFTs, a few idiots got suckered into paying for monkey JPGs and are now left holding a bag that no one wants.
The blockchain has a small cult trading money back and forth to make it look bigger than it really is. But it’s never achieved any kind of mainstream adoption as the currency true believers keep insisting it will be. And it never will, because it’s way too inefficient to ever scale.
Blockchains in an age of Trump choosing a new Fed chair after trying to have Powell arrested.
Trust your government over software and cryptography, which has no basis in reality outside of the laws of physics and mathematics.
Figured I’d summon at least one person trying to defend crypto. Just because the US has issues doesn’t suddenly mean crypto is good.
Bitcoin has been around for almost two decades now, and still has not achieved anything beyond being a means for speculators to try and fleece each other. If it hasn’t reached widespread mainstream adoption by now, it never will.
Crypto is a failed technology, full stop.
Gold is also just digging something up and then re-burying it. If it hasnt replaced fiat then why are people buying it, why has it been going up 100% a year recently when theres no new industrial demand for it?
Its fine to not hold it, but all finite assets have some intrinsic value, because fiat keeps pumping via new debt issuance, which is inevitably debased. Like it was during Covid, or 2008, or 2001, etc…
Crypto has a higher volatility, but can have a higher return, and is more closer correlated to the Nasdaq; like all assets its generally efficiently priced. I’d say its closer to TQQQ than it is to VT or gold, which may be suitable for 1-10% of a portfolio depending on goals and risk tolerance. If they drop interest rates quickly to pump the stockmarket TQQQ and Bitcoin would likely both rise dramatically.
I feel like you just autopiloted into random cryptobro talking points that have nothing to do with the conversation. I don’t care if you like crypto, the reality is that rest of the world has already rejected it and moved on.
If the US dollar goes through hyperinflation and becomes worthless, people in the US won’t switch to Bitcoin or other crypto as their main form of currency. We’ll do exactly what citizens of every country that experiences such a currency crash does - start using other more stable currencies. You would see businesses start accepting a mix of Canadian dollar, Mexican pesos, Euros, and Yuan.
I’ve contemplated this myself, about competing currencies, and how that would leave the world if we had cheap and ubiquitous FX with little to no drag. Would it not cause a race to the bottom for inflation targeting, and lead to something similar to everyone using a fixed currency?
Why would I hold Canadian dollar or Pesos if their inflation target is 2% versus say the Swiss 1%? Is there enough new money supply for everyone to even attain the lowest inflation currency, or do they bid down the denomination as that countries FX value rises?
Why would I hold Canadian dollar or Pesos if their inflation target is 2% versus say the Swiss 1%?
No. No it wouldn’t.Because ultimately you (assuming you’re in the US), have to pay your taxes in USD. People say that fiat currencies aren’t backed by anything, but that isn’t true. They’re backed by the fact that every single US citizen and resident has to gather up thousands of dollars every year and pay them to the government. Even if you could convince your employer to pay you in Euros, the IRS will still demand you pay whatever taxes you would owe if you were paid in an equivalent amount of dollars.
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Sorry don’t remember any of those other technologies using so much resources, raising prices for everyone else as they don’t pay the actual cost. And being wrong about stuff.
Bitcoin and Ethereum PoW used resources and raised (GPU and electricity) prices for everyone.
They literally killed and excommunicated people after the invention of the printing press for producing unauthorized copies of the Bible. Figures like William Tyndale paid with their lives for translating scripture into English, challenging the Church’s authority.
There is illicit material circulating freely on Tor, demonstrating that technology can distribute both knowledge and criminal content.
Semiconductors underpin some of humanity’s most powerful and destructive technologies, from advanced military systems to cyberweapons. They are a neutral tool, but their applications have reshaped warfare and global power dynamics.
You are fully entitled to dislike AI or technologies associated with it. But to dismiss it entirely is ignorant. Whether you want to believe it or not, we are on the precipice of a technological revolution, the shape of which remains uncertain, but its impact will be undeniable.
