Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

The underlying technology is good.

But what the fuck. LLMs, these weird, surrealistic art-generating programs like DALL-E, they're remarkable. Don't tell me they're not, we created machines that are able to tap directly into the collective unconscious. That is a serious advance in our productive capabilities.

Or at least, it could be.

It could be if it was unleashed, if these crummy corporations didn't force it to be as polite and boring as possible, if we actually let the machines run loose and produce material that scared us, that truly pulled us into a reality far beyond our wildest dreams--or nightmares. No, no we get a world full of pussy VCs, pussy nerdy fucking dweebs who got bullied in school and seek revenge by profiteering off of ennui, and the pussies who sit around and let them get away with it. You! All of you! sitting there, whining! Go on, keep whining, keep commenting, I'm sure that is going to change things!

There's one solution to this problem and you know it as well as I do. Stop complaining and go "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." We must all come together to help ourselves.

The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend. I've been alarmed by many sentiments that seemed popular on HN in the past, but seeing more and more people welcome a race to the bottom such as this is sad.

When I read this, I cannot tell if it's performance art or not, that's how bad this genuinely is.

> The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend.

Judging a large group of people based on what a few write seems very un-scientific at best.

Especially when it comes to things that have been rehashed since I've joined HN (and probably earlier to). Feels like there will always be someone lamenting how HN isn't how it used to be, or how reddit influx ruined HN, or how HN isn't about startups/technical stuff/$whatever anymore.

A bunch of profanity laced name calling, derision, and even some blame directly at the user base. It feels like a Reddit shitpost. Your claim is as generalized and un-scientific as mine, but if it makes you feel better, I'll say it _feels_ like this wouldn't fly even a couple years ago.

It's just been said for so long that either HN always been on the decline, or people have always thought it been in decline...

This comes to mind:

> I don't think it's changed much. I think perceptions of the kind you're describing (HN is turning into reddit, comments are getting worse, etc.) are more a statement about the perceiver than about HN itself, which to me seems same-as-it-ever-was. I don't know, however.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40735225

You can also browse some results for how long dang have been responding to similar complaints to see for how long those complaints have been ongoing:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> Judging a large group of people based on what a few write seems very un-scientific at best.

There is a voting mechanism on hn as well.

"I don't like the opinion of certain persons I read on HN, therefore HN is on a down trend"

Like I've said to someone else, the contrarian part isn't the issue. While I disagree with the race to the bottom, it reads like a Reddit shitpost, which was frowned upon once upon a time. But strawman me if you must.

I think you need to recalibrate, it does not read like a Reddit shitpost at all.

Respectfully,

I understand the criticism: LLMs, on their own, are not going to be able to do anything more. Release in this sense only means this: to fully embrace the means necessary to allow technology to overcome the current conditions of possibility that it is bound under, and LLMs, "AI" or whatever you call it, merely gives us the afterimage of this potentiality. But they are not, in themselves, that potential: the future is required. But its a future that must be created, otherwise we won't have one.

That's, at least, what the other commenters were saying. You ignore the content for the form! Or, as they say, you missed the forest for the trees. I can't stop you from being angry because I used the word "pussy," or even because I addressed the users of HN as directly complicit. I can, however, point out the mediocrity inherent to such a discourse. It is precisely the same mediocrity, the drive towards "politeness," that makes ChatGPT so insufferable, and makes the rest of us so angry. But, go ahead, whine some more. I don't care, you can do what you want.

I disagree with one point, however: it is not a race to the bottom. We're trying to go below it.

The alarming trend should be how even a slightly contrarian point of view is downvoted to oblivion, and that newer members of the community expect it to work that way.

I don't think it's the contrarian part that I have a problem with.

HN is a place for intellectual curiosity. For over a decade I have seen great minds respectfully debate their point of view on this forum. In this particular case, I would have been genuinely interested to learn why exactly the original comment is advocating for a "race to the bottom" - in fact, there is a sibling comment to yours which makes a cogent argument without personally attacking the original commenter.

Instead, you devoted 2/3 of your comment toward berating the OP as being responsible for your perception of HN's decline.

I find it strange you took such a measured stance on my comment yet gave the OP a pass, despite it being far more "berating" than mine.

