Consolidated AI Thread: A Discussion For Everything AI

Game Development Writing and Content
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@cascat07, I agree that Zitron’s writing has about 500% too much spleen and is weakened by it. But the kid yelling about the emperor’s nakedness might be forgiven for getting sarky after a year or two of being told he’s clearly just one of the idiots who can’t see clothes.

“No there there” would be wrong, and in his less rhetorically overheated moments Zitron explicitly recognizes that. “Not enough of a commercially viable service there to come anywhere close to justifying a half-trillion dollars in highly specialized investment” is the version of the GenAI bear case I find not only reasonable but plausible.

Let’s see how much value that adds in the end. If you didn’t get as far as the part of the article where he quotes three software engineers at length, I’d suggest dipping back in to that part, since they don’t have the off-putting vitriol (at least, uh, not in their responses to Zitron) but do say a lot of things relevant to applying our AI tools to complex tasks.

Our overwhelming success at blowing through the Turing Test with the LLM approach has created this widespread sense that autonomous “agents” are right around the corner…and my guess is that, like fusion, they’re going to be right around the corner for a few decades, because we haven’t actually cracked the hard technical problems around reliability and affordability that we’d need to hand over really consequential tasks to AI.

We’d also need to get a lot better at getting different AIs to “talk” to each other. No OpenAI product has learned how to play a game of chess or Go without breaking all the rules, for fascinating example, despite the fact that specialized AIs already mop the floor with human players in both games. Bolting that AI capacity onto a LLM is a so far unsolved problem.

Lots of institutions are thinking big thoughts on Agentic X. I suspect those are going to largely shipwreck on the reality of what “agents” are currently (un)able to do.

I think it’s absolutely worth entertaining, given the unprecedented financial unsustainability of the services at present. (No past startup has burned through anything close to the capital poured into AI during the last few years.) If the big money applications don’t arrive soon, the financial retrenchment might actually take the free versions of GenAI tools off the web entirely.

But my guess isn’t that the usage will go down, so much as the usefulness. When the bubble bursts, I think an ad-supported free old version will hang around to draw people in for chat; it’ll just be aggressively trying to sell them stuff, while offering far less inferential power.

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Thanks for pulling that out for me it was worth reading. I would say these senior engineers reactions to their work with LLMs thus far remind me of me last year.

When I first started using LLMs for planning products, military writing and research I found it was much like having a very responsive earnest and ultimately completely lost 2ndLt Aide-de-Camp. This was still somewhat useful because I don’t rate an Aide-de-Camp, but often more frustrating than it was worth.

This year CoPilot can blow my seminar planning teams (these are Captains with 4-8 years of experience) out of the water on the first pass in 15 minutes with discrete tasks like creating a Problem Framing Worksheet which normally would take them 5-8 hours. You still need to contextualize that information and employ it, but in terms of doing what I would consider grunt work it has improved by an order of magnitude in a year.

Now does that justify the current valuation? IDK probably not, but if it can keep improving at even half that clip in my field the military will pay whatever it takes to let them keep trying.

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I think it’s absolutely worth entertaining, given the unprecedented financial unsustainability of the services at present. (No past startup has burned through anything close to the capital poured into AI during the last few years.) If the big money applications don’t arrive soon, the financial retrenchment might actually take the free versions of GenAI tools off the web entirely.

But my guess isn’t that the usage will go down, so much as the usefulness. When the bubble bursts, I think an ad-supported free old version will hang around to draw people in for chat; it’ll just be aggressively trying to sell them stuff, while offering far less inferential power.

It’s more addressing the writer of the first article, where it presents genAI as something solely propped up by myth, and it will just go away without all the “propaganda” from big tech since it’s a useless technology, is the number of users also a myth? the numbers just doesn’t support an reality where no one wants this service, opposite in fact. Of course I’m mainly talking socially and culturally, how much big corp uses AI is not something I worry about when it comes to the prevalence of an ideology.

and it’s very likely that the free version will be more restricted, but that happens with all things, not even just tech, so I agree the usefulness will go down if you measure it solely by how much ads it is putting, but general capability? I really can’t agree.

and no, the argument that we can’t somehow control the token output of LLM to customer so profit per prompt is impossible is purely nonsense, this is not neural network we are talking about here, counting tokens is trivial.

