I wrote a kid's homework for them over on Reddit
My complaints center mostly around LLMs, with a slight diversion into generative AI for
music and images:
My first complaint is just the quality of the output. I keep having... you know, the kinds
of friends who DM you random whackadoodle Substack articles, only now they're DMing acres
and acres of LLM generated slop and saying "this is so insightful" and it isn't. It's
mediocre writing that often doesn't actually make sense. Really, when you use an LLM to
generate prose it's doing the metaphorical equivalent of seven fingered humans, you're just
not smart enough to see it.
The second complaint is the outsourcing of thinking. I mean, sure, you can make the argument
that these things are analogous to calculators and you don't actually need to do arithmetic,
but a lot of what I'm seeing is that people have stopped critically reading the output
altogether. Or, if they're coding, they're losing the mental model of the code they're
writing. Turning out stuff that appears to work, sure, but they're quickly dropping into
delusions about what the LLM can and can't know, and they have no mental model for the code
that's actually being generated.
Which, you know, is fine if you don't actually care how things work, but understanding how
things work is how we figure out new and novel and interesting ways to use technologies, and
that's not coming out of LLMs.
The third is how that ties into the anthropormophization of these things. The literature
refers to this as "epistemia", but I see a lot of thinking that the LLM is thinking, and
because of the "slot machine" payoff nature of these things that may be often enough to
actually be really compelling, but then they use it for something where they get a
grievously wrong answer, and the crater is pretty big. And because of well known issues of
attention and operator fatigue, there's really no good way to outsource the kind of
attention that's necessary to get good output from these things to humans. Use of them will
bite you.
(Cue all of the cocky kids saying "skill issue". Dude, if that skill issue could be solved,
C would be a safe programming language. Fuck all the way off with that argument.)
Then we get into the ethics of how these things are trained.
The theft of content. I don't even get that cranky about the huge percentage of traffic
that's hitting my web servers from AI vendors and making it harder to have personal sites,
the use of pirated materials, and remixing of intellectual properties in ways that
individual humans would never get away with feels like a different set of rules. Anthropic
and OpenAI pirated how many books? And they're getting a slap on the wrist, after huge
efforts.
I'm old enough to remember when the record industry went after Napster users. If there were
justice applied equally... well...
The power use, from local pollution to climate change to just electricity prices. If there
were some sort of good coming out of it, sure, but, as pointed out up-thread, the LLMs are
overhyped stupidity (every claim for success from these things has been a lie stemming from
overtraining on test data or randomness), and the images are just stupid. Sure, they now
mostly get the right number of fingers, but we're gonna burn down the planet for those
aesthetics. Eeewww.
I'm the showdown between the Catholic Church and the current administration I can't believe I'm siding with... I mean... Holy shit, if you'd asked me pre this administration to name an evil institution responsible for so much suffering and abuse...
Glyph
@glyph@mastodon.social
here’s the “AI regulation” that I want: if anyone proposing utility for an AI
tool utters the words “I could imagine…”, a big cartoony boxing glove on a spring needs to
pop out of a box and punch them through a wall
Every time I think my voice is getting good, someone gives me a holy crap moment. Latest case is Charlie Puth making a reference to T Pain's auto tune technique, with no hardware...
https://switchedonpop.com/epis...ka-g3wnk-nrtag-fwsbl-tfsxc-szzhn
https://www.berklee.edu/berkle...h-advice-switched-on-pop-podcast
Two really good ones today. That AI Great
Leap Forward that I
linked earlier, and Let’s
talk about LLMs, talking about what software development really is, and a deep dive
into how churning out code is not, in fact, going to give you an order of magnitude of
productivity gain.
Via James Bennett
@ubernostrum@infosec.exchange, the author
Nature: Scientists invented a
fake disease. AI told people it was real
Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they
would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper
is
made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were
recruited for the
exposure group”.
Via
Hmmm... The Dell i7 8Gen hand me down laptop I've been using for Linux stuff is giving me flakey display, including keeping remnants of the previous display after a shutdown and restart (I didn't know they did that these days).
Sigh. I need work to turn around.
Of course, this Rust repo was last updated over 4 months ago. Why would I expect that it'd run on a modern Mac.
Guess this is gonna happen on a Linux machine.
A good start: John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to-
Repair Settlement
While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this
is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and
individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is
available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment
repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere
between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court
documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.
The article also reports that older used tractors ballooned in value as farmers sought out
repairable devices.
Preprint: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence
and Hurts Independent Performance Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska,
Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey
Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading
comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term,
people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these
effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes).
Via.
The AI
Great Leap Forward — Han Lee
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted
down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was
useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
Postal Arbitrage. Using Amazon Prime to
send messages more cheaply than a first class letter by gifting cheap items.
My neighborhood will hate you.