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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize.

if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins.

It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a slot machine is that AI will never output cash directly, only the possibility of an output that could make money. So if you're lucky with your first gamble, it'll give you a second one to try.

Gambling all the way down.

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This only makes sense if you have an all or nothing concept of the value of output from AI.

Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution, even if that value is just narrowing the latent space of potential outputs by keeping track of failed paths in the context window, so that it can avoid that path in a future answer after you provide followup feedback.

The vast majority of slot machine pulls produce no value to the player. Every single prompt into an LLM tool produces some form of value. I have never once had an entirely wasted prompt unless you count the AI service literally crashing and returning a "Service Unavailable" type error.

One of the stupidest takes about AI is that a partial hallucination or a single bug destroys the value of the tool. If a response is 90% of the way there and I have to fix the 10% of it that doesn't meet my expectations, then I still got 90% value from that answer.

> Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution

This has not been my experience, maybe sometimes, but certainly not always.

As an example: asking chatgpt/gemini about how to accomplish some sql data transformation set me back in finding the right answer because the answer it did give me was so plausible but also super duper not correct in the end. Would've been better off not using it in that case.

Brings to mind "You can't build a ladder to the moon"

In your anecdote I still see this as producing value. If I was lacking in knowledge about the problem space, and therefore fell into the trap of pursuing a "plausible but also super duper not correct" answer from an LLM, then I could have easily fell into that trap solo as well.

But with an LLM, I was able to eliminate this bad path faster and earlier. I also learned more about my own lack of knowledge and improved myself.

I truly mean it when I say that I have never had an unproductive experience with modern AI. Even when it hallucinates or gives me a bad answer, that is honing my own ability to think, detect inconsistencies, examine solutions for potential blindspots, etc.

> One of the stupidest takes about AI is that a partial hallucination or a single bug destroys the value of the tool. If a response is 90% of the way there and I have to fix the 10% of it that doesn't meet my expectations, then I still got 90% value from that answer.

That assumes that the value of a solution is linear with the amount completed. If the Pareto Principle holds (80% of effects come from 20% of causes), then not getting that critical 10+% likely has an outsized effect on the value of the solution. If I have to do the 20% of the work that's hard and important after taking what the LLM did for the remainder, I haven't gained as much because I still have to build the state machine in my head to understand the problem-space well enough to do that coding.

This isn't a bad thing at all. It just means that AI utilization doesn't have quite the exponential impact that many marketers are trying to sell. And that's okay.

I personally think of AI tools as an incremental aid that enables me to focus more of my efforts on the really hard 10-20% of the problem, and get paid more to excel at doing what I do best already.

This assumes you can easily and reliably identify the 10% you need to fix.

Why wouldn't you be able to do identify the 10% that you need to fix?

AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain. I find it ironic that many people complain that they have a hard time identifying the hallucinations in LLM generated content, and then also complain that LLM's are making LLM users dumber.

The problem here is also the solution. LLM's make smarter people even smarter, because they get even better at thinking about the hard parts, while not wasting time thinking about the easy parts.

But people who don't want to think at all about what they are doing... well they do get dumber.

It is extremely well known in the world of programming that reading code is substantially harder than writing it. Just because you have the code in front of you does not mean that determining that it is correct is a trivial (or even moderately easy) task.

That's right. I don't think that AI makes coding easy or trivial. What it does do, is it accelerates your ability to get past the easy and trivial stuff, to the hard parts.

When you get deep into engineering with AI you will find yourself spending a dramatically larger percentage of your time thinking about the hardest things you have ever thought about, and dramatically less time thinking about basic things that you've already done hundreds of times before.

You will find the limits of your abilities, then push past those limits like a marathon runner gaining extra endurance from training.

I think the biggest lie in the AI industry is that AI makes things easier. No, if anything you will find yourself working on harder and harder things because the easy parts are done so quickly that all that is left is the hard stuff.

> It should be regulated as gambling, because it is.

That's wild. Anything with non-deterministic output will have this.

> "Anything with non-deterministic output will have this.

Anything with non-deterministic output that charges money ...

Edit Added words to clarify what I meant.

i think at least a lot of things (if not most things) that i pay for have an agreed-upon result in exchange for payment, and a mitigation system that'll help me get what i paid for in the event that something else prevents that from happening. if you pay for something and you don't know what you're going to get, and you have to keep paying for it in the hopes that you get what you want out of it... that sounds a lot like gambling. not exactly, but like.

If I ask an artist to draw a picture, I still have to pay for the service, even if I am unhappy without the result.

