It’s Superintelligence, stop calling it ai or i’ll throw a plate of ketchup against the wall again, hmp!
-orange
but the shareholders?
Looks like they would have been better off too. I think those are the humans he is talking about.
File under “Y” for “Yeah, no shit”.
YOU DON’T SAY??
All AI does for me is to give me more work to do. Its code is terrible. It has horrible taste. Its work is not modelled after the task, but after “must look complicated”
Every now and then, when zeal comes upon them, my bosses email me a bunch of risk assessments and policy documents that have obviously been written by AI, probably just from one or two prompts. I have actual work to do, I don’t have time to be reading through that shit - so I get AI to summarise it for me.
For this we are boiling the oceans. Sometimes I think our species is just one big Darwin award waiting to happen.
Get Ponytail https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail and an auto-linter such as pi-lens if you’re using Pi harness. And a goal/to-do (pi-goal-x) extension.
What model are you using?
All of this crap for a single markdown file 🙈 or am I overlookong something
Thx, will take a look! GLM 5.3 (flash and no flash), mistral large 4 were the best i tried. The worst were chatgpt 5.6 sol, claude sonnet (a new one, no idea which one). Deepseek v4 flash was ok-ish, qwen coder was nice if i was too lazy to paste stuff.
I used them via mistral’s CLI, served via Mistral’s API, and an academic cloud vendor. I have the cli run in an extremely strict jail (podman-based), so the stuff they can use is super limited (e.g. no bash).
Still learning. Could really be a skill.md issue?
Skill.md issue
How can someone have a skill issue with AI? Isn’t the whole point that it does everything for me? Never understood this.
People are like “you’re gonna get left behind!” and I’m like. How could I be left behind by the magic machine that does everything for me? I’ll just start using it one day and be just as good as everyone else because that’s explicitly how they are designing the software to be used, right?
I think you do have a point. I think the overarching problem with discussions about “AI” is that people rarely refer to the same things when they talk about it and they end up talking past each other. There is a difference between using a custom harness with (a) carefully optimized local LLM(s) and other models you glue on top yourself for other-than-text tasks and using server-side models with a ready-made CLI and UI served to you on a golden platter with all processing being done elsewhere. “You’re gonna get left behind” is not the argument here. If the problem is “the code is too complicated”, that is a style issue that can be mitigated. It’s not set in stone. Sure, there are many problems with LLMs and ML models in terms of where they source their training data from and the environmental impact of data centers. I’ve also had my fair share of literal slop pop out. Some problems are just there and won’t go away (yet), but some problems are a choice, whether you know it or not.
I also think that some people like the idea of being on the designing end rather than just being on the using end. Why stop at skill.md? Why not post-train your model on your own code, style and preferences? I’ve trained a tiny model on a small subset of data I may legally use because it’s… fun. It’s my hobby. I just tinker around with it. The model itself is absolute poop, because it’s super small. But it works. I also locally rebuilt llama.cpp with a TheRock ROCm build for better support for my graphics card and got a very significant performance improvement. It doesn’t even need to be useful in any meaningful way (it often is anyway), as long as I got fun understanding how it works.
“I’ll just start using it one day and be just as good as everyone else because that’s explicitly how they are designing the software to be used, right?”. Yes. You’re still going to need to be capable enough to express what you want with precision, but if you can do that, you’re absolutely right, especially considering future models. But maybe you don’t want to be absolutely dependent on big companies serving you those models.
It’s with anything. It’s a tool. Like if you buy a synthesizer but you don’t press any buttons and complain you don’t get the sound you want.
Like go on a image generation site and say “dog” sure you’ll probably get a picture of a dog but it’s probably not the breed, color or setting or pose you want. If you are more spesific in your prompt you’ll get a more spesific thing.
Skills etc are just prompts. And with better prompts you’ll get better results. It’s very simple
Honestly yeah likely, I have extreme lack of knowledge re: vibe coding.
I am much faster per pedes right now
duh.
I was a programmer for 25 years. I always figured I could have made a contribution to AI research, but the opportunity never came up (I was too busy writing Skype clones for cable companies and ISPs that were never used by anyone). I regretted this for a long time, but not any more. I never imagined AI would be this fucking bad, “bad” in the sense of bad for humanity and just plain bad as a product.
It’s cause it’s not AI
FWIW I always felt my contribution would have been towards “real” AI rather than the current pseudo-AI stuff that is all the rage. In addition to being a programmer, I also have a background in evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy. The “neural networks” that are part of current AI were originally based on the understanding of how neurons function that existed in the 1970s, and they were (and are still) a poor implementation of that level of knowledge. IMHO true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function and how they have come about in the real world through hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
That being said, “real” AI is probably going to be even worse for humanity than this current stuff is, so at least I’m glad that blood won’t be on my hands.
I feel for you. Going into machine learning was my dream to. Until this. I wanted to work on true artificial intelligence based on the human brain.
I really don’t understand this perspective, and it’s my biggest gripe with Chollet and his ilk as well. What, in your opinion, makes neuro-symbolic AI inherently superior to (the currently better performing) statistical methods?
I really don’t understand this perspective
This is honestly a strange thing to say. The only examples we have on the planet today of what we consider true intelligence are living animals. Why wouldn’t it at least be possible that the properties of the signaling units that comprise these existing, observed intelligences (i.e. neurons) are fundamental to the task of replicating these intelligences? It seems to me it’s the “statistical methods” that have yet to prove they’re capable of producing true intelligence.
