There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.
What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.
Top quality luddite opinions right here. Plenty of fear and oprobium being directed against the technology, while taking the kleprocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as a given that can’t be challenged.
That seems to be the theme of the era.
Yes, it is incompatible with the status quo. That’s a good thing. The status quo is unsustainable. The status quo is on course to kill us all.
The only real danger AI brings is it will let our current corrupt leaders and corrupt institutions be more efficient in their corruption. The problem there is not the AI; it’s the corruption.
Improving human efficiency is essentially the purpose of technology after all. Any new invention will generally have this effect.
deleted by creator
What? It’s the sociological definition of technology. A cultural tool which is used by a community for making a task xyz, easier, faster, more efficient.
Efficiency is an extremely broad term.
What’s your counter definition of technology and efficiency that is leading you to disagree?
But there’s also real danger here today.
For example, ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon
These are easily avoidable problems. There are always reputable authors on topics and why would a self published foraging book by some random person be better than an AI one? You buy books written by experts, especially when it’s about life or death.
“Easily avoidable” if you know to look for them or if they’re labelled appropriately. This was just an example of a danger that autocomplete AI is creating today. Unscrupulous people will continue to shit out AI generated nonsense to try to sell when the seller does zero vetting of the products in their store (one of the many reasons I no longer shop at Amazon).
Many people, especially beginners, are not going to take the time to fully investigate their sources of knowledge, and to be honest they probably shouldn’t have to. If you get a book about mushrooms from the library, you can probably assume it’s giving valid information as the library has people to vet books. People will see Amazon as being responsible for keeping them safe, for better or worse.
I agree that generally there is a bunch of nonsense about ChatGPT and LLM AIs that isn’t really valid, and we’re seeing some amount of AI bubble happening where it’s a self feeding thing. In the end it will shake out, but before that all happens you have some outright dangerous and harmful things occurring today.
I mean, people should at least check if the publisher is reliable for any information source.
deleted by creator
People should learn how to approach information sources. If that’s not happening AI doesn’t really matter for this discussion.
Then why did you bring it up at all lmfao
Because that’s exactly the point.
I think the idea is that someone buying a basic book on foraging mushrooms isn’t going to know who the experts are.
They’re going to google it, and they’re going to find AI-generated reviews (with affiliate links!) of AI-generated foraging books.
Now, if said AI is generating foraging books more accurate than humans, that’s fine by me. Until that’s the case, we should be marking AI-generated books in some clear way.
The problem is, the LLM AIs we have today literally cannot do this because they are not thinking machines. These AIs are beefed-up autocompletes without any actual knowledge of the underlying information being conveyed. The sentences are grammatically correct and read (mostly) like we would expect human written words to read, however the actual factual content is non-existent. The appearance of correctness just comes from the fact that the model was trained on information that was (probably mostly) correct in the first place.
I mean, we should still be calling these things algorithms and not “AI” as “AI” carries a lot of subtext in people’s minds. Most people understand “algorithms” to mean math, and that dehumanizes it. If you call something AI, all of a sudden people have sci-fi ideas of truly independent thinking machines. ChatGPT is not that, at all.
I agree. And ML may never be able to cross that line.
That said, we’ve been calling it AI for decades now. It was weird enough to me when people started using ML more. I remember the AI classes I took in college, and the AI experts I met in my jobs. Then one day it was “just ML”. In most situations, it’s the same darn thing.
It’s literally baked into the models themselves. AI will reinforce kleptocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as you so aptly put it because the very data it’s trained on is a slice of the society it resembles. People on the internet share bad, racist opinions and the bots trained on this data do the same. When AI models are put in charge of systems because it’s cheaper than putting humans in place, the systems themselves become entrenched in status-quo. The problem isn’t so much the technology itself, but how the technology is being rolled out, driven by capitalistic incentives, and the consequences that brings.
snicker drewdevault is an avid critic of capitalism. thats entirely the point of this post actually.
Thank you for educating me twice: Kleptocracy and kakistocracy. Now I can refer to my government with astute Greek terminology!
The fact that AI evangelists have the gall to call everyone who disagrees with them “luddites” is absolutely astounding to me. It’s a word I see people like you throw around over and over again.
And before you heap the same nonsense on me, I use AI and have for years. But the entire discourse by “advocates” is quarter-baked, pretentious, and almost religious. It’s bizarre. These are just tools, and people calling for us to think about how we use these tools as more and more ethical issues arise are not “luddites.” They are not halting progress. They are asking reasonable questions about what we want to unleash on ourselves. Meanwhile nothing is stopping you or I from using LLM’s and running our own local instance of ChatGPT-like systems. Or whatever else we can come up with. So what is the problem?
Imagine if we had taken an extra five minutes before embracing Facebook and all the other social media that came to define “Web2.0.” Maybe things could be slightly better. Maybe we wouldn’t have as big of a radicalization/silo-ing issue. But we don’t know, because anyone who dares to even ask “should we do this?” in the tech world is treated like they need to be sent to a retirement home for their own safety. It’s anathema, it’s heresy.
So once again: What is the problem? What are those people doing to you? Why are they so threatening? Why are you so angry and insulting them?
I feel like we are just entering the new iteration of crypto bro culture. 
There are definitely people who are harmed by FUD like this. For example the current writers strike, which has 11,000 people putting down tools… indefinitely shutting down global movie productions that employ millions of people and leaving them unemployed for who knows how long.
I stand with my colleagues in the WGA/SAG-AFTRA. Their support for the strike is near unanimous. As is SAG-AFTRA’s (97.91%). Do not speak on things you don’t understand, and definitely don’t leverage the collective action of those of us in the film industry against our own interests to make some oblique argument about AI.
I don’t have anything against you or your colleagues. You’ve got every right to strike if that’s what you want to do.
But there are millions of people being harmed by the strike. That’s a simple fact.
Journalists/etc need to do their job and provide good balanced information on critical issues like this one. FUD like Drew Devalt posted inflames the debate and makes it nearly impossible for reasonable people to figure out what to do about Large Language Models… because like it or not, they exist, and they’re not going away.
PS: while I’m not a film writer, I am paid to spend my day typing creative works and my industry is also facing upheaval. I also have friends who work in the film industry, so I’m very aware and sympathetic to the issues.
Unrestricted AI usage without creative attribution and runaway studio power is harming them. The strike is a result of that. The strike isn’t happening because they’re luddites about AI. They know exactly what it’s capable of. Your argument isn’t grounded in reality and is just you piling assumption on top of assumption.
You aren’t dumb, clearly, yet you are acting ignorant of the issue and being so reductionist it’s borderline dishonest. Especially if you are familiar with the industry and its stated woes.