And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things that have gotten better due to AI (certain kinds of accessibility tech) and a huge pile of things that just suck now. The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.
This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.
You'd think we would have learned this lesson in failing to implement email charges that net'd to $0 for balanced send/receive patterns. And thereby heralded in a couple decades of spam, only eventually solved by centralization (Google).
Driving the cost of anything valuable to zero inevitably produces an infinite torrent of volume.
>Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to,
I don't generate chunks of code because I want to. I do it because that's how I get paid and like to eat.
What's interesting with LLMs is they are more like human behaviors than any other software. First you can't tell non-AI (not just genAI)software to generate a picture of a naked women, it doesn't have that capability. So after that you have models that are trained on content such as naked people. I mean, that's something humans are trained on, unless we're blind I guess. If you take a data set encompassing all human behaviors, which we do, then the model will have human like behaviors.
It's in post training that we add instructions to the contrary. Much like if you live in American you're taught that seeing naked people is worse than murdering someone and that if someone creates a naked picture of you, your soul has been stolen. With those cultural biases programmed into you, you will find it hard to do things like paint a picture of a naked person as art. This would be openAI's models. And if you're a person that wanted to rebel, or lived in a culture that accepted nudity, then you wouldn't have a problem with it.
How many things do you do because society programmed you that way, and you're unable to think outside that programming?
1. There are probably AI portals that are OK with uploading nonconsensual sexual images of people. I am not about to go looking for those, but the ratio of women to men on those sites is likely similar. 2. The fact that the quality of women is better than the quality of men speaks to vastly more training being done on women 3. Because there's so much training on women it's just easier to use AI for nefarious purposes on women than men (have to find custom trained LORAs to get male anatomy right, for example).
I did try to look for statistics out of curiosity, but most just cite a number without evidence.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-hara...
Am I misunderstanding you or are you somehow saying anything done in the past is fine to do more of?
When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.
It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.
Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.
Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.
[1] https://thefactbase.com/the-vibrator-was-invented-in-1869-to...
[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/ma...
(also: what city? for a friend...)
What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?
(note: I do not actually know if it explicitly prevents that. But because I am very cynical about corporations, I'd tend to assume it doesn't.)
Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.
That's what it feels like with AI. But perhaps worse since companies are lobbying to keep the chaos instead of making a board of standards and etiquette.
This is the knife-food vs knife-stab vs gun argument. Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.
If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities.
If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.
Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.
To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.
Today if we could survey AI contact with humans, I'm afraid the top 3 by a wide margin would be scams, cheating, deep fakes, and porn.
Yes, and now porn is highly regulated. Maybe that's a hint?
Do these legitimate applications justify making these tools available to every scammer, domestic abuser, child porn consumer, and sundry other categories of criminal? Almost certainly not.
Obviously the intended use and design of AI isn't to scam the elderly, but it's extremely efficient at doing it, and has no guard rails to help prevent it.
Why is anyone allowed to make a digital copy of me, without my permission, and then use that to call my relatives? It should be illegal to use it and it should be illegal to even generate it. Sure, it's already illegal to defaud people, but that's simply not enough at this point. The AI companies producing these models should be held liable for this form of fraud, as they're not providing any form of protection.
You're exactly the person that this article is satirizing.
Phones are also a very popular mechanism for scamming businesses. It's tough to pull off CEO scams without text and calls.
Therefore, phones are bad?
This is of course before we talk about what criminals do with money, making money truly evil.
Without Generative AI, we couldn’t…?
I could have taken the time to do the math to figure out what the rewards structure is for my Wawa points and compare it to my car's fuel tank to discover I should strictly buy sandwiches and never gas.
People have been making nude celebrity photos for decades now with just Photoshop.
Some activities have gotten a speed up. But so far it was all possible before just possibly not feasible.
People seemingly have some very odd views on products when it comes to AI.
This line of thinking is ridiculous.
The phone let's you talk to someone you couldn't before when shouting can't.
ChatGPT let's you...
Please complete the sentence without an analogy
The answer is that chatgpt allows you to do things more efficiently than before. Efficiency doesn’t sound sexy but this is what adds up to higher prosperity.
Arguments like this can be used against internet. What does it allow you to do now that you couldn’t do before?
Answer might be “oh I don’t know, it allows me to search and index information, talk to friends”.
It doesn’t sound that sexy. You can still visit a library. You can still phone your friends. But the ease of doing so adds up and creates a whole ecosystem that brings so many things.
AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work.
I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.
And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.
To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.
They spoke slowly, through letters, until phones sped it up.
We coded slowly, letter by letter, until agents sped it up.
It does not. You could still till the land with hand tools. You just get a lot more done.
ChatGPT let's me program in languages I was not efficient in before.
Anyway, I'm done with your technology purity contest, it has about zero basis in reality.
How obtuse. The poster is saying they don't enable anything of value.
Phones are utilities. AI companies are not.
After you eliminate anything that requires accountability and trustworthiness from the tasks which LLMs may be responsibly used for, the most obvious remaining use-cases are those built around lying:
- advertising
- astroturfing
- other forms of botting
- scamming old people out of their money
As a filmmaker, my friends and I are getting more and more done as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U
As long as humans are driving, I see AI as an exoskeleton for productivity:
https://github.com/storytold/artcraft (this is what I'm making)
It's been tremendously useful for me, and I've never been so excited about the future. The 2010's and 2020's of cellphone incrementalism and social media platformization of the web was depressing. These models and techniques are actually amazing, and you can apply these techniques to so many problems.
I genuinely want robots. I want my internet to be filtered by an agent that works for me. I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.
Apart from all the other madness in the world, this is the one thing that has been a dream come true.
