I've felt a bit weird making them because I feel I'm profiting off of "the AI hype train" rather than genuine interest in a product. While I'm not making any money off my projects, my analytics tell me I'm getting 10-20x more traffic on my AI-related projects than my other ones.
I'm just curious - does anyone feel similar to me?
I think ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are pretty cool but, like blockchain before it, there's a lot of low-effort projects that are riding on investor-hype-money. I became intimately familiar with it, because I got a lot of recruiters reaching out to me with AI positions.
When I would take an interview, the company was almost invariably "add an LLM to something where an LLM doesn't really fit", and the person in charge was someone with basically no industry experience who had made a rough prototype and had managed to convince some VC folks that what they're doing is legendary. Obviously most people doing stuff with AI are perfectly fine humans, and I'm not suggesting otherwise, but I do think that the "AI entrepreneur" is attracting the "get rich quick" type of people.
STORY TIME:
I had one case where I took an interview, and they were asking me to whiteboard a notification system. That was totally fine, so I started drawing up diagrams, but they would stop me occasionally to ask for proper nouns [1], so that they could write them down. Initially I didn't think much of it, but after the interview was over I got the vibe that they used me for unpaid consulting because the questions were more specific . They did make me an offer, but it was way too low so I turned it down.
A month later I get an email from their CTO, asking for some advice on distributed task scheduling, e.g. which libraries would I use, how do I make sure things are done in the right order. I give a very simplified response with like three links to open source documentation. He responds back asking for more clarification, and I responded with "any further discussion on the matter will require me to charge my hourly consulting rate. Please let me know if you would like to continue this discussion so I can prepare an invoice."
He stopped responding after that.
[1] Which message queue was that again? Which binary serialization library? Where do you download those?
The market is throwing attention and money at these AI products because one might end up being truly useful as a product. You should be rewarded for your efforts in exploring the product space, trying things out, creating real value through application/product engineering.
I'll also say that you aren't ripping anyone off. Google / OpenAI want you to find product/market fit so they can rip you off right back. They are essentially outsourcing that work. Get your bag while you can.
If OP can productize and suddenly make an extra $1k/mo, more power to them.
When you boil everything down, most code can technically be recreated by any skilled-enough individual(s). Sometimes, an Enterprise License for some software saves a company enough money relative to the cost of building in-house to where they just want to sign a check and be given an API key, in order to focus on things they're naturally better at.
That's why I have a job. People want coded stuff, without hiring the coding people. My company allows another company to sign a dotted line, and get access to developer braintime.
And I'm taking into notes that usually what we are talking about is llms as AI. But in the other hand, my last project for this company was an energy demand and allocation time series with auto-training in case it detects a huge chunk of error in the last statistics stracted from the model compared to the reality. This project was complex but it impacted the company positively with millions of euros in earnings.
So, yeah. Statistics and programming works. Usually when we talk we do refere llms as AI, but there are other situations where just "classic" data science is useful and more than enough.
> While I'm not making any money off my projects
????
"I feel I'm benefitting from the AI hype train although I'm not making money from my projects."
I've felt the same way working in finance until I learned there are ways to benefit retail investors and not just hedge funds through my work.
I've felt the same way when I was doing freelance server management for minecraft servers, until I started looking at it through the lense of an entertainment-enabler rather than someone leeching off of the very lucrative environment.
Find purpose in the work you're doing, other than money or fame.
You made a new website using tool B, and got 20x the traffic.
So people are finding website B more useful and engaging with it more.
What part do you feel guilty about exactly?
That doesn't follow. The OP guessed that it was only getting more traffic due to AI hype, not necessarily that it's more useful.
"You grew some vegetables and sold $X worth. You refined crack cocaine and sold $1,000x worth. So people are finding crack cocaine more useful and engaging with it more."
Yes, and we've had whole wars over what that does to a society in the large.
It's not confined to HN by any means, but for my entire professional life I've gotten the feeling that programmers, more than any other group, feel guilty about making money.
consequently, i'm horribly underpaid relative to the 7- or 8- figure salaries the generative boys are getting right now!