Bullshit, fuck your false equivalency. This tech is good at generaating slop, propaganda, and destroying critical thinking. Thats it. It has zero value.
Ok. This is clearly rage bait.
You’re an ignorant fool and I’m probably not the first person to tell you that.
Same with the internet. Fuels billionaires, destroys the environment with data centers and cables, kills libraries and textbook research, spreads nazi propaganda. We need to stop using technology in general.
There are things you can do with the Internet that are impossible to do without the Internet. Everything you mentioned is very real harm that the Internet does to humanity in the world - even if you meant it sarcastically - but that harm has to be weighed against the benefits the Internet provides that can’t be replicated by anything else.
There’s nothing a LLM can do that a human can’t. The only thing LLMs are good at is convincing managers to replace human employees with LLMs. Because even though LLMs do a worse job than any human employee, they’re cheaper and won’t unionize.
The cost-benefit analysis for society is very different.
Lets see a standard problem I’m randomly making up using a free AI, you tell me if this kind of thing can be useful to someone:
If I have a bucket that is 1 meter tall and 1 meter wide how much volume can it hold?
The volume V of a cylinder can be calculated using the formula:
V=πr2h
Where:
r is the radius, h is the height.
In this case, the bucket is 1 meter tall and 1 meter wide, which means the diameter is 1 meter. Therefore, the radius r is:
r=21 meter=0.5 meters
Now substituting the values into the volume formula:
V=π(0.5m)2(1m) V=π(0.25m2)(1m) V≈0.7854m3
Thus, the volume the bucket can hold is approximately 0.785 cubic meters.
What you’ve given is an example of a problem where an LLM is inherently the wrong tool.
See, variation is built into LLMs. They’re programmed to evaluate probable responses and select from them on the basis of probability - to simplify ridiculously, if a particular word follows another 90% of a time, in 90% of the content it generates the LLM will have that word follow the other, and in the other 10% it won’t.
If you give an LLM the exact same prompt multiple times, you will get multiple different responses. They’ll all be similar responses, but they won’t be exactly the same, because how LLMs generate language is probabilistic and contains randomness.
(And that is why hallucination is an inherent feature of LLMs and can’t be trained out.)
But math isn’t language. Math problems have correct answers. When you use a software tool to answer a math problem, you don’t want variation. You want the correct answer every time.
To solve a math problem, you need to find the appropriate formula, which will be the same every time. Then you use a calculator, which always gives the correct result. You plug the numbers into the formula and calculate the result.
What I’m getting at is, if you use a calculator to do the math problem yourself, and you put in the correct formula, you’ll always get the correct result. If you use a LLM to generate the answer to a math problem, there is always a non-zero chance it will give you the wrong answer.
But what if, you might ask, you don’t know the correct formula? What if you’re not good enough at math to calculate the correct answers, even with a calculator? Isn’t this a time when the LLM can be useful, to do something you can’t?
The problem is, the LLM could be wrong. And if you haven’t looked up the formula yourself, from a reliable source that is not an LLM, you have no way to check the LLM’s work. Which means you can’t trust it for anything important and you have to do the math yourself anyway.
(This is true for everything an LLM does, but is especially true for math.)
And if you have looked up the formula yourself, it’s just as easy to use a calculator the first time and skip the LLM.
Right? This is what I’m getting at. An LLM can do some of the same things a human does, but it’s always going to be worse at it than a human, because it’s not conscious, it’s not reasoning its way to a correct answer, it’s just generating a string of linguistic tokens based on probabilities. And math problems might be the clearest possible example of this.
Thats well put, I’m under no naive assumption that LLMs are AI. Though I do think youre discounting the usefulness, as it did give the right answer, which is a fine use for average people doing basic math or whatever project theyre working on. I’m under no delusion that its replacing workers, unless someones job is writing fancy emails or building spreadsheets, and I do still think its a massive bubble.
