Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
This mindset is the entire problem. “Oh we don’t need to worry about ethics or morals, just efficiency” is exactly the issue with every pro-AI argument and every pro-capatalism argument. Its the issue with our governments, with investing, with corporations.
I say fuck anyone who argues ethics is not important when talking about efficacy. Fuck that mindset and fuck AI.
Yeah, but your compiler wasn’t made with massive copyright infringement, stealing much needed water and rampant corruption, was it?
I guess Linus doesn’t care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I’m not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it’s environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.
This isn’t an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.
I say fuck off with that noise, I don’t have e to accept anything.
as a pro-AI, anti-cloud nerd? All of these problems disappear when we address the real problem of Capitalism.
there are abandoned tech certs for building datacenters that produce 110% of their own electricity. these are distinct from the data mines these useless nerds want to build.
without capital, the surveillance state dies.
intellectual property is a capitalist myth invented to hold us back and induce rents, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
oh no, you fired me from a job I’d rather not have to do and I still get to survive because we slew capitalism? ahhh, how will I cope with the blow to my identity?
Can wildlife live in the datacenters? Do forests grow on their roofs? The problem is human overshoot.
Intellectual property is an imperialist tool for exploitation and oppression. I see you are a fanatic zealot defending it. And you think we should just accept that?
BTW most tokens today are sold in China and mostly and increasingly produced with nuclear or renewable energy. China is also the country with the most, fastest and most sensible regulations on AI. You’re blaming the ills of neoliberal capitalism on AI.
Therefor you are shielding capitalism from critique, and are preventing any sensible regulation on AI and any changes to the system that actually leads to our downfall. You people clearly have given up belief in democracy or revolution and just accept that this helpless and brainless zealotry is the only thing you can do now. Preach hate against your common man instead of the oppressors that make the decisions about how AI is used. So if you want to talk ethics, sniff your own butt first.
Is that really all you got from that? AI is stealing people’s art, their video games, music, etc. I’m not talking about large companies. I’m talking about Joe down the street who’s spent the last 4 years making a game, just to have an AI try to rip a slop version of his game 2 days after he released it.
I don’t give a shit about Microsoft, or any other corporation for that matter, and the fact that you came in here with this aggressive long ass rant reply to me without even so much as asking a clarifying question says more about you than it does me.
When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI” has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn’t have a boss and has untold resources for whatever “AI” “tools” he finds useful.
He isn’t ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn’t do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn’t have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new “tool”. He simply uses what’s useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don’t have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the “tool” that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
the thing is - no other tool (currently yall_cant_read) in our industry, and others, out there involves as much active destruction in both the working class and environment in its use.
that’s it. that’s the bit.
for those not understanding: the word “in” above implies in current use not that i am comparing AI’s effects with the invention of knitting machines or electricity.
Could have said the same about the invention of electricity
The invention of the light bulb.
That has been SO much worse than the negatives we’ve seen with AI. If anyone is interested, that is a horrible story socially, industrially, environmentally, etc. Definitely worth reading about.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI, you just write a sentence. Then it “creates” a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same, even if you always use the same model and prompt. Not to mention all of the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it. On top of this, all AI models were trained on unfathomable amounts of stolen information.
cognitively speaking
That’s not what the damn study says.
People who wrote an essay with an LLM did not show signs of having having written it themselves, on account of, they hadn’t. Just like I couldn’t tell you the remainder of a long division I put in a calculator, because it went straight to a mantissa. I didn’t lose the ability to to math. (At worst, I don’t wanna, now that I have a calculator.)
The only long-term aspect of this study was a dozen people coming back months later and switching sides. So even pretending it’s asking the right questions, the tabloid interpretation should expect to see the brain-only essayists fumble it and the LLM essayists sharper than ever. But that’s plainly not what happened.
They didn’t even measure essay quality. It was just about EEG activity, incidental recall, and self-reported degree of ownership. But that nerd shit doesn’t get clicks, so every fucking headline is like Does chatbot is brain damage?! or Permanent cyber-psychosis ten minutes!! or If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. It is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
Oh sorry, that last one was Plato arguing against the detrimental cognitive effect of books.
You constructed an entirely fictional argument about a study that you quoted. That’s not what I was referring to. It’s a pointless discussion though. None of these AI companies are financially sustainable (except for the shovel sellers, obviously).
Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y’all keep repeating, because I haven’t seen that shit. Every time I go searching for some dire evidence of dain bramage from spicy autocomplete, it comes back to one of three poorly-designed studies that fail to distinguish this new tool from any other tool and categorically do not match their pearl-clutching news coverage.
It’s a pointless discussion though.
This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense. You can’t make some damning claim, glibly dismiss an effort to explain you’re mistaken, and then gallop toward some other topic entirely. That’s working backwards from a conclusion and failing to update your beliefs.
No shit these companies are boned. Local models will survive and proliferate on their demonstrable merits. Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.
We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won’t give you a lobotomy.
Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y’all keep repeating, because I haven’t seen that shit.
This names a few. Also, I can speak from personal experience and from what other people using AI tell me. It does indeed negatively impact your ability do the thinking on your own. If you don’t feel that impact, maybe in your case there wasn’t much to lose in the first place :) If you “haven’t seen this shit” then maybe you should take off the blindfold.
This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense.
Not at all. It’s just another very relevant part of the argument. The stealing machine is power and money hungry af and it’s not being fed. It will die.
failing to update your beliefs.
Beliefs are unrelated. It’s the reality of these companies’ numbers. Show me at least ONE of them that isn’t selling hw and is profitable.
Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.
Were is this decentralized development you speak of? Also, training an AI to create porn is pretty different than one trained to do coding, writing, research, etc.
We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won’t give you a lobotomy.
Talking about facts as if you knew the future, lol. Is that way Coreweave is going down the drain? It won’t give you a lobotomy but it will make you dumber and also use any data you provide it.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
RNG is pseudorandom. Every computer program is deterministic in some sense, even if the seed is obfuscated or dependent on ephermal environment variables. Being able to predict the output is very different from determinism.