As long as these systems aren't owned by massive monopolies, we can disrupt the large companies of the world and make our own place. No more nepotism in Hollywood, no more working as a cog in the labyrinth of some SaaS company - you can make your own way.
There's financial capital and there's labor capital. AI is a force multiplier for labor capital.
While i certainly respect your interactivity and subsequent force multiplayer nature of AI, this doesn't mean you should try to emulate an already given piece of work. You'll certainly gain a small dopamine when you successfully copy something but it would also atrophy your critical skills and paralyze you from making any sort of original art. You'll miss out on discovering the feeling of any frontier work that you can truly call your own.
Claims of productive boosts must always be inspected very carefully, as they are often perceived, and reality may be the opposite (eg spending more time wrestling the tools), or creating unmaintainable debt, or making someone else spend extra time to review the PR and make 50 comments.
There's no chatbot. You can use image-to-image, ControlNets, LoRAs, IPAdapters, inpainting, outpainting, workflows, and a lot of other techniques and tools to mold images as if they were clay.
I use a lot of 3D blocking with autoregressive editing models to essentially control for scene composition, pose, blocking, camera focal length, etc.
Here's a really old example of what that looks like (the models are a lot better at this now) :
for an 2011 account that's a shockingly naive take
yes, AI is a labor capital multiplier. and the multiplicand is zero
hint: soon you'll be competing not with humans without AI, but with AIs using AIs
"OK, so I lost my job, but even adjusting for that, I can launch so many more unfinished side-projects per hour now!"
But to be more in the spirit of your comment, if you've used these systems at all, you know how many constraints you bump into on an almost minute to minute basis. These are not magical systems and they have plenty of flaws.
Real creativity is connecting these weird, novel things together into something nobody's ever seen before. Working in new ways that are unproven and completely novel.
[1] https://www.russiabeyond.com/arts/327147-10-best-soviet-bus-...
It's ostensibly doing things you asked it, but in terms dictated by its owner.
and it's even worse than that: you're literally training your replacement by using it when it re-transmits what you're accepting/discarding
and you're even paying them to replace you
Do you know anything about "Hollywood grade VFX" ? Have you ever worked for any company that does it?
No more nepotism in Hollywood
Do you think "Hollywood VFX" is full of nepotism?
True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".
Saying that the tools make mistakes is correct. Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.
History is paved with people who got steamrollered by technology they didn't think would ever work. On a practical level AI seems very median in that sense. It's notable only because it's... kinda creepy, I guess.
Incorrect. People are capable of learning by observation, introspection, and reasoning. LLMs can only be trained by rote example.
Hallucinations are, in fact, an unavoidable property of the technology - something which is not true for people. [0]
Also, you don't know very many people, including yourself, if you think that confabulation and self-deception aren't integral parts of our core psychological makeup. LLMs work so well because they inherit not just our logical thinking patterns, but our faults and fallacies.
it's not a person, it doesn't hallucinate or have imagination
it's simply unreliable software, riddled with bugs
It is, though. We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture, and numerous case studies by companies who have tried putting them in control loops! We have about 4 years of examples of bad things happening because the trigger was given to an LLM.
And we have tens of thousands of years of shared experience of "People Were Wrong and Fucked Shit Up". What's your point?
Again, my point isn't that LLMs are infallible; it's that they only need to be better than their competition, and their competition sucks.
But human systems that don't fuck shit up are short-lived, rare, and fragile, and they've only become a potential - not a reality - in the last century or so.
The rest of history is mostly just endless horrors, with occasional tentative moments of useful insight.
I mean, I think you have not put much thought into your theory.
The language of the reader is no longer a serious barrier/indicator of a scam (A real bank would never talk like that, is now, well, that's something they would say, the way that they would say it)
Instead of being used to protect us or make our lives easier, it is being used by evildoers to scam the weak and vulnerable. None of the AI believers will do anything about it because it kills their vibe.
And like with the child pornography, the AI companies are engaging in high-octane buck passing more than actually trying to tamp down the problem.
To be honest, it’s really distasteful to make a high level comment about this article then have people rush to attack me personally. This is the mentality of a mob.
Just like with Mark Zuckerberg's "Metaverse" we're now in a post-market vanity economy where not consumer demand but increasingly desperate founders, investors and gurus are trying to justify their valuations by doling out products for free and shoving their AI services into everything to justify the tens of billions they dumped into it
I'm sorry that some people's pension funds, startup funding and increasingly the entire American economy rests on this collective delusion but it's not really most people's problem
The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant.
Do you think that it isn't used for this? The satire part is to expand that usecase to say it exists purely for that purpose.
If it's not happening yet, it will...
The critics were right, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in which Silicon Valley was a not insubstantial part were wrong.
As such, and combined with the ills of social media, Silicon Valley has blow’ any public trust it may have had in the past.
I think point article was trying to make: LLMs and new genAI tools helped the scammers scale their operations.
Before this we had "the internet is for porn." Same sort of exaggerated statement.
Yes. Yes it does. That is the satire.
In order to be funny at least!
If you aren't familiar, look into it.
But did it accelerate the whole process? Hell yeah.
>It's the jobs and employment. Nobody's going to be able to work again. It's God AI is going to solve every problem. It's we shouldn't have open source for XYZ... https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436
and he says a "end of the world narrative science fiction narrative" is hurtful.
Regardless, LLMs are already being abused to mass produce spam, and some of that spam has almost certainly been employed to separate the elderly from their savings, so there's nothing particularly implausible about the satirical product, either.
The Trump administration is using AI generated imagery to advance his narrative, and it seems like it's a thing that mostly the elderly would fall for. So yes, there is some truth to it.
In general, the elderly will always be more vulnerable to technological exploitation.
The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.
I say this as someone whose father was scammed out of a lot of money, so I’m certainly not numb to potential consequences there. The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.