Problem looking for a solution. Reverse centaur. Cory has a great way of putting it. IF only normies had half a brain and could think critically for even one millisecond. but no. Tap your little ai diamond butthole logos to make your slop photos. This is how 99% of the population is.
I read this sort of stuff every day. I'm a software architect though and I use this stuff every day. It's not a toy for us. It's a powerful tool of our craft.
Yes, people can make slop with it and vibe code with no clue. But engineers can also learn and collaborate and get much more significant work done with it.
If y'all are thinking this will go away, I would not bet on it.
Yes, but considering 90% of modern society is ALSO a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction, I'm horribly afraid it fits right in and we're going to wind up stuck with it.
"Its kinda shitty" doesn't stop a lot of products or services because they're cheap to make or run.
AI is neither cheap to make or run.
What else in modern society is even remotely close go the level of having a trillion dollars annual subsidy? I can think of nothing.
What else in modern society is even remotely close go the level of having a trillion dollars annual subsidy?
In the US? Oil, unfortunately.
Fair, didn't think of oil.
A lot of the work economy has historically run on oil, or at last got dependent on cheap subsidised oil at the cost of downstream externali—oh dang
It's mostly an outlay for building out the expensive data centers quickly.
Don't get me wrong - it's still wasteful shit with no clear benefit - but once all the capacity is built the ongoing costs won't be as high.
The video cards are expensive and are outdated in a few years. The energy costs and water costs are huge.
They are kinda already outdated. The GPUs in use now are from the 2022 line mostly, 90% of the 2024 line is sitting in storage, and IDK about this year's.
They are not actually building that DC capacity they sell either.
The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.
Doctorow really writes like a poet, doesn't he?
I read "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" and found it pretty lackluster, he has definitely grown as a writer since then.
no, its being used for SURVEILLANCE mostly, since commercially no one is buying it so. they are peddling it for government use.
The perfect time to be a fascist government would be if you could process unbelievable amounts of surveillance data with cold calculating detachment while also heavily undermining worker power.
But what kind of disruptive technology could do all that...
a few routers and an automatic ai snitch
Chatgpt alone has 50 million paying users.
I'm SaaS solutioning / sales and yeah, the shit is flying off the shelves at the enterprise level. AI is powerful and here to stay, what we have to worry about is HOW it's being used. We desperately need regulation in the space especially as it relates to lending, insurance, and healthcare
Yeah it's a loss leader right now, but what about when OpenAI folds and customers have to start paying the real costs?
Also it's clearly being deployed in a way pernicious to workers and the environment, so like... evil. But then people still use AWS so wtf do I know
That they make money on? I mean more than the costs directly associated with those customers? Doubt it
I, for one, think AI has a very terrible potential to abuse people into suicide and to generate child porn.
already proven and diployed, my fear is it being a snitch for everyone who isnt in the rich club so that they can bring injustice
So far AI has been used to destroy knowledge and the billionaire techlords have seen fit to place their creation as the arbiter of what you see and know - just like their social media platform’s algorithms.
They do things like buy up rare books and destroy them to scan them, now the LLM is the available “source” for that knowledge, a filtered and selective source. The same goes for everything all the data they’ve stolen to feed their monster.
They’re just like the religious theofascists that destroy old monuments and texts so that they get to be the sole purveyors of whatever “history” they’ve created.
Again, the same paragraph and lines from Orwell, over and over again: All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
But it's shitty distraction, people have fallen so far that this even rates attention. Thanks propaganda, advertising, social media (why is it always you three...)
What is novelty though? It can be used to shortcut your development time, your documentation time, your presentation preparing time, that’s a shit ton of stuff that developers/office workers do.
I think making false narratives is not how you fight AI, you fight for regulation on Data center water use, noise pollution, then let the cost bankrupt the companies that need to go bankrupt.
Although maybe this is just one of those communities that wants to endlessly circlejerk around an issue.
No it doesn’t. Matching the quality of human produced output with it arguably takes just as long if not longer. Even the most die-hard advocate of Claude Code admits it’s only as good as a junior programmer. What it is good at is making it seem like it’s doing a lot to ignorant execs because it makes a large output of content quickly, which is the only metric they have ever evaluated (see: programmers being judged on lines of code or number of closed bugs).
Maybe the title is clickbaity, but in the article this is addressed, AI has it uses but we shouldn't repeat the lies the CEOs spew about their products, even the ones that paint AI in a dark picture as this serves as a marketing purpose. Instead we should call out those lies and address the real destructive potential that AI has, like the environmental ones or that is a Ponzi scheme.
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.