David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Wow, someone created a Mastodon account specifically to jump into a thread and disagree with me about 'AI' hype. His example of how LLMs are adding value to the economy? They make cold calling more efficient for salespeople. Yup, spam really is the most important use case for LLM fans.
toldtheworld@david_chisnall serious ask: I've been trying to compile a list of use cases for which generative AI is a better or more viable alternative. The one example I can come up with is for visually impaired people to interact with pictures sent to them (asking questions about them) or with product at stores without having to wait for a human to be available. That's it. Do you know any others?
Rachel B@toldtheworld @david_chisnall I've heard it's an improvement on conventional speech-to-text. Anecdotal, but anecdotes from people with e.g. major motor disabilities who actually rely on voice typing as a tool.
viq@individeweal @toldtheworld @david_chisnall I couldn't quickly find it, but in last half week or so I saw about someone with specific accessibility needs around mobility having an LLM create a tool working how they needed it to, IIRC for navigating on computer.
mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)@toldtheworld @david_chisnall the visually-impaired people we've seen around here say that the slop descriptions are worse than nothing. all of this cheerleading about "good for people with disabilities" appears to come from tech weenies doing white-saviorism.
@atax1a @david_chisnall I heard it from a blind person at a disability awareness center (Dialog im Dunkel)
@toldtheworld @david_chisnall ok, so you have one anecdote of one person getting one use out of it, whereas the rest of the world is drowning in slop.
i don't think this tech has any legitimate uses.
Dickon Hood@toldtheworld @david_chisnall I do, as I've been asked to look into the slop machines at work -- and yes, I objected. But there's a use-case I've not seen mentioned and that's using the embeddings models to do semantic search.
SS isn't new, but doing it now is a matter of installing ollama, and postgres with pgvector, and getting on with it.
It doesn't solve the ethical issues, but it genuinely does work *if* you're willing to overlook that.
@dickon @toldtheworld @david_chisnall why is it that everyone who says "if you overlook the ethical issues" says it at the end of their argument? is it that because if you started with that, you'd come off as a clown willing to trade your ethics for convenience?
@atax1a @toldtheworld @david_chisnall I think it's at least partly because people minimise it so much that most don't worry about it as much as they should. We all know it's utter hell doing the work that's required to make these models, but sadly most don't, and so don't think about it.
Who *actually* cares about some poor sod in the 'global South' (tm) who is training this bullshit? Who really cares about the environmental wreckage it causes? And all the rest of it. It's been normalised away.
@atax1a @toldtheworld @david_chisnall That's no excuse, BTW, but it seems to be the world we're living in.
@dickon yes well our question is "why did you do the thing when you could have not"
@atax1a And only the likes of Sam Altman can give you an answer.
You may as well ask Trump why he decided to start a war he could only lose. You're not going to get a useful response from either.
@dickon dude we're talking about you having no self-awareness here and reproducing the exact lackadaisical carelessness and thought-terminating cliche garbage that we can get from any slop purveyor. check yourself.
@atax1a I'm not even arguing. I hated the whole thing, still do, and always will. There was a direct question, and I answered it. My reason for putting the ethical considerations at the end is the audience: Mastodon users are usually very well aware of them, and it's preaching to the converted.
If you think I'm minimising the damage this bullshit is causing, then I apologise; that is not my intent. Don't get me wrong: I want this to die, now, and the sooner the better.
@dickon nah i think going "well, there are some legitimate uses", elaborately detailing them, and then finishing with "it works but you have to throw away your ethics" is a bad tactic regardless of your supposed audience and, as mentioned, is indistinguishable from many a pro-slop argument
@atax1a I never said it was legitimate, merely that it does work, and, TBH, works quite well. But it's the *one* use that I've found -- and I looked quite hard -- and I agree: it isn't compelling, especially if you need to jettison your morals.
I still hate it. I wish I hadn't been asked to do it, but I was, and I wasn't in a position to say no.