AI Is a Waste of Time
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I am actually in favor of a global debate on AI at this point, probably led by the UN so to reach as much nations as possible. Because we already know this is going to be needed as the year rolls on. Because the ball is moving fast.
Like all tech there is hype then trough of disillusionment. NFTs are in the trough and AI chat tools will get there soon, just like self driving cars are in it right now.
I think all the high valuations are money laundering. You create a pre-order system and get your friends on it, then buy their monkey pics for your near-stolen (FTX, etc) crypto and they give some back under the table.
> web3 had a big presence
The NFT tech is pretty cool. It lets (by packaging a friendly UI around it) people be their own identity providers.
Yes, but the same can be said of most of the art world, and that has survived for Millenia.
Why would their response to AI be any different?
But if the numbers do get scary, I think we do need to have a collective sit down as societies come under stress of job loss.
There is a use for NFTs, and I could see implementations being a thing in industries like title insurance and deeds. But as it stands, right now it's mostly bag holders and money laundering.
Start with a goofy app that accurately discerns what ugly sweaters you would wear to semi-automated product recommendation engines.
Institutions are clearly threatened by this tech as it promises to upend many professional fields and economic relationships. In my case I'm seeing teachers suggest that GPT will ruin education, as though we haven't said the same thing about calculators or the internet or whatever the next thing is for generations.
Like many similar articles in the NYT and WaPo this article is nearly anti-intellectual is it's lack of basic research and curiosity. It's like these people haven't used the thing for even a half hour. But yet they speak with authority on the implications.
That demonstrates fear or gatekeeping. It demonstrates an interest in slowing down the change we are seeing. And it's pretty embarrassing to watch because you can't really hide that agenda when you don't know what you are talking about and are only coming from a place of defending the status quo.
Who buys into this? Who is this for? Who is convinced? They must be talking to people who want this answer and find it comforting. But given that it's not really very insightful or true, and has no shelf life, what's the point?
I really wonder.
Oh, and there are the always-green ones about calculators, and encyclopedias (that changed into wikipedia). Of course there is the famous one from ancient Greece about writing... So, yeah, consider the population dumbed down already.
Socrates in Phaedrus. I searched it with ChatGPT. Could only vaguely remember it and indeed ChatGPT found the passage. Socrates was right...
I guess this one is handcrafted free-range GPT-free 100% authentic human-made and some people may find that important.
Because I gotta tell yeah, whatever you want to believe, if you were one of my students and you were tasked with summarizing this article, you would probably fail the assignment.
AI can help generate text, but reading and comprehension is still something you need to care about as a human, especially if you are trying to help people save time and understand things! Its an honorable intention, but its still something you have to follow through with and do well. Otherwise you are doing more harm than good.
If you're interested, maybe a little direction:
1. What kinds of things does the author identify as "wasting time"? 2. Does the author think wasting time and play are bad things? 3. Does the author in this article think AI is bad?
Awhile back one of their reporters blocked me on Twitter for mildly questioning the government’s narrative around a political event.
If you actually read it, the author uses image gen models and such a lot, and is opining on how technology that allows us to tinker and "waste time" can be more impactful than technology that is simply "productive."
I was born in the early 80s. There are only 2 other techno-socio moments in my life that have hit as hard: (1) the web around 1994, and (2) the smartphone. The appearance of the current iteration of generative AI for public consumption in the last few months dwarfs both.
My own daily working patterns, expectations for my future, for my children's desirable skillsets have been entirely shifted. The entire value of generating information has been totally upended. If it can be created by AI -- and it's looking like most information-based things can/will be soon -- then humans now have a very different position in the world. Why I need to list any specifics at this point is beyond me.
This is going to spread through the world like a fire.
It’s incredibly obvious how AI tools can be applied to many different problems.
So even if it’s the same people “pushing” both, that doesn’t mean they are the same. These people are tech enthusiasts who want to make money, and they will be excited by any promising new tech.
Getting your life savings out of a warzone
This type of use mostly seems like a crypto bro fantasy to me, but I’d definitely be interested to see some reporting on this actually working.
I don't think your comparisons to civilization butressing inventions like fire and writing and language (the last, to be fair, is an evolutionary invention, not a cultural one) are unfair or exagerrated. Things are about to get very strange in short order.
ChatGPT is, IMO, about the same value as a freshly graduated programmer — it would be a mistake to let it loose unsupervised, but on the other hand, what do junior devs cost to hire these days?
The level of bullshit will be unparalleled. Because of AI.
- Smart pre-job safety app that looks across past observations and incidents to make job-specific recommendations about safety risks
- Automatically summarize detailed hourly rig reports into daily summary reports. This is an ongoing savings of $1.2 million per year in labor
- Review rig reports for evidence of formation gas for a study on casing integrity. This was a one-off savings of 400 engineer hours
- Perform clustering and topic modeling of employee HR development goals and schedule training classes based on the areas of greatest demand
- Custom chatbot to answer questions about how to use SAP. We have ~50 training PPTs that nobody reads. The chatbot answers questions using the documents
Regular office workers can make automations, devs can enhance documentation with LLMs, LLM powered search and spreadsheets, these all save time.
Businesses that don't take advantage of this will be left in the dust. In a few years not using it will be like not allowing your employees to use Google, because there is fake news on the internet.
The time efficiency gained will surpass the hallucinations, just like how people for the most part have learned to use the internet for their benefit despite all of the garbage on the net.
ChatGPT hallucinates so many things that don't exist, e.g., buttons or menu options in programs that don't exist, not considering file compatibility issues etc. I could go on for hours.
If the average problem is "I got locked out of my account" or basic and common stuff like this that just warrants giving someone a link or telling them to reboot their router, sure, maybe it'll be better than dealing with a human being in x out of y occurrences, hallucination not withstanding.
If it's something more complex like needing an NGINX configuration when a company has only ever considered Apache htaccess in the past, the customer is probably seven kinds of fucked. I wasted days trying to get something other than nonsense out of ChatGPT for an NGINX config, even going so far as to feed it documentation and the lines it would need for implementing URL rewrites. It kept hallucinating things that didn't exist in the documentation, and was a complete waste of time. Even after correcting it umpteen times, it still gave the same response. There's no reasoning applied.
Is there potential? Sure. But it isn't replacing human beings in a lot of cases. And for even more cases, just using a search function on a knowledgebase or search engine will yield more accurate information than trusting it isn't hallucinating. I have wasted far more time than I've saved due to hallucinations.
If all customer support does is search the problem on a knowledgebase, sure, it makes sense, because the support agent is already just doing what the LLM does if they can't apply logic and reasoning to the query. But why not just access the knowledgebase directly and not risk hallucinations?
I disagree very strongly over the knowledgebase being inferior to the LLM data set.
The data sets of LLMs are not stored in a human-readable format. The data sets of LLMs are likely a worse means of storing data because the outputs are prone to hallucination, and if an output can only be rendered via an LLM itself, well, therein lies your problem. You can't trust that it's right and not hallucinating if you can't read the data it is using.
I do not see how a LLM will help in a way that was not achievable before.
> In 1994, the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer studied how various 20th-century technologies had spread among households. They concluded that “time using” technologies (for example, TV and radio) diffused faster than “time saving” technologies (vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines).
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/issue-cartoons/cartoons-s...