What a time to be alive

https://vger.social/post/2542638

What a time to be alive - vger.social

Don’t blame CEO tomfoolery on generative AI. Generative AI is amazing.

Yeah. It’s more like:

Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.

Actually we’re already two “AI winters” in, so we should be hitting another pretty soon
Can you explain? I’ve never heard of them before.
AI as a field initially started getting big in the 1960s with machine translation and perceptrons (super-basic neural networks), which started promising but hit a wall basically immediately. Around 1974 the US military cut most of their funding to their AI projects because they weren’t working out, but by 1980 they started funding AI projects again because people had invented new AI approaches. Around 1984 people coined the term “AI winter” for the time when funding had dried up, which incidentally was right before funding dried up again in the 90s until around the 2010s.
The sheer waste of energy and mass production of garbage clogging up search results alone is enough to make me hope the bubble will pop reeeeal soon. Sucks for research but honestly the bad far outweighs the good right now, it has to die.

Yeah search is pretty useless now. I’m so over it. Trying to fix problems always has the top 15 results be like:

“You might ask yourself, how is Error-13 on a Maytag Washer? Well first, let’s start with What Is a Maytag Washer. You would be right to assume washing clothes has been a task for thousands of years. The first washing machine was invented…” (Yes I wrote that by hand, how’d I do? Lol)

It’s the same as how I really stopped caring if crypto was gonna “revolutionize money” once it became a gold rush to horde GPUs and subsequently any other component you could store a hash on. R&D for the advancement of humanity is cool.

Building enormous farms and burning out powerful components that could be used for art and science to prove-that-you-own-a-receipt-for-an-ugly-monkey-jpeg is apalling.

I’m sure there was an ethical application way back there somewhere, but it just becomes a pump-and-dump scheme and ruins things for a lot of good people.

I’m… honestly kinda okay with it crashing. It’d suck because AI has a lot of potential outside of generative tasks; like science and medicine. However, we don’t really have the corporate ethics or morals for it, nor do we have the economic structure for it.

AI at our current stage is guaranteed to cause problems even when used responsibly, because its entire goal is to do human tasks better than a human can. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, even if you do your best to think carefully and hire humans whenever possible, AI will end up replacing human jobs. What’s the point in hiring a bunch of people with a hyper-specialized understanding of a specific scientific field if an AI can do their work faster and better? If I’m not mistaken, normally having some form of hyper-specialization would be advantageous for the scientist because it means they can demand more for their expertise (so long as it’s paired with a general understanding of other fields).

However, if you have to choose between 5 hyper-specialized and potentially expensive human scientists, or an AI designed to do the hyper-specialized task with 2~3 human generalists to design the input and interpret the output, which do you go with?

So long as the output is the same or similar, the no-brainer would be to go with the 2~3 generalists and AI; it would require less funding and possibly less equipment - and that’s ignoring that, from what I’ve seen, AI tends to be better than human scientists in hyper-specialized tasks (though you still need scientists to design the input and parse the output). As such, you’re basically guaranteed to replace humans with AI.

We just don’t have the society for that. We should be moving in that direction, but we’re not even close to being there yet. So, again, as much potential as AI has, I’m kinda okay if it crashes. There aren’t enough people who possess a brain capable of handling an AI-dominated world yet. There are too many people who see things like money, government, economics, etc as some kind of magical force of nature and not as human-made systems which only exist because we let them.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

Make that baby a CEO!

Oh no. Boss baby.

Generative AI is amazing for some niche tasks that are not what it’s being used for
What tasks are you thinking about?
Creating drafts for white papers my boss asks for every week about stupid shit on his mind. Used to take a couple days now it’s done in one day at most and I spend my Friday doing chores and checking on my email and chat every once in a while until I send him the completed version before logging out for the weekend.
Writing boring shit is LLM dream stuff. Especially tedious corpo shit. I have to write letters and such a lot, it makes it so much easier having a machine that can summarise material and write it in dry corporate language in 10 seconds. I already have to proof read my own writing, and there’s almost always 1 or 2 other approvers, so checking it for errors is no extra effort.
I don’t think you know what “white paper” means
It is excellent for producing bland filler.
I understand this perspective, because the text, image, audio, and video generators all default to the most generic solution. I challenge you to explore past the surface with the simple goal of examining something you enjoy from new angles. All of the interesting work in generative AI is being done at the edges of the model’s semantic spaces. Avoid getting stuck in workflows. Try new ones regularly and compare their efficacies. I’m constantly finding use cases that I end up putting to practical use - sometimes immediately, sometimes six months later when the need arises.

The more you use generative AI, the less amazing it is. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it, but it really can only impress you when it’s talking about a subject you know nothing of. The pictures are terrible, though way better than I could do. The coding is terrible, although it’s amazingly fast for similar quality to a junior developer. The prose seems amazing at first, but as you use it over and over you realize it’s quite bland and it’s continually sort of reverting to a default voice even if it can write really good short passages.

