So what if its indistinguishable - its not a product of human intellect or effort. I feel there is a large disconnect where people look at artful output such as music or writing as a thing no different than a box of paper clips. To them, "It's just there." They don't care how it got there, they just like the feeling they get from the consumption.
That's fast food thinking; It's engineered to be "tasty" in the sense that they put the right amount of chemicals into the food to tickle the right nerve endings. It's junk food that exists to turn a profit. Whereas even the local diner puts effort into its food and has a damn fine Greek menu and the best mozzarella sticks.
> If I was very talented and had the time, I could have written the lyrics and recorded the song myself (which undoubtedly would be even more awesome), but I can’t do this.
I promise you that any art you produced would be better than slop. There is not a single crayon scribble or off-tune melody that would be worse than the generic garbage that comes out of an AI model
Just look at the leadership of tech workers, some of the most deeply anti-human and anti-democratic people on the planet. Not hard to see how these terrible people rub off of their workers.
If it's indistinguishable, that could be because the user doesn't care to look closely, or it could be because it's just that well made now. For simple profile pictures, I genuinely stopped being able to tell if I'm looking at a real photo or not last year.
> That's fast food thinking; It's engineered to be "tasty" in the sense that they put the right amount of chemicals into the food to tickle the right nerve endings. It's junk food that exists to turn a profit. Whereas even the local diner puts effort into its food and has a damn fine Greek menu and the best mozzarella sticks.
The former is molecular gastronomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy
The digital version fast food we already have and is a little different, in that it's the tuning of "the algorithm" to addict us, while text and image models* seem to be trying to actually fool us.
* I suspect video and music models are trying to addict, but I'm not super sure either way.
It's not all artisanal, made with love goodness just because human hands did it.
May I introduce you to the runtime of The Lord of the Rings films?
Also the American Federation of Musicians' campaign against "robot" musicians replacing live musicians in movie theatres? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
The vast majority of music consumption is by people that have never seen the artist live. Hell, I have no idea myself if there is a human behind it.
>what gives the right and permission for humans to exist anymore?
Nothing. We are just a mote in incomprehensibly small fraction of eternity. Eventually the process of equalizing entropy will erase all traces of our existence. Enjoy it while you have it.
This just assumes I'm listening to mainstream music or whatever when I mostly buy grungy metal and whatever else I enjoy off Bandcamp. Many times, directly supporting the artist.
> ... local diners work, you might not be so impressed.
I already stated the homemade gyro platter and they're mozzarella sticks w/sauce are slammin and they are proud of it. Sure it's business but they crafted some damn fine mozzarella sticks and they always come out crispy and oozing with hot but not roof melting cheese. That's giving a damn even if its slammin a few in the fryer then tossin em on a plate and sendin em into the human ether. I hope they stay around as they're a great Sunday afternoon lunch spot with friends.
You're simply drawing the line where it suits you.
I don't consider it pure human coding if you use anything but Notepad.
Real programmers write the code and throw it away after compilation. All the fixes happen in the binary. You are not a real programmer unless you debug hex dumps and add changes directly to the compiled program.
Text editor? No. You punch the program on cards and then wait 1 week to get your turn and get a compiler error.
I'm drawing the line where the human effort is no longer there.
There was a similar argument against electronic music. No effort because no instrument is played. But the fact is the instrument just changed shape, drastically.
Like there's an artist I am sure a few here would be familiar with: Master Boot Record, a video game heavy metal electronic blend fully composed on a DAW. MBR live streams his composition sessions while chillin in his own irc channel he's hosting himself so you can chat with him. It's impressive to hear how he lays down notes, loops it, tweaks and expands it, then little by little builds a song passage by passage. Often with the irc channel reacting to the process itself and perhaps influencing the output. You know when it finally clicks and you're left feeling "Oh that was cool as fuck!" That's uniquely human, a life form that evolved over billions of years on a mud ball floating in a vast vacuum - at random. Talking, thinking, playing, laughing meat. Amazing huh?
An AI shitting out a similar pattern because it was trained on the same and similar patterns is not interesting or original. It's just a really good illusion from a well tuned stochastic parrot. It's interesting in the technical sense, but not in the artistic one. There was no creative process involved. Prompting is just a well formed set of instructions and questions which a human could understand - a spec. Nothing special there. It's like driving to McDonalds and ordering a quarter pounder with cheese meal. As a search engine, cool. As an artist, no thanks.