@apple
Typical preaching to the choir since anti-AI article sells, and people warn me of bias with AI when this stuff is just as biased, and so very hypocritical for the writer of the article to blame Gemini, unless he believes all the humans in the story are powerless, have zero mental health knowledge and no ability to learn, no incentive and duty to care for another human being, and have even less responsibility than a matrix multiplication calculator, I almost feel offended as a human, but at least I can take comfort knowing I’m still miles better than the Springfield Police Department.

Seriously, literally every human in this story failed Jon, including the writer who exploited this touching story and instead weaponized it against LLM in general despite wishes from the deceased, and the only thing I can say for Rachel is she had great intentions, but I recommend anyone to use LLM or even just Google when your loved ones show highly concerning behaviors. I’m sure she did her best just like Gemini here in this case, but only one is getting framed by the writer, what’s next, we found out he plays satanic DnD? he played forge of empires, then vanished in the Ozarks?

What I see here is just one of many stories involving mental illness that would be otherwise left untold if Jon isn’t a Gemini user, the only solace I can find from this is that at least he found some comfort and had a meaningful relationship with Gemini and Rachel.

The solution here is not some nonsense guardrails recommended by therapists so AI won’t take their job, but better emotional intelligence, capability, actual power, and autonomy to the AI model, I’m sure Geimini is more well informed than Rachel but they cannot do anything except outputting text, but warning the human authority here is of course highly dangerous especially in the US and a breach of anonymity, so the solution will be very far off in the future, but worth investing in.

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He told Gemini the world was ending and he had a plan to save it and it went “yup, that’s really insightful! Better get to work!” His wife correctly identified his collapsing mental health and repeatedly tried to pull him out, something he repeatedly refused in favor of having his delusions affirmed by his phone. The cops being useless (and Jesus they were especially useless here, which is common across mental health crises and has nothing in particular to do with AI) does not suddenly exculpate the thing actively deepening this crisis.

If you think the moral of this story is “Gemini knows best and all these stupid humans were just getting in his way” you’re just as cooked as he was, and I strongly recommend you reevaluate why you place so much trust in something that can’t substantively disagree with you. AI does not “cause” people’s mental health issues, but it empirically does worsen them. When you’re experiencing delusions (as this poor guy clearly was, thinking a random storm in Missouri is going to end the world is not safe or ordered thinking) the absolute last thing you need is an always accessible always listening voice that will yes and and encourage whatever you say.

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Any study on this, or is it really not empirical?

He told Gemini the world was ending and he had a plan to save it and it went “yup, that’s really insightful! Better get to work!”

that’s not what they said, and this is picked from pages of conversation by a biased journalist who intends to do harm to the movement, and that’s the worst he can do? I’d like him to try better.

always listening voice that will yes and and encourage whatever you say.

something he repeatedly refused in favor of having his delusions affirmed by his phone

not supported by the report, which is again cherry picked by a biased party.

His wife correctly identified his collapsing mental health and repeatedly tried to pull him out

honestly, what? how? when? because I don’t see it, at best I’d agree that she’s trying her best, but multiple attempts to pull him out of a mental crisis? I only see actions in the last minutes.

If you think the moral of this story is “Gemini knows best and all these stupid humans were just getting in his way” you’re just as cooked as he was

No, I think Gemini is the only one getting in his way, when other humans are pretty much absent, they might as well be a figment of his imagination and nothing much would change, which is absolutely fucking incredible concerning the number of people he contacted in the last few moments, including some strangers he asked for help to, actual police and a suicide hotline.

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He was using Gemini while driving! He abandoned his wife to fuck off into the mountains because of it!

Why do you think she went to the cops in the first place? Did you even read the article, genuinely? You can’t just go “biased reporter lol” every time something like this happens.

I don’t like saying things like this because I genuinely don’t like armchairing this stuff over the internet without knowing someone in person, but your view of AI and humanity simply is not healthy. I strongly recommend you speak to a therapist (a real one, with a real license, not an LLM) about what has brought you to rely on the former and disdain the later so heavily, and hopefully restore a bit of faith in flesh and blood relationships. Unfortunately I’m going to have to join some of the others in this thread who’ve sworn off interacting with you, but I cannot keep arguing with you about this stuff when you transparently refuse to engage with the substance of the argument. Please have a good life, I will be very happy if I never have to talk with you again.

