Can't have a shenanigasm without shenanigans π€·
No, no. You've got the wrong idea.
Will AI completely ruin a zillion people's ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!
I'm just saying there's nothing we can do to stop it at this point.
You're about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I've been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.
People saying "Just use AI!" Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, "stop driving gas guzzlers!" Or, "stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!" Lives in so many others.
At least most people don't think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) π€·
"It democratizes coding" in the same way an Easy Bake Oven democratizes cooking.
"It democratizes drawing" in the same way a plotter democratizes making lines.
"It democratizes music creation"... Uh, this one was already cooked a long time ago. AI changes almost nothing in this area.
People have been listening to (electronic) automated/generated music since the 1960s. Technically, every time we "listen to music" we're hearing a machine-generated version (since the artists aren't performing there in the room with us).
Also, pop music is so formulaic it didn't surprise me in the slightest the first time I tried an (open source) AI music generation model on my PC (local GPU) and it made a catchy tune almost immediately. I was expecting total shit I could laugh at and share with my friends but it spat out perfectly respectable tracks about 10% of the time (and it only takes like 10 seconds to generate a song) π€·
What isn't AI? What are you even talking about?
BTW: I don't work for any AI companies and I don't believe the hype for one second that they're building extinction-level AGI. What they're building is general-purpose "intelligence" that's OK-ish at some things, great at others (that don't make them much money, LOL), and fucking terrible at anything that requires reliable truth (on the first try, LOL).
(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)
Yeah that's not what I'm talking about. That's just coding stuff and I think everyone is learning a hard lesson right now that there's really two ways to do AI (for code):
- You let the AI write all the code. Using those techniques you mentioned to try to keep it from fucking up too much.
- You use the AI to fix/write a little bit of the code at a time. Manually. As in, someone who knows software architecture really well tells the AI to write a function or two or maybe even a whole module and that's it. They do this repeatedly until their task is complete.
#1 is a very expensive way to do it but it seems to work, albeit with a huge learning curve and a much longer horizon before you get something stable. Even then, what you get can be a giant fucking mess that's really, really hard to understand.
#2 is much safer and works quite well, IMHO. When the AI fucks something up, it's only a tiny little thing that's easy to fix. This method really is just a way for developers to improve their productivity.
With #2, it only takes a small amount of tokens to have the AI help you troubleshoot as well. At least, that's been my experience.
Having said that, the places where we are seeing the most growth in AI is small shit. For example, at my work they implemented an agent that scans customer complaints and filters out false positives. I work for a huge company that has a zillion products/services and the AI has tool calls into our ticketing systems to check if there was an outage at the time the customer complained. It's not that smart, but it's smart enough to tell if a ticket about system X was opened when system X had an outage. It can even tell if the customer was complaining about something relevant to the outage.
Stuff like that runs 24/7 and eats up bazillions of tokens, but only on our local hardware (we have thousands of enterprise GPUs). At other companies, they're doing similar things and slowly realizing they can replace OpenAI/Anthropic API calls with local ollama stuff.
Even if your token bill is $10,000/month for a service like that, it's still cheaper than paying an entire team of humans to perform the same function.
That is the growing use of AI automation I was talking about.
I had a similar problem with my shower valve. Turns out I didn't need to replace the whole thing, just the core. Ordered a new one from Amazon for like $20 and that fixed the problem.
The new core wasn't a perfect fit, so I had to take apart the old one and use some of its parts in the new one (they fit perfectly). It was just a matter of unscrewing stuff and screwing it in, so it wasn't a big deal.
#2 is the most sage advice!
I watched a friend drop a screw right down the drain. Then we found out that it wasn't ferromagnetic (the hard way, LOL).
Not just stigma, smells, and other mild/gross annoyances. Garbage collectors are in the top ten most hazardous jobs.
Main issues:
- Repetitive stress injuries
- Spinal and disc injuries
- Slips and falls
- Traffic strikes
- Crushing injuries and pinches
- Flying debris
- Needlesticks and sharps (diseases and infections)
- Bioaerosols and molds
- Animal and insect bites
- Toxic chemical exposure and diesel exhaust
- Thermal stress
- Hearing loss
Elevated cancer risks:
- Lung
- Bladder
- Gastrointestinal and liver
- Leukemia and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
- Skin
It's too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.
On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that's actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It's actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).
Let's say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone's computers be scanned regularly for AI models?
No. It's unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won't be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.
As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is "slop", it really does do useful stuff! It's just most of the useful stuff doesn't make the news. It's boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it's supposed to have or follows the correct format.
AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who's not using AI for that is an idiot. It's just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.
There's fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We'd be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn't good for a lot of things.
We can regulate its use but that's not really "regulating AI" as much as it is "regulating capitalism" or "regulating people". Because the AI isn't just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.
What we need isn't "AI regulation" is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.
The article concludes with this:
We would be doing a disservice to our users and our downstream fellow developers in the same way that a visual artist would be doing a disservice to their viewers or a musician would be doing a disservice to their listeners if they served them auto-generated filler instead of their own creative output.
You can personally select and fell all the trees used to build your house. You can cut and sculpt each 2x4 with chisels and a hand plane like a true artisan.
Or you could just buy lumber in bulk, toss the boards that have flaws, and build your house that way. What's great about that is that as long as you follow building codes your home won't just collapse at the first storm. It won't just burn down with the drop of a match. It won't leak and ruin your stuff.
Using LLMs to code is like buying lumber in bulk. Some of the boards that come off the truck will have flaws. Sometimes they're so bad you can break the 2x4 over your knee! But the job of the builder/framer is to make sure those bad boards don't get used. They're spotted, marked, and replaced.
Code can be art! Absolutely! But not all code needs to be art. Not only that, but your employer doesn't give a shit about how well-written any given code is so why bother? Just give them the AI output that works/passes tests and collect that paycheck.
Individuals using AI are a tiny drop in the bucket. Think bigger: Businesses and government.
There's government agencies racking up token usages to the point where Google had to build an entire data center on Christmas Island (the place with the cool crabs) and that still won't be enough! And that's just one government!
Companies are using AI in automations now and it's working so well that they're willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation.
These usages are where demand is growing. Not regular people or even developers using AI to help them write code.
Coffee? Don't care
Wine? Don't drink
Chocolate? The style/recipe or do you mean the cacao it originates from? Pretty much all dark chocolate tastes the same to me (inferior to milk/sweet chocolate) π€·
Cheese? CHEESEβ½ WTF is wrong with you? Parmesan tastes nothing like mozzarella and ricotta is like an entirely different world!
Your opinion is clearly tasteless! It also lacks nuance and texture.