The stochastic parrot claim is long gone.
Someone with actual skill in their respective field can create something new and original from current AI systems.
The real danger is that creative/intelligent people are giving up those abilities and letting the AI do it for them.
That's just marketing.
> At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.
Nit: it won't be impossible, just so hard so most people won't bother or give up if they try, and society will settle into a mediocre, regressed state. Then wait a little while, and the next generation will justify their mediocrity as actually some kind of progress, and the people who knew better will be dead and unable to challenge that.
More technology != more progress. Just look what social media had done. At its best, it's like what came before, just more isolating.
Control of technology is a key issue. Social media wouldn’t be allowed to exist the way it does if govt’s regulated the internet much earlier. Are you happy with the trade off…?
That's an article of faith, and I don't think it's true, or will stop being true at some point.
> Control of technology is a key issue. Social media wouldn’t be allowed to exist the way it does if govt’s regulated the internet much earlier. Are you happy with the trade off…?
Not necessarily. Human psychology needs limits and friction, and technology is almost always about removing limits and friction. We're not wise enough, collectively and individually, to say no in many, many cases when we should.
I don't think what I'm about to say is a black-and-white rule, but I think we get into trouble when technology isn't invented to solve actual problems, but invented as an end in itself.
Look in the mirror.
> Are you for real, do you want to go back to the Stone Age? Go ahead!!!
That, my "friend," is called a strawman.
> You are absolutely delusional.
That's a knockout argument there, for sure. /s
Or are you just assuming you learned something because you made a finished product of some kind?
You may argue what if LLMs are inaccessible but that’s like teachers saying “you won’t always have a calculator”
My problem is that filtering all of human creativity and expression through an LLM is ugly
They were right, though. For one, you still need to now what kind of equation to put into the calculator. If you don't know the concepts, what are you going to calculate. Real life situations don't actually spell out neat textbook questions.
And just take a look throughout the day how many quick maths you do subconsciously. Just things like cooking or grocery shopping have tons of moments where you just do the calculation in your head. And you can do that because you've learned how and when to do that.
It's not just a matter of "What if it's inaccessible", but also "Do you want to be dependent on your phone even more". Are just going to walk around with your phone on voice mode narrating your life into your LLM to let it tell you what to do?
They were not. I'm not dead yet so I suppose there's still a chance, but so far in decades of living life I've always had calculators when I've needed them.
> For one, you still need to now what kind of equation to put into the calculator.
That's a very different construct. Math concepts don't care how the arithmetic is performed.
> If you don't know the concepts, what are you going to calculate.
If you don't know the concepts, then what kind of arithmetic are you going to perform with anything -- whether the mind's eye, pencil and paper, a sliderule, or a pocket supercomputer?
It's definitely worth it for kids to invest the time it takes to learn the little shortcuts involved in mental math: that effort gets repaid many times over during the course of a normal human lifetime.
It was the same back then: Some quick mental math was often faster than using a calculator, so that's what I used first. The calculator came second.
I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts.
Agreed; just because I "rarely" pull out the calculator doesn't mean I never use it. Sometimes my wife asks me "If this cake recipe calls for filling a 9-inch pan with batter, and makes 3 layers, but I have an 8.5-inch pan and I'm making two layers, then how much should I reduce the recipe?" The π terms cancel each other out in that math, but I still can't do (4.25×4.25×2) / (4.5×4.5×3) in my head faster than I can punch it into the calculator. (It comes out to about 0.59, BTW, meaning she should use either half or two-thirds of the recipe depending on if she wants a slightly thinner or thicker cake).
Bringing this back to the broader LLM-related discussion, the lesson I took away from the Fable kerfluffle was "the model will usually, but not always, be available." You might have an Internet connection hiccup, you might have hit your subscription usage credits for the week and not be willing to pay API pricing, the model might even be taken away from you. (Most of which are problems you won't face if you run a local model, but that's a different discussion). So just as it's important to learn mental math even when you have a calculator as backup, it's important to retain the skill to solve many categories of problems without the LLM, even if you still reach for the LLM for the categories of problems that it can solve faster than you can.