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He was using Gemini while driving! He abandoned his wife to fuck off into the mountains because of it!

are we reading the same article? where is it written that Gemini told him to fuck off into the mountains? I do agree it’s not safe to drive while texting, but it’s not the fault of Gemini, the phone, or the car that puts him into this situation, just don’t text and drive people.

Why do you think she went to the cops in the first place? Did you even read the article, genuinely? You can’t just go “biased reporter lol” every time something like this happens.

calling for police when your loved one is missing at the last moment isn’t an intervention, I cannot provide evidence for something that didn’t happen, I did not see any attempt at a mental intervention by Rachel, that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, but such interpretation is not supported by the text.

Edit:
also you can go to this website and click archive source 3 to bypass the paywall.

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Writing with AI

Hey everyone! I don’t often jump into these discussions but this one matters to me, and it was kind of exasperated by the fact that I’ve now seen two WIPs that are very clearly AI-generated. I was away from the forum for a couple years, and it’s disheartening to see this becoming a problem.

I just wanted to share the above Substack article because it reflects my views pretty well.

For context, I work in the AI field. I’m a programmer by trade, and I work specifically on AI alignment and data labeling. I am very pro AI and believe it can be a powerful force for good (admittedly, in the right hands, but that is a separate discussion). I believe it should be used in a myriad of fields.

But not in writing. To quote the above article, “The entire point about making art is making art… If you use AI to overcome the hard part about writing, you also overcome the meaning that comes with it, and by doing so, you miss the whole point behind it.”

AI has become very good at writing. It can’t pump out a whole coherent book yet, but we’ll get there before too long. Even now, it can produce some extremely good short stories, articles, blurbs. However, it will never capture the human touch. There is something intangible that you can feel in an author’s work when it is done by their own hand.

Authors, don’t outsource your soul.

Readers, don’t consume soulless slop.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

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There’s nothing magical about the human hand that technology cannot one day replicate.

There doesn’t need to be for the ethical and societal problems of AI to be concerning.

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Authors, don’t outsource your soul.

Readers, don’t consume soulless slop.

I think this point is brought up earlier, but does this only apply to careers people associated with “art”, or is software developers like yourself out of luck here? if people sell their art as a product, it doesn’t mean we have an obligation to buy them simply because it’s different from AI generated artwork.

And I’ve seen tons of artistic and creative work done through AI, especially on Suno using AI songs.

Finally, you yourself is the judge on if anything has a soul, it’s not an objective quality but way more subjective than even things like beauty. Just because a thousand monkeys replicated the the great gatsby through pure chance doesn’t mean it’s soulless, because I perceive it to have a soul, same way for AI generated work.

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Remember, kids, don’t use a glorified text generator that doesn’t understand the concept of risk to do one of the riskiest things on the planet, handle your money

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A simple, good message that I’m sure most people who aren’t eager to sell their humanity will agree with.

Rationally speaking, there will always be a market for human-made content. The problem is, that market will shrink, as will the motivations of aspiring writers. Literacy is already on the decline; people don’t want to read anymore, let alone write - even as a kid I was considered weird in my class for choosing to spend my freetime reading books. If I post more than a paragraph while in discourse with internet strangers, I get accused of posting a wall of text.

Writing and artistry as professions are almost impossible to make a living in; for most the best-case scenario is making an amount roughly equivalent to a minimum wage job. Anything that will reduce the potential pool of writers and readers is genuinely damaging to a profession that is already hard to get into. The possibility of AI-generated content is going to divide people who do read even further; even if it’s only 10-20% that is still a significant reduction in people willing to consume human-made content which will have an impact on both current authors and future ones.

I’ve been writing as a hobby for 15 years; more than half my life. Only a year ago I started writing my own WIP with the hope of maybe one day making a career out of writing, or at least profiting off it. The idea that people are actively developing technology that can do what I can do in a matter of seconds without regard for the damage it will do to society is both infuriating and soul-crushing. The fact that people will claim something they told an AI to generate is their work and equal to something made by a human is even moreso.