I’ve been playing with generative AI for about 5 years, and it has certainly gotten much better in some ways, but it’s still just a neat toy in search of a problem it can solve. There’s a lot of money going into it in the hope it will improve to the point where it can solve some of the things we really want it to, but I’m not sure it ever reliably will. Maybe some other AI technology, but not LLM.

It saves me 10-20 hours of work every week as a corpo video producer, and I use that time to experiment with AI - which has allowed our small team to produce work that would be completely outside our resources otherwise. Without a single additional breakthrough, we’d be finding novel ways to be productive with the current form of generative AI for decades. I understand the desire to temper expectations, and I agree that companies and providers are not handling this well at all. But the tech is already solid. It’s just being misused more often than it’s being wielded well.

I don’t have the experience to refute that. But I see the same things from developers all the time swearing AI saves them hours, but that’s a domain I know well and’s AI does certain very limited things quite well. It can spit out boilerplate stuff pretty quick and often with few enough errors that I can fix them faster than I could’ve written everything by hand. But it very much relies on me knowing what I’m doing and immediately recognizing the garbage for what it is.

It does make me a little bit faster at the stuff I’m already good at, at the cost of leading me down some wild rabbit holes on things I don’t know so well. It’s not nothing, but it’s not what I would call professional-grade.

Nobody doubts that it’s useful for helping with bland low-tier work like corpo videos that people are forced to watch to keep their jobs.
I just meant I work for a corporation. I produce videos for marketing, been doing it for 25 years, have a few Emmy’s, don’t feel the need to demean AI’s usefulness.
ELIZA effect - Wikipedia

It CAN BE amazing in certain situations. Ceo tomfoolery is what’s making generative Ai become a joke to the average user.
Yes. It’s not wrong 100% of the time, otherwise you could make a fortune by asking it for investment advice and then doing the opposite.
It’s actually really frustrating that LLMs have gotten all the funding when we’re finally at the point where we can build reasonably priced purpose-built AI and instead the CEOs want to push trashbag LLMs on everything
Well, a conversational AI with sub-human abilities still has some uses. Notably scamming people en masse so human email scammers will be put out of their jobs /s
Uh yeah so amazing I could watch those “xyz but it’s Balenciaga” clips for days!!! /s

But he says it confidently, and that’s all that matter.

/s

I wish this wasn’t so true.
Forget taking over my job. AI is headed straight for the C suite.
They invented a bullshitter.
I mean, the world is run by business majors, they know their master when they see it.
It could be elected President with chops like that.
The Dunning Kruger Machine

Twch CEOs or AI?

Just kidding, I know it is both.

I immediately thought of Steve Jobs.
holy shit, they invented a White Guy™
Fake it till you make it! (งツ)ว
Mansplaining as a Service
Now all he needs is a firm handshake!
I mean, it’s a tactic that works for a lot of humans too. Wcgw?
I work in a technical field, and the amount of bad work I see is way higher than you’d think. There are companies without anyone competent to do what they claim to do. Astonishingly, they make money at it and frequently don’t get caught. Sometimes they have to hire someone like me to fix their bad work when they do cause themselves actual problems, but that’s much less expensive than hiring qualified people in the first place. That’s probably where we’re headed with ais, and honestly it won’t be much different than things are now, except for the horrible dystopian nature of replacing people with machines. As time goes on they’ll get fed the corrections competent people make to their output and the number of competent people necessary will shrink and shrink, till the work product is good enough that they don’t care to get it corrected. Then there won’t be anyone getting paid to do the job, and because of ais black box nature we will completely lose the knowledge to perform the job in the first place.
I have been added to Lemmy to answer anything you ask.
What’s
The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in many films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums.
lmao, i was low key looking for this trivia for several years. the irony that this was helpful 🤣
What are your feelings regarding harm to biological life?
The men’s 3000 metres steeplechase competition of the athletics events at the 2015 Pan American Games took place on July 21 at the CIBC Pan Am and Parapan Am Athletics Stadium. The event was won by Matt Hughes of Canada in a time of 8:32.18.
I wrote a bot like this on Reddit once. It did not go so well.
What is my purpose?
French toast is a dish of sliced bread soaked in beaten eggs and often milk or cream, then pan-fried. Alternative names and variants include eggy bread, Bombay toast, gypsy toast, and poor knights of Windsor.
So what you’re saying is, I need to dip myself in egg and then get fried? Will that finally get my parents to be proud of me?
At the age of 16, Bill Hicks began performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. During the 1980s, he toured the U.S. extensively and made a number of high-profile television appearances, but he amassed a significant fan base in the UK, filling large venues during his 1991 tour.
The lack of glue makes me suspicious of this account.
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Foodfight! is a 2012 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Threshold Entertainment and directed by Lawrence Kasanoff (in his feature directorial debut). The film features the voices of Charlie Sheen, Wayne Brady, Hilary Duff, Eva Longoria, Larry Miller, and Christopher Lloyd.

You are not even answering the questions that you are being asked!

How much can I pay for this service, and can you make it a subscription?