I don't think I'd want to rely upon having a rental pocket calculator to use. It could become unavailable at any time, for any reason. For something as common, inexpensive, and easy to find as pocket calculators have been for decades, renting one sounds crazy.
But that's the way that clown-based LLMs are: They're rented. They could disappear at any time.
And sure, I do use the bot to get some stuff done, anyway. I think of it as somewhat akin of the time-sharing computer systems of yore, where people absolutely rented (often far-away) computing resources to accomplish their work.
Those time-sharing systems were only temporary. The giants like Control Data Corp fell out of favor as computers became smaller, faster, and cheaper. (And then they came back in the shape of things like AWS, but that has a lot of non-technical things driving it; AWS is, strictly-speaking, completely optional.)
Unless we stop making computers smaller/faster/cheaper (which we haven't, despite the present-day supply/demand market blip) I think it is certain that we will get there again with LLMs, where the giants fall. Not this year, or next, but small systems will catch up.
And these little machines don't even have to win the race. They just have to be Good Enough.
So it seems inevitable that people like you and I will live to see fantastic local LLMs happening with affordable hardware that fits on a desk.
And then, eventually, into our pockets -- like a calculator.
P.S. If "clown-based LLMs" was an autocorrect-assisted typo for cloud-based, it was inspired. :-) If you typed that on purpose, it was also inspired. Have an upvote.
Before we get there, we'll have network connectivity to our desktop AI boxes at home. That's pretty good, too.
And if this clown-bot[1] boom is a bubble (as I believe it is), then it's just a matter of time before it pops. The blast radius is unknown, but at one end it seems likely to result in something between potentially-idle fabs that have already been mostly paid for. Idle factories are bad and it makes sense to avoid that even if it is expensive, so this means cheap hardware.
At the other end, it means failed companies with fabs that are sold for pennies on the dollar alongside a resolute unwillingness amongst the investors (who just had their asses handed to them) to start on Boom 2.0. This latter scenario would mean golden age of cheap hardware.
I think we'll be fine.
[1]: Yeah, clown is on purpose. It fits as a replacement in any technical parlance where "cloud" would be used. :)
... And I've just been agreeing with you on all points with this comment, haven't I? Time to wrap up the discussion, then: once total agreement is reached then there's not much point in continuing the discussion unless someone has something new to say, and I don't have anything new to say on this topic. See you around.
Sure, a teacher framing the necessity of learning math as "you don't always have calculator" is pretty lazy answer that doesn't really get to the point. In my experience, teachers rarely even made this point, students did that tried to argue that Mathematics was pointless when you have calculators.
But my point was that actually knowing these concepts is good for complex reasoning you can do in all aspects of life. Whether you have the calculator with you or not.
And AI has that reputation!
This is where LLMs and even things like youtube videos muddle the difference between what you are and things you have to do as a human. The number of things you can be presented with in the modern world that you'd like, or have to do, is simply endless. If it's something small, with little opportunity cost if failure occurs, then just going to an LLM for an answer doesn't bother me. Now if it's something that's more costly like DIY remodeling an LLM isn't a primary driver, but in as a device that can push back when I ask about mistakes that can be made and what to watch out for.
"This guy couldn't do a thing we found easy, now he can! Boooo!"
Yes, I can now set up a Drupal website in a few hours. That is great for me.
I don't want some random joe smoking crack working on my aircraft before I fly.
At the same time I don't want to have to pay a light bulb changer after filing 6 safety forms in triplicate.
Extremism on both sides leads to suboptimal outcomes.
In my domain (web app CRUD), we build the same thing over and over and over. And it's not beautiful or interesting like furniture. It feels like with LLMs, all that repetitive stuff is gone and I can focus myself on the tricky problems.
Many of the LLM maximalists I know don't have the skills or knowledge to excel in technology and need to use LLMs to do their job. It's seen as a cheat code to get work done.
As an example, A person I went to high school with that could barely figure out how to setup a Drupal site a few years ago, is now a frontier engineer at an AI startup. His Linkedin posts are filled with AI buzz words on a daily basis.
"It's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. "
At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.