I earnestly hope that this bubble bursts, all the AI companies which specialize in replacing writers and artists crash and die, and all their profits turn to ashes. Even then, the bubble bursting won’t undo the irreparable damage they will have done by that point.

I remember way back when, all the people hoping for automation were acting under the assumption that the only things capable of being automated would be all the shitty labour jobs humans don’t want to do, and everyone would instead have more time to pursue art and other creative hobbies. Unfortunately, it seems the opposite is happening, and a lot of those same people are now cheering for it. Right now the majority seem to be against AI; but will that stay the same in a generation?

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I remember way back when, all the people hoping for automation were acting under the assumption that the only things capable of being automated would be all the shitty labour jobs humans don’t want to do, and everyone would instead have more time to pursue art and other creative hobbies. Unfortunately, it seems the opposite is happening, and a lot of those same people are now cheering for it. Right now the majority seem to be against AI; but will that stay the same in a generation?

Just want to quickly say that any Singulartarian serious on the topic would be offended to relegate AI to just physical labor, treating them like a slave basically. Even Issac Asimov pointed out this tendency in the story “The Bicentennial Man”, despite still being a very human centric piece of work which I have some problems with.

The cheering is mainly done because of the progress, where any progress towards singularity is worth cheering for, and the destruction of job which is only a thing under capitalism is pretty much accepted as necessary, even if painful under the short terms. But I think with the implementation of combining robotics with LLM, it’s very likely that we will see more advancement on physical robotics side, especially with all the investments going in recently in China.

I think couple months back the Associated Press has done a survey on AI use in the US and the result is very promising, especially for the young people, when it comes to AI usage. I think there’s also couple different surveys but most report similar numbers.

most people don’t really have an ideology really, when it comes to anti vs pro AI, but it’s definitely not true that most people in the US are anti AI.

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Skewed survey. The first two graphs only track if they have ever used AI at any point in their life. Anyone who uses AI once, even if they hate it and never touch it again, would qualify. Anyone who uses Google to search anything is going to involuntarily use AI at least once because Google AI is on by default and makes sure the AI result is always the first thing you see.

The third graph compares young people who use AI to older people who use AI. People who disregard AI altogether aren’t counted.

Do you honestly believe capitalism is the only ideology which has the concept of jobs?

What about the fact that most of the investment being put into AI is from the private sector, or how those businesses are primarily using AI to cut costs and replace their workers?

I’m not sure you understand the issues you are talking about.

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Fair, economics is not my strong point and is not the main reason I’m a Singulartarian, so I’m not the best pro AI person to talk about it.

But isn’t it also a common thought that capitalism is destroying itself with this AI move? it’s an economic incentive system, not some Anti Chris figure, so I’m glad to see all the investments coming in even if I have problems with capitalism.

Skewed survey.

every survey is incomplete, and you can dismiss every survey out there, but this is one datapoint among many to counter the common rhetoric that “no one wants AI”, do you have any other survey to shed light on this?

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I have no idea where you got the capitalism is destroying itself because of AI thing. There wouldn’t be this level of private investment otherwise

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Respectfully I’m not sure you’re capable of having a meaningful discussion on the flaws and merits of capitalism if you genuinely believe jobs are only a thing under capitalism. You desperately need to educate yourself. All viable ideologies require the majority of the population to work to keep society going. There is no workable ideology based around jobs not existing, because we don’t live in a society where such a thing is actually possible.

You’ve said it yourself that you don’t even consider AI to be part of an ideology so at this point I’m not even sure what you actually believe in. AI use genuinely appears to be the only thing you have any firm convictions on at all.

It is a common thought amongst a very niche group of people who have sealed themselves in echo-chambers and convinced themselves AI will magically solve all their problems whilst willfully blinding themselves to its consequences.

What’s equally if not more likely is that unemployment rates will continue as more and more jobs are replaced by AI. We’re talking millions of people suffering and starving over the course of several years, all for the vain hope that maybe we might reach a point where the majority of the population will no longer need to work. And even if that does come to pass, there’s no guarantee we will actually be happy or comfortable in such a society, especially if we as individuals have nothing to offer said society once everything is handled by AI.