Sounds like you should negotiate a better contract next time, such as one that allows for revisions.

In the US? No, you actually do not need to pay for the service if you deem the quality of the output to be substandard. In particular with art, it's pretty standard to put in a non-refundable downpayment with the final payment due on delivery.

You only lose those rights in the contracts you sign (which, in terms of GPT, you've likely clicked through a T&C which waves all right to dispute or reclaim payment).

If you ask an artist to draw a picture and decide it's crap, you can refuse to take it and to pay for it. They won't be too happy about it, but they'll own the picture and can sell it on the market.

There must be artists working on an hourly contract rate.

Maybe art is special, but there are other professions where someone can invest heaps of time and effort without delivering the expected result. A trial attorney, treasure hunter, oil prospector, app developer. All require payment for hours of service, regardless of outcome.

It'll mostly depend on the contract you sign with these services and the state you live in.

When it comes to work that requires craftmanship it's pretty common to be able to not pay them if they do a poor job. It may cost you more than you paid them to fix their mistake, but you can generally reclaim your money you paid them if the work they did was egregiously poor.

maybe more accurately anything with non-deterministic output that you have to pay-per-use instead of paying by outcome.

>that you have to pay-per-use instead of paying by outcome.

That's still not gambling and it's silly to pretend it is. It feels like gambling but that's it.

That's incorrect, gambling is about waiting.

Brain scans have revealed that waiting for a potential win stimulates the same areas as the win itself. That's the "appeal" of gambling. Your brain literally feels like it's winning while waiting because it _might_ win.

By this logic:

- I buy stock that doesn't perform how I expected.

- I hire someone to produce art.

- I pay a lawyer to represent me in court.

- I pay a registration fee to play a sport expecting to win.

- I buy a gift for someone expecting friendship.

Are all gambas.

You aren't paying for the result (the win), you are paying for the service that may produce the desired result, and in some cases one of may possibly desirable results.

>I buy stock that doesn't perform how I expected.

Hence the adage "sir, this is a casino"

None of those are a games of chance, except the first.

>None of those are a games of chance, except the first.

Neither is GenAI, the grandparent comment is dumb.

I see the resemblance, though. Money goes into mystery machine, thing you were hoping for maybe comes out. If it didn't, put more money in until you get the prize you want.

So how exactly does that work for the $25/mo flat fee that I pay OpenAI for chatgpt. They want me to keep getting the wrong output and burning money on their backend without any additional payment from me?

Something of an aside, but this is sort of equivalent to asking "how does that work for the $50 dollars the casino gave me to gamble with for free"? I once made 50 dollars exactly in that way by taking the casino's free tokens and putting them all on black in a single roulette spin. People like that are not the ones companies like that make money off of.

For the amount of money OpenAI burns that $25/mo is functionally the same as zero - they're still in the "first one is free" phase.

Though you could say the same thing about pretty much any VC funded sector in the "Growth" phase. And I probably will.

Is it really gambling, if the house always loses? :-)

Books are not like gambling, they are gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (money — some libraries even give you digital credits for "tokens") and spend them on a book in exchange for the chance of getting something good out of it.

If you don't get something good the first time you buy a book, you might with the next book, or you might not. Either way, the house wins.

It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor — the only difference from a slot machine is that books will never output cash directly, only the possibility of an insight or idea that could make money. So if you're lucky with your first gamble, you'll want to try another.

Gambling all the way down.

I run genAI models on my own hardware for free. How does that fit into your argument?

The fact that you can get your drugs for free doesn't exactly make you less of an addict.

It does literally make it not gambling though, which is what's betting discussed.

It also kind of breaks the whole argument that they're designed to be addictive in order to make you spend more on tokens.

As long as that argument makes you happy, go for it :)

I used to run GenAI image generators on my own hardware, and I 200% agree with your stance. Literally wound up selling my RTX 4090 to get the dealer to move out of the house. I'm better off now, but can't ever really own a GPU again without opening myself back up to that. Sigh...

Yikes. The reactionary reach for more regulation from a certain group is just so tiresome. This is the real mind virus that I wish would be contained in Europe.

I almost can't believe this idea is being seriously considered by anybody. By that logic buying any CPU is gambling because it's not deterministic how far you can overclock it.

Just so you know, not every llm use case requires paying for tokens. You can even run a local LLM and use cline w/ it for all your coding needs. Pull that slot machine lever as many times as you like without spending a dollar.

Do you understand what electricity is?

Oh so now you think because it consumes some resource it's gambling? Would you say farming is gambling because it consumes water and time and you won't know what the result will be?

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