Charlie StrossFeb 25, 2023

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about all the current hype around Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT is that it follows, as night follows day, about six months after the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

This is not a coincidence.

Hucksters are chasing the sweet VC/private equity money that has been flushed out of crypto, and AI is the new hotness all of a sudden.

If you're thinking about investing now? Don't: it's too late and you'll be the target of a grift.

Show threadHello, yes, this is GreglyFeb 25, 2023
@cstross This is a very good point. I’ve sometimes gotten annoyed by the comparison between neural networks and crypto, because the former actually has some utility (if used ethically and responsibly) while the latter is utterly pointless and destructive… but from an investment/financial standpoint, they’re exactly the same sort of hype bubbles.
Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 25, 2023
@glindsey Given that much of what passes for "journalism" these days is just stenography copying from press-releases, I suspect the PR firms are working overtime to push AI. Things will tick along for a while but there's going to be a crash, sooner rather than later: my view is that the Bing/ChatGPT fiasco is just a harbinger of the way deep learning models are going to be discredited in the public eye in about 1-3 years' time (The cryptocurrency bubble lasted a bit over a decade in contrast).
Show threadHello, yes, this is Gregly
@cstross I totally agree. For me, one of the neat things about NNs is precisely that they *do* get things wrong — often. I see their hallucinations as a feature, not a bug; a tool that could truly be used to help creativity and inspire ideas (setting aside the problematic training data for now). But these folks want to market and use them as all-knowing infallible oracles, and that’s just not gonna happen. The instant the advice of one of these NNs gets someone killed, the bubble will implode.
Feb 25, 2023 at 2:45pmWeb