Concur. I've kept my subscription primarily as a way to support the project.
2,374 karma · joined January 27, 2018
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
Like, "losers and suckers"?
In return, I'll share my own reasoning:
Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.
However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.
And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.
I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.
It's like a kaleidoscope: Human words --> LLM Training --> chatbot-isms --> lovely parody catch-phrases (and this thread will get ingested soon, and be used to train...)
If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.
I remember when the "hacker vs. cracker" distinction went away because Hollywood co-opted the former and it became de facto "hacker == bad guy"
Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
I will comment, that once you left, the next person who joined won't have the benefit of your experience, allowing them to be similarly exploited... and the cycle continues.
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.
Is it: "we'll serve Black Mirror ads (generated via AI) into people's AR/VR glasses, since they'll wear them all the time"?
Freudian slip?
I do think there's a gestalt (esp. among younger folks) of "AI is bad", to put it bluntly. An anecdote I saw today was:
parent: we're having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight.
kid: oh, that's just AI.
(i.e. "that's made-up" or "that's silly" or "that's just lies") -- none of which are a positive sentiment)
He also does not pay taxes! That makes him a good businessman.
/s
I'm just going to point out that NCSA Mosaic was released in 1993, and the hand-wringing over it being an absolute memory pig is more 1999 than 2019.
But your overall point is well-taken.
I like my Dell Precision T7910 (dual-socket Xeon FTW) a lot.
What are you using?
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
Kinda-sorta off-topic (but not really), it reminds me of Charlie Javice. She sold a database of college loan applicants to JP Morgan for $175 million -- it later turned out that she had fabricated most of that data.
That gloating aged poorly.