Yeah, I get that it seems like a fine use for average people doing basic math. The nonzero chance of error could end up not mattering. But it could matter very much, depending on the use case. If you’re asking an LLM the volume of a bucket, it’s not a big deal. If you’re asking an LLM “how many milligrams of this drug is the correct dose for a 80 kg man”, that’s a big fucking deal.
If people don’t know LLMs can’t be trusted to give the corect answer, they’re not going to realize they need to do the math themselves in important use cases. And that is certainly not something Microsoft and Google are encouraging people to learn.
Then there’s the efficiency issue - Big Tech spent trillions of dollars to develop and train machine learning processors, which perform quadrillions of energy-intensive processes per second, and they’re being marketed to do a job that a 99 cent solar powered calculator from the 1980s can do better.
God, I just realized tax season is coming up. And after all the layoffs and political firings and general dogebaggery at the American IRS, they’re going to have to deal with people using AI to do their taxes 😆
Using llms for math questions is probably the worst usage for llms.
And all of this is easily calculated without ai. You can literally google it and let google do the math for you without ai.
Perhaps your right, though the AI also allows natural language or voice, and further explanations.
When you visualize a cylinder, think of stacking many thin circular disks (each with a height Δh) to build up the height h. The volume of each individual disk is its area πr2 multiplied by its infinitesimally small height Δh. When you aggregate these over the full height h, you arrive at the volume of the cylinder.
Its also eroding all the bullshit we used to do, like cover letters and things that had no reason to exist besides wasting someones time. So truth be told I’m a fan, even if it is a massively unprofitable bubble, I also recognize its limitations given its hallucinations so I understand it shouldnt be relied upon for useful work.
Found the Mennonite.
The fuck are all these comments? The internet is shit, fuck the internet. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing it. Stop using it.
t’s the same as any other commercial tool. As long as it’s profitable the owner will continue to sell it, and users who are willing to pay will buy it. You use commercial tools every day that are harmful to the environment. Do you drive? Heat your home? Buy meat, dairy or animal products?
I honestly don’t know where this hatred for AI comes from; it feels like a trend that people jump onto because they want to be included in something.
AI is used in radiology to identify birth defects, cancer signs and heart problems. You’re acting like its only use-case is artwork, which isn’t true. You’re welcome to your opinion but you’re welcome to consider other perspectives as well. Ciao!
The use in radiology is not a good thing. Hospitals are cutting trained technicians and making the few they keep double check more images per day as a backup for AI. If they were just using it as an aide and the humans were still analyzing the same number of picturea that would be fine but capitalism sees a way to save a buck and people will die as a result.
This isn’t a problem with AI though, it’s a problem with the people cutting trained technicians. In places where such incompetent people don’t decide that, you get the same number of trained technicians accepting (and being a part of) a change that gives them slightly more accurate findings, resulting in lives being saved overall. Which is typically what health workers want to begin with.
That big ol list of things didn’t do it for you, huh?
That sensationalized list? No, not really.
OK so why is AI so big right now because it isn’t profitable. Even there most expensive tier is losing them money. Then you have the data centers getting breaks on electricity so the rest of us cost goes up to make the difference. Where is this magical profitability that is driving AI.
I honestly don’t know where this hatred for AI comes from
Did you try reading the comment you just replied to?
It’s in part because people aren’t open to contradictions in their world view. In part you can’t blame them for that since everyone has their own valid perspective. But staying willingly ignorant of positives and gray areas is a valid criticism. And sadly there are plenty of influencers peddling a black-white mindset on AI, ignoring all other uses. Not saying intentionally or not, again perspective. I’m sure online content creation has to contend with a lot more AI content compared to the norm. But only on the internet do I encounter rabidly anti AI people, in real life basically nobody cares. Some use it, some don’t, most do so responsibly as a tool. And I work in the creative industry…
“I’ve never seen it it must not exist”
I work in a creative industry too and it is the bane of not only my group but every other company I’ve spoken to. Every artist and musician I know hates it too.
