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Comment by lostoldsession | Hacker News Reader

Is there really something of value to be had by fighting a war against the coming tide of AI that can spit out whatever you ask for?

To me it looks like old world professors calling the council because the abacus is under threat by the calculator, and we need to ensure the students are absolutely not using the calculator for their abacus studies. This all being despite the fact that society at large is moving as fast as it can to leave the abacus for calculators.

I can't help that but feel that people have lost the forest for the trees. So transfixed on the small steps that they have completely lost track of why we take all those small steps, and the utility that they ultimately provide.

If you want to study whatever subject and become an expert, history or chemical engineering, cool, go ahead. I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.

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> I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.

AI will never replace experts.

Someone still has to curate the firehose of information returned. What's the point then?

AI can only interpolate a response from internet sources, and claims of plagiarism are already coming hard. The internet was never a good source of expertise.

If an AI can be trained on the internet, it can be trained on a textbook or lecture notes. I think it’s shortsighted to insist that AI won’t replace experts based on the training sets that AIs are currently being trained on.

Who writes the books and lectures? This is literally chicken and egg. Can't have eggs without chickens. Can't have chickens without eggs. This is not an oversimplification.

Yes, now you're getting it.

What happens when the AI can write itself? What happens when it can design its own hardware? And assemble it?

What have we created when it is fully capable of self replication?

Stagnant crap nobody wants?

AI can detect pancreatic cancer better than the best radiologists. The belief that machine learning cannot surpass human intelligence is contrary to the evidence.

Citation for your pancreatic cancer claim? I am skeptical, or perhaps we have different definitions of better.

That’s what Wall street said about expert traders. And then replaced them all with bots and gave the capital to the bots to be traded.

I remember when Garry Kasparov insisted that centaurs -- computer+human — do better than just a computer or just a human. He held out longer than most in this belief. But seriously… can you name a field where computers and bots can NEVER beat humans?

Any topic where being an expert is not mere memorization or imitation without comprehension, and discovering new facts is not just relentlessly churning through a rule set and producing what was already self-evident.

I don't disagree whether computers are good at computation. That's what they're for. I disagree that AI can replace experts because expertise is a moving target.

Where AI approximates a response given at some point in time or within a range of time written by a crowd of people who are not necessarily experts, experts must inevitably contradict themselves on something and update their theories. AI as currently implemented will always lag behind human experts.

In other words, do you seriously believe that an AI trained on scientific publications from the middle ages would eventually rediscover what we know now and beyond? I think it would be stuck forever hallucinating recipes to turn lead into gold.

>AI will never replace experts

Just like it will never beat a top ranked GO player.

Go has static rules that can be mastered and a finite number of games possible. Expertise is always evolving.

> a finite number of games possible.

Effectively infinite with modern hardware. AI did not solve Go by making an effort to explore the state space. That's what's amazing about it.

There are vastly more possible games than atoms in the observable universe. The fact that it is finite is irrelevant.

> The internet was never a good source of expertise.

Agree, but world listen internet "experts". A lot.

What does 'never' mean here. Do you literally mean that it can't happen even if human society progresses for another millenia? Or just that it won't happen in your career. The latter is somewhat plausible to me, but the former is only happening if there is a civilization ending catastrophe.

For this to remain true for the indefinite future we must assume that strong AI is strictly impossible. Our scientific knowledge today does not suggest that this is the case.

It already has in several useful, practical ways.

Experts used to evaluate your credit application. Experts would adjust depth of field in portrait photography, and bracketed exposure in HDR photography. Experts would beat you at chess.

AI now does the majority of instances of these things and many more. Not every instance, so you can say that experts have not been completely replaced, but they have been substantially replaced.

As for ‘can only interpolate a response from internet sources’, first, there’s no requirement that training data comes from the internet, and second, if the AI has learned the correct function, ‘interpolation’ is not a criticism.

It is valuable for SPAM filters, and other fraudulent activity. If you get an e-mail from someone you know and it says "I need itunes gift cards right away!" most people know that is a scam. But if you get an e-mail that appears to be following up on a previous conversation, you are much more likely to click on a link in that e-mail.

I doubt spammers will be the only ones leveraging AI generated text. I'm sure legit marketing people and even administrators and support staff will benefit from using AI written responses. So you're going to filter out valuable emails as well.

There are no valuable emails from 'legit marketing people', especially so if they're using AI-generated messages to hit you with a firehose.

Maybe not for you, I subscribe to brands I like.

Typically, outside experts are useful for out of distribution inference about a particular situation. Fine-tuned generative AI is self evidently not good at generalizing outside the scope of its training data, and becoming reliant on it for this task is foolish. Signed, AI researcher.

I mean, is the very situation you stated not a situation you are trying to solve? Would you stumble upon such a solution and bury it because AI isn't supposed to be more informed than experts?

I feel you — but there's another possible reason, which would be to (optionally) separate out the AI generated content from future model training.

these kind of comments “I will hire an AI instead of a human” are all quite ironic.

the only things you will find out from asking an AI consultant is what occurred to _you_ to ask it.

Interacting with a human will always give you more ideas, opinions and .. more questions.

And you both can use the AI consultant, and get that important thing done.

This generation of AI? Sure.

Five or ten generations of AI from now? I'd place my full bet firmly on "Humans aren't nearly as special as they tell themselves they are"

I value being able to spot a T-1000 in disguise!

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