What I have been arguing is that Microsoft, Google and Amazon are investing billions of dollars on AI. They want to sell this AI as fast as possible to recuperate their investment. This kind of environment won't last forever so you should consider taking advantage as long as you can.
The overwhelming majority of people going to work every day are doing it to earn a paycheck, not because of any genuine interest in what they are doing. You're in good company.
Getting attention isn’t anything to feel bad about.
If you’re lying in your marketing material, feel bad. If not, just build what you want and let the chips fall.
If I were to make a website on some topic where all the content was AI-generated, I would feel scummy whether or not I was profiting financially. It would be adding noise to search results without adding value. It's like setting up wind farms right along the sides of interstates to produce "free power!" from the wind produced by trucks driving by. Except it's not free because it produces a small amount of drag paid for by the gasoline used by the trucks.
If I were to make a website with my own lame thoughts on the same topic, which didn't especially add any new ideas or break any new ground, but it felt significant to me, I wouldn't feel scummy at all. Even if it was just because of some funky CSS layout tricks and not really the content. Contributing a perspective feels fundamentally worthwhile. I think that would be my primary metric, in answer to your question.
Same thing if I were publishing a new package on npm or github or cargo or whatever. If I got the code from an AI or some other existing source and didn't add anything of my own, I would feel pretty scummy. I'd be squatting on some namespace and polluting the results of people looking to solve a problem. If I instead wrote some crappy code that worked the way I wanted it to, or used a novel-to-me technique, then I'd be totally fine with it.
There's a vast gray area in between those, though. It's a judgement call as to whether you've injected "enough" of yourself (your time, effort, care, interest...) to move from scummy to good. It'll vary between people and over time (my beginner project might feel awesome to me and dangerously incompetent to more experienced people.)
(And for the record, making a fully AI-generated website is a great learning experience and a worthwhile endeavor. The question of scumminess only comes up when you publish and promote it. Publishing with a robots.txt to make it be ignored is no problem at all.)
That's my 2¢ anyway.
If parent poster considers the general development or use of AI to be in any way harmful, then riding the hype train to fund/promote worthy goals doesn't absolve them of culpability under conventionally-held morality! However, if parent simply considers AI to be morally neutral, no harm is caused by profiting from it, whether for altruistic purposes or selfish ones.
The money were good though!
Crucially, I do not think predictions that all these issues will improve is a good enough justification to keep innovating before they have improved. Harm caused now is not undone just because we fixed the flaws later.
In that sense: I think feeling weird about the hype train is completely normal, but for different reasons. I do not want any complicity in legitimizing LLMs.
Besides ethical concerns, I also think the myriad applications of LLMs are mostly misguided market waste. In that sense, profiting off the hype could be seen as you simply slurping up some of that waste for yourself, and while I don't like that function of the system, I think the system is the issue rather than you trying to exist within it. If you don't share my ethical concerns or aren't objecting to the market's function of trying all ideas and assuming the good ones profit, then you're probably not really doing anything scummy by your own standards.
<bondvillain>...and it's not like we literally eat Eloi, anyway. I'm chuffed with a 5% cut, so it's more like being a vampire, a parasite, than a werewolf, a predator. What was that management story about the chicken and the pig at breakfast? The sons of Mary* are only involved with me; the Eloi were committed to the Morlocks, after all.</bondvillain>
Wrappers around ChatGPT have already provided more value generation than any prod blockchain implementation I've ever heard of that couldn't otherwise be implemented as a distributed db.
Don't feel scummy; instead realize that you're learning how to better work with AI and getting a better feel for what's really possible.
Edit: Do you feel scummy about planting tulips, using radio, or the internet? All three of those had bubbles / hype too.
I find that viewpoint rather myopic. Once information is generally available, it's unreasonable to expect that you can retain control of how that information is used.
I don't know if your AI products are scummy or not, but the fact that you're asking this question makes me less worried about you than a lot of other folks out there furiously rushing to get their AI pre-crime hot dog detectors rushed out the door so they can get on the NASDAQ.