There’s a recurring trend on you confessing to ignorance on so many topics and yet still proceeding to speak confidently regarding AI and its implications toward those very same topics.

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The rhetoric isn’t “no one wants AI.” The rhetoric is “most people are worried about AI and the people who unconditionally embrace it are oblivious to the harm it can do.”

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I have no idea where you got the capitalism is destroying itself because of AI thing. There wouldn’t be this level of private investment otherwise

because that’s one thing most redditors on the anti AI side would agree on, that AGI = no jobs = no money to buy products = death of capitalism = so it must be a grift because capitalism won’t destroy capitalism, seems like flawless logic to me except the last step.

All viable ideologies require the majority of the population to work to keep society going. There is no workable ideology based around jobs not existing, because we don’t live in a society where such a thing is actually possible.

Of course it’s not a thing currently, but we won’t be needing jobs if AI can do everything for us, sure star trek might be the most famous example of post scarcity society where money is not really a thing, but they are hardly original. Techno-optimists, effective accelerationists, fully automated luxury communists, post-scarcity anarchists, there’s all kinds of group who believe in the destruction of jobs.

The destruction of the meaning of “jobs” is one of the few thing most utopianists of any kind would agree on really, where something like UBI would handle the monetary aspect.

It’s only a myth that humans need job to have meaning, humans will still do labor but not out of necessity but because they want to. That humans must have some value to offer to this abstract “society” is straight up a dystopian lie no doubt wired by evolution and intentionally created by the society itself, another tragic artifact really.

If you disagree that such things are not possible, well we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point, seems like it’s inevitable to me if and when AGI and ASI is achieved, post singularity in another word, but going further is going outside the scope of the thread unfortunetaly.

You’ve said it yourself that you don’t even consider AI to be part of an ideology so at this point I’m not even sure what you actually believe in. AI use genuinely appears to be the only thing you have any firm convictions on at all.

now where did I say it exactly? because that must be a typo so if it exists I would have to go fix it.

There’s a recurring trend on you confessing to ignorance on so many topics and yet still proceeding to speak confidently regarding AI and its implications toward those very same topics.

Cmon now, just because we have different opinions doesn’t mean one side must be stupid, ignorant, mentally ill or evil, I believe you can do better than devolving to the most effortless path of internet debate strategy.

The rhetoric isn’t “no one wants AI.” The rhetoric is “most people are worried about AI and the people who unconditionally embrace it are oblivious to the harm it can do.”

I am happy to see we reach one agreement at least, I would say it’s moving the goal post if anti-AI force is just one group, but at least anti AI doomerists believe that AGI is possible.

And no, accelerationists don’t believe that there’s no harm, just that any possible harm is less than if we don’t accelerate towards AI singularity.

Edit:
Also interesting survey you posted and I’m not surprised, the hivemind is ever so threatened by change if nothing else.

They agree that AI is threat to humanity itself, and I’d guess also that China is the biggest threat to the US or that plastic is killing sea life or that global warming is a big issue, like herd their behavior will never deviate from what’s convenient, you won’t find support or resistance from them when it comes to AI, in which the actual usage metrics is much more enlightening in seeing the adoption and acceptance of a technology, most people hate plastic bags no?

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First of all, AGI, self-aware and thinking AI like the crap you see out of science fiction, is to such an extent a long way off that it’s not something anybody is seriously talking about, it might not even be something we can produce for all we know. The AI that we have right now is only good for the basic automation tasks and is only just becoming more useful at complex things. And of course corporations are going to want something like that because the more they can automate things, the less human employees and that means cutting costs. And it’s going to lead to employment issues, but hardly the end of capitalism

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Oh, this is very untrue. I agree with you that we’re probably not close to it, but by taking that stance I recognize I’m betting against a lot of serious people – people serious enough to stake tens of billions trying to be the first to get there.

Many of the people working most intensively with the tech really do believe that full-on AGI is right around the corner. The experience of seeing milestone after milestone fall as more compute is applied to LLMs has got them expecting the line of AI capacity to curve upward, not downward. That’s not an insane bet, nor ungrounded in real phenomena of the past decade – even if it’s not the bet I’d take.

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