AI Megathread

Third Eye

Whelp, now to add ‘Please don’t feed my scenes into an LLM’ to my +finger, too…

Hobbie

Notepad doesn’t need Copilot.

Pavel

@Hobbie I am glad that it has that “you didn’t save this but we’ve kept it in the buffer for you” when files weirdly decide to open in notepad instead of notepad++. Which isn’t AI, but is neat.

Hobbie

@Pavel that is a genuine QoL feature I use daily.

But I don’t need to have Copilot/Gemini/whatever advertised to me every time I open something that isn’t a video game.

I don’t even read the AWS roadmaps anymore because it’s endless updates to Q and nothing about bringing their existing functionality out of minimum-viable-product stage.

AI has its effective areas of use, but it is far narrower than what has been marketed and sold.

dvoraen

@Hobbie You mean you don’t want me to tell you your post was PoWeReD bY AI like has been thrown at us for every. single. fucking. thing. that’s on a computer these days?

But on the serious, I’m 100% with you. Tired of seeing Gemini, Copilot, and all the others flung at me as if they’re trying to honeypot me with the latest tech buzzwords*. I don’t need AI to do my job for me; I do need AI to do things for me that are far beyond my capacity. Like massive quantities of data analysis and collation.

AI is way oversold and way underdelivered, and I dare say that the “AI” products being thrown out are not, strictly speaking and technically (pun!) actual AI, but more a heuristic algorithm like pathfinding algorithms such as A*.

* ETA - It’s so bad I just had this comparison come to mind: “They’re acting like MU* sex pests pretending not to be sex pests.”

Hobbie

@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

Faraday

@Hobbie I love that one.

Friend quoted me this recently:

"It’s like ChatGPT has read everything on the internet, and kind of vaguely remembers some of it and is willing to make up the rest.”

There are so many documented instances of LLMs making up nonsense. Citing books that don’t exist. Making up fake lawsuit citations. Misrepresenting articles written by journalists. Making up fake biographical details. The code it spits out is often garbage (or, worse, wrong in subtle ways). And that’s not even touching on all the random stupidity where it tells people to use glue in their pizza or incorporate poison into their recipes.

The whole GenAI industry is most likely just a big bubble built on a con.

Juniper

People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning. It is saying things that are wrong. It is failing to do what it was designed to do.

Roz

Faraday

@Roz

“They’re designed to produce statistically probable sentences.”

Exactly. Sometimes what is statistically probable is also correct: “What is the capital of France?” will most likely correctly tell you “Paris” because Paris has a high statistical association with “capital of France”.

But this methodology is inherently unreliable for giving facts. A LLM might confidently assert that George Washington cut down a cherry tree, just because there’s a common association between Washington and that story, even though historians largely believe it’s a myth. Elon Musk associated with Teslas + Teslas associated with car crashes + Elon Musk associated with a car crash leads to a LLM erroneously asserting that Elon Musk died in a fatal Tesla crash. Sure, it’s a statistically probable sentence, but it’s just not true. The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.

Pavel

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.

I know this may seem like a quibble, but I feel it’s an important distinction: It can’t do either of those things, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a very fancy word predictor, it can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create.

Rucket

As more and more time passes and AI becomes more and more widespread all I can think is, “When do we declare our Butlerian Jihad?” Because I’m kinda over all this stuff already lol.

Ashkuri

The AI problem is now so bad that people are trying to defeat it with… more AI. I don’t even know. What is life.

What I do know is that if someone fed my poses into ChatGPT or similar, I’d be pretty pissed off about it.

MisterBoring

Is it sad that I’ve met people whose natural writing and RP are so bad that I assumed they were LLMs incorrectly?