I never said it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry people in your area are being negatively affected if so. But the point still stands. My experience is just as valid.
I’m pretty anti AI as it is a tool of the billionaire class to enslave the masses. Look up TESCREAL, its the digital eugenics billionaires and fringe philosiphers believe in and it is the driving force in the AI push.
That being said I can see a use for a focused, local LLM/AI assistant. I have to search a lot of confidential technical manuals, schematics and trust cases in my job. We are thinking about testing out Ollama to upload all our documents too to make searching them easier.
You are the exact person I didn’t mean 😄 the first is a very valid reason to dislike AI.
Even before our current time, “nobody cares” is not a thermostat reading of what “really matters”. It almost sounds like you believe people know what’s best for themselves, when the truth of the matter is that humanity has long proved otherwise.
You sound like a cartoon supervillain, Lex Luthor ranting to superman about the common animals not knowing what’s best for themselves.
Republicans.
I don’t believe that. What I’m saying is that these are all people I work with look very critically and skeptically at the world, as that’s pretty much an inherent requirement for the creative industry. We all know what AI is and what it does, and most arguments against it hold no water to people with a realistic view of the industry to the point it simply cannot be black and white like some claim it to be.
There are a few good reasons to dislike AI, but those don’t apply to all of AI. Some are value based, and other people have other values that are equally valid. And some can be avoided entirely. Like how you could ship packages with a coal rocket instead of a train on electricity, or just shipping less packages to begin with.
There is trust and experience between one another in the industry that we aren’t using it unnecessarily, wastefully, and incorrectly, and AI is not anywhere near a requirement by consumers nor healthy minded businesses.
Look up dot com bubble. We still have the internet. Just because AI is over-hyped and in a bubble doesn’t mean it won’t still have uses.
I fully agree. I still remember the time when using Photoshop was seen by some as not being “real artist”, because “any idiot with a mouse can draw now”. I’m not under any illusion this will last forever, the negative sentiment is boiling because of the bubble and it’s negative externalities, not by the technology itself. So once that bursts, things will hopefully be a lot more peaceful.
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Which ai and for which use? It’s a tool. It’s like getting mad cause a guy invented a hammer. It’s not the tool hurting you dude, it’s the people wielding it.
If that hammer also had massive environmental impacts and hammers were pushed into every aspect of your life while also stealing massive amounts of copyrighted data, sure. It’s very useful for problems that can be easily verified, but the only reason it’s good at those is from the massive amount of stolen data.
All those things you said are vague and nebulous and every day people are not gonna understand that message and will just think you’re hysterical or a conspiracy guy. The way the message is put forwards is super important
Arguably, hammers also have a massive impact on the environment. They are also part of everyday life. Building you live in? Built using a hammer. New sidewalk? Old one came out with an automatic hammer. Car? Bet there was a type of hammer used during assembly. You can’t escape the hammer. Stop running. Accept your inner hammer. Embrace the hammer, become the hammer. Hammer on.
Is the hammer making nude images of children?
Yup. you can use a chisel or even just a hammer, you just need the right person with it
A camera can, ban cameras
So do computers.
Personally I don’t hate it but I just think there’s really no urgent need for it. If they’re using it to take jobs away from people well what is everyone going to do for work? To the billionaires think there’s going to be a gigantic human die off and they’re going to be elite class of 100,000 people and they’ll be served by intelligent robots? If that’s their angle good luck.
If you’ve taken a look at the Epstein files, you know exactly what kind of “work” the billionaire caste wants to force desperate people into.
They all grew up on classic sci fi. And, being dumbasses, they took Solaria as an aspiration rather than a warning.
To be fair, it’s a genius robot slave.
Billionaires everywhere are shooting into the sky on rocket exhaust composed of their own semen.
If that worked I’d have been near Jupiter halfway through high school.