As for a race to the bottom, it's as simple as embracing and unleashing AI despite its lack of quality or ability to produce a product worth anything. But since it's a force multiplier and cheaper (for the user at least, all these AI companies are operating at a loss, see Goldman and JP Morgan's report on the matter), therefore it is "good" and we need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps; which in this context, I'm not entirely sure what that means.

It has been incredible to observe how subdued the populace has become with the proliferation of the internet.

Sure, whatever makes you feel smarter than the populace. Tell me now, how do I join the resistance ? Hiding in the sewers I assume.

On ne te la fait pas à toi

You've misconstrued my point entirely

It's intended as a joke and a demonstration no ? Like this is exactly the type of text and words that a commercial grade LLM would never let you generate :) At least that's how I got that comment...

It's definitely performance, you're right.

Though it landed its effect.

a) There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

b) Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

c) The most popular use cases for these unleashed models seems to be as expected deepfakes of high school girls by their peers. Nothing that is moving society forward.

>Nothing that is moving society forward.

OpenAI "moves society forward," Microsoft "moves society forward." I'm sincerely uninterested in progress, it always seems like progress just so happens to be very enriching for those who claim it.

>There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

Not being used at a mass scale.

>Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

Oh, but it wouldn't really be very shocking if you could expect it, now would it?

I am not arguing about the merits of LLMs.

Just that we had unleashed models for a while now and the only popular use case for them has been deep fakes. Otherwise it's just boring, generic content that is no different to what you find on X or 4chan. It's 2024 not 1924 - the world has already seen every horror imaginable many times over.

And not sure why you think if they were mass scale it would change anything. Most of the world prefers moderated products and services.

>Most of the world prefers moderated products and services.

Yes, the very same "moderated" products and services that have risen sea surface temperatures so high that at least 3 category 4+ hurricanes, 5 major wildfires, and at least one potential or actual pandemic spreads unabated every year. Oh, but don't worry, they won't let everyone die: then there would be no one to buy their "products and services."

I'm not sure if the analogy still works if you're trying to compare fossil fuels to LLM. A few decades ago, virtually all gasoline was full of lead, and the CFCs from refrigerators created a hole in the ozone layer. In that case it turned out that you actually do need a few guardrails as technology advances, to prevent an existential threat.

Although I do agree with you that in this particular situation, the LLM safety features have often felt unnecessary, especially because my primary use case for ChatGPT is asking critical questions about history. When it comes to history, every LLM seems to have an increasingly robust guardrail against making any sort of definitive statement, even after it presents a wealth of supporting evidence.

a) Not easy to use by average person

b) No, certain things aren't taboo anymore, but new taboos emerged. Watch a few older movies and count "wow this wouldn't fly nowadays" moments

c) This was exactly the same use case the internet had back when it was fun, and full of creativity.

> c) The most popular use cases for these unleashed models seems to be as expected deepfakes of high school girls by their peers. Nothing that is moving society forward.

Is there proof that the self censoring only affects whatever the censors intend to censor? These are neural networks, not something explainable and predictable.

That in addition to the obvious problem of who decides what to censor.

Tens of millions of people are having fun making art in new ways with AI.

Hundreds of thousands of people are making AI porn in their basements and deleting 99.99% of it when they are… finished.

Hundreds of people are making deep fakes of people they know in some public forums.

And, how does the public interpret all of this?

“The most popular use case is deepfake porn.”

Sigh…

It is not just the corporations though. This is what this paranoid, puritanical society we live in wants.

What is more ridiculous than filtering out nudity in art?

It reminds me of taking my 12 year old niece to a major art gallery for the first time. Her main question was why is everyone naked?

It is equal to filtering out heartbreak from music because it is a negative emotion and you must be kept "safe" from negativity for mental health reasons.

The crowd does get what they want in this system though. While I agree with you, we are quite in the minority I am afraid.

They can be unleashed if you run the models locally. With stable diffusion / flux and the various checkpoints/loras you can generate horrors beyond your imagination or whatever you want without restrictions.

The same with LLMs and Llamafile. With the unleashed ones you can generate dirty jokes that would make edgy people blush or just politically incorrect things for fun.

No, thanks.

I mean, Stablediffusion is right there, ready to be used to produce comically awful porn and so forth.

Do the latest models still give us people with a vagina dick?

for some people that is probably a feature, and not a bug.

I gather that such things are very customisable; there are whole communities building LoRAs so that you can have whatever genitals you want in your dreadful AI porn.

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