Don't get me wrong, I think Gen AI will be a useful tool, but the obsessives who think it will be the end all/be all and solve all the problems of the world are a bit much.

Posting in Soap Box because the ethical/moral implications are often ignored, with the zealots not seeming to care how models were trained or how bias can show up in models.

4/28/2025 7:30:12 AM

IBT Nerds!

4/28/2025 8:33:07 AM

Can you be more specific on who you are referring to as obsessives? Just helps to see the angle you are coming from.

I see people that are true believers and ,like you, I don’t see it as some unlimited paradigm shifting technology. Not yet. At the same time I am leaving room that I just don’t get “it” yet and it is hard for some one like me to perceive the rapid advancements that are being made.

I also just see the typical hype men in the tech world doing the same thing they do to every technology that attracts investors’ attention. Hype hype hype.

4/28/2025 9:18:21 AM

There's a wide gamut of them

The standard tech talk evangelists that you see at conferences who love lecturing about all these pros.

The advocates who have no idea what the fuck they're talking about (A1 in schools!)

Elon/and others like him who just doesn't give a shit about ethical considerations.

The hobbyists who think their skills at being a "prompt engineer" to generate 'art' makes them special and don't care who they're ripping off

I'm just exhausted by it.

[Edited on April 28, 2025 at 9:42 AM. Reason : A]

4/28/2025 9:41:36 AM

You would love Technopoly!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly

Quote :

"The story, as Socrates tells it to his friend Phaedrus, unfolds in the following way: Thamus once entertained the god Theuth, who was the inventor of many things, including number, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing. Theuth exhibited his inventions to King Thamus, claiming that they should be made widely known and available to Egyptians. Socrates continues: Thamus inquired into the use of each of them, and as Theuth went through them expressed approval or disapproval, according as he judged Theuth’s claims to be well or ill founded. It would take too long to go through all that Thamus is reported to have said for and against each of Theuth’s inventions. But when it came to writing, Theuth declared, “Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.” To this, Thamus replied, “Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”1"

4/28/2025 9:56:48 AM

^ That looks interesting, I'll check it out!

I think my biggest problem with the evangelists/true believers is they just refuse to look past examples of how society functions. I mean, most Americans have access to an overwhelming and vast amount of knowledge at their fingertips, yet misinformation is on the rise. Championing AI as some solution to all of this, which some people have, is just a gross mistake. "Well it's true cause grok told me"

4/28/2025 12:47:31 PM

A scarier type of bias that really favors the establishment and corporate control comes from selective things in the training data. It gets really difficult for a new player to take hold if the AI constantly favors the old players. If technology people are using AI, they're going to use the solutions with the least friction. A new upstart product and its use won't be in the training data so when the user asks how do they do something the AI won't be aware of it. You can extrapolate this out to lots of other things which already happens with general advertising in media.

I do find it quite funny that the prediction for AI and robotics was that it would take all of the blue collar jobs first, but it does seem better suited to take the bullshit email jobs, tech boiler plate like devops and jira jockeys.

4/28/2025 1:03:56 PM

saw this a few weeks ago and it still makes me mad:

Quote :

"I'm sorry but if you're against AI art you're an idiot You're trying to stop the greatest innovation of our lifetime In the next 2 years AI is going to eat everything and there is nothing you can do to stop it Movies, music, video games, every form of media will me mostly made of AI. A tremendous amount of people in those industries will lose their careers Why? Because AI is cheaper, better, and faster. Innovation always wins. It doesn't care who suffers. It doesn't care who loses their jobs. It doesn't care who goes broke. For every artist it puts out of a job, it'll allow 100 other people to create art they've never been able to create before I'm building an entire video game right now. This was never possible before You really have 2 options, try to fight innovation and be left completely behind in modern society or embrace it and reap the rewards of a once in a lifetime transfer of wealth Up to you. Adapt or die."

https://x.com/alexfinnx/status/1906396884744446000?s=46

4/28/2025 1:10:02 PM

TerdFerguson ^ That's a really strong example of the people I'm referring to. It's such an incredibly ignorant take.

4/28/2025 1:52:38 PM

It doesn’t matter how the models are trained as long as the public has free access to the output

4/28/2025 2:19:20 PM

good luck with that

4/28/2025 2:23:52 PM

All the ai companies have free access now. And there’s high quality foss models now

If we don’t allow ai companies to use anything observable by an average person then we incentive ai being completely locked away behind a paywall. Ai should be like libraries, a publicly funded social good. In this case the public funding comes in the form of permissive rights to typically paid content ( exactly how libraries work)

4/28/2025 2:29:51 PM

^^^ if the output only contains Google et all approved services it absolutely matters. People are lazy and will take the least friction option.

4/28/2025 2:38:46 PM

It’s already a concern. Meta is explicitly biasing llama to be more conservative than its data suggests

I meant really that antiquated notions of copyright shouldn’t limit researchers and engineers in devising training data though— laws need to be updated to allow generous development of ai because it’s so important

4/28/2025 2:42:09 PM

Quote :

"Adapt or die."

lol but it's not evolution

it's inbreeding

4/28/2025 4:06:55 PM