I will retreat to the fact that I said “true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function” and not “can only be achieved”. Time will tell which approach works better.
I don’t know who Chollet is but I’ll look him up. Thanks for the reference.
Edit: the downvote was predictable. Nice job.
they can’t read and, as Sartre said: the slopper knows the things it says are absurd…
Please stop using this argument. Unless you also brought it up every single time the term was used in videogames etc
It’s a bad argument that relies on pure language semantics that helps no one and undermines any good argument against it because it weakens your stance
I do bring it up every case and even if I didn’t this case it’s an important distinction. Artificial intelligence is a marketing term used to conjure images of Jarvis and what not in people heads.
Video games companies never claimed to have near sentiment AGI baked into their games that would replace all human workers or blow up the world.
The term artificial intelligence is used to anthropomorphize LLMs as weird as that seems.
It is an important distinction. These are large language models, not reasoning models, not AGI, not artificial life not artificial intelligence.
I know that term as been used by the machine learning community in the past to mean things like decision trees and general models, and it didn’t really matter much then but it matters A LOT now.
Words have meanings. This isn’t arguing semantics, it’s using words as they are intended so we can communicate effectively about something in the world. To argue otherwise is naive, dishonest, and quite honestly just annoying.
Hi I’m new to this debate and I agree with you that language matters and all that stuff you said at the end. That being said, I’m firmly in the camp of “LLMs are bad, but a ‘true’ AI would be even worse for us”. I could type up several paragraphs diving into the several reasons why I think that way, but to save time (and to get back to my job) I’m just going to steal this Frank Herbert quote:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them
Do I think AI, in a vacuum, is always bad and will be no matter who or what makes it? No, not necessarily. But whatever we build will be inherently, and intrinsically tied to the micro- and macro-systems of our society, which are all DEEPLY fucked. Consequently, any AI we bring in would also, even if not initially, end up as being equally, deeply, fucked and end up being far, FAR more detrimental than positive
Yeah true AI would be quite insane. Especially if it was behind human capabilities.
There’s just no way to ensure it’s aligned towards good. We can’t even define that ourselves. Who knows the suffering we could unleash on ourselves.
What does true AI even mean? What do any of the things you guys say even mean? What?
Not a LLM. LLMs aren’t intelligent they are pretty much just pattern matching. No world model or real reasoning capabilities
we can argue what actual ai would be, as long as we agree that it remains very firmly in the realm of science fucking fiction, just this side of inertial dampener fields and FTL travel.
I do agree that any ai made by this society as it exists would be apocalyptic. all its stories about ‘evil ai’ are just metaphors for itself. we have already given up our thinking to computers (which don’t yet think) and corporations and kings and markets. we fucking love giving up our thinking. it’s like the whole appeal of fascism for most fascists.
no. no because in video games it was understood that the “ai: very hard” was not actually ai, it was computer player. it did actually use some very early research in the field, but it was not ai and even at age ten I knew that. ai would not have so many dumb pathing problems. nobody was trying to tell me the AI from unreal:tournament or starcraft: brood war had feelings or was going to conquer the world, so clarification was not required.
but it was not ai
It’s as much AI as when they made the chess computer that beat Kasparov, it’s just not a very sophisticated AI.
its not ai. its not on the cutting edge of the field of researching ai. its not progress. it does not get us closer. it does not tell us anything about ourselves or information science we didn’t learn from satoshi nakamoto or Adolph Hitler years earlier.
It doesn’t have to be cutting edge or even progress to be AI, how did you get that idea? Obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have cutting edge AI, they are considered the global leaders, even if they go bankrupt in a few months.
I think you are confusing AI with AGI or strong AI.
There is not 1 single way to make an AI, and there are HUGE differences in how good they are, but very very definitely we have had AI since the 80’s. Back then it just wasn’t really usable, that began to a very small degree in the 90’s, with for instance expert systems.Maybe read this to become better informed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligencewe call it ai when its at the frontier of how close we’re getting to ai. cultural convention.
this shit isn’t and never was.
we also call stuff that is parts of what would be an agi theoretically if we ever build one, kinds of narrow reasoning and the like. this shit isn’t and never will be.
If we fix the name, it will not change what it does, and it probably won’t fix how people use and feel about it. “Really Good Guessing Machine” is less marketable than “Artificial Intelligence”, and much closer to the truth, but CEOs would be willing to take credit for laying off 20% of their workforce because they have RGGM now.
Maybe “Predictive Token Gamble”, to convey that all it does is predict tokens, and each output, each use case, and the entire industry as a whole is a gamble… “PTG reduced our human capital expenditure by 20%” still goes a long way, though.
I think it would change how people use it. the people ordering it used are mostly very stupid. the current push, insurability of anything that uses it, and flood of endless vc cash, is based on the bullshit fairy tale.
How is what people do any better or different than the Really Good Guessing Machine?
What is AI to you then? Is the only thing that’s AI a fully working consciousness but running on silicon instead of synapses?
already replied to another that covers this
You misunderstand AI. Limited algorithms are still AI. So yes, video game algorithms are AI, LLMs are not, because they are statistical garbage generators.
quibbling over definitions but sure, it’s kind of technically but the media push over thus shit gas garbled the language so communication between experts casual stuff knowers and gormless fuckwits has three mostly non overlapping sets of meanings for a bunch of words
You are spot on, and the ones downvoting you are simply wrong.
it’s funny because they are literally proving my point. But oh well
It’s sad how many stupid people are here. 🙁
Too much reddit contrarianism leaking. All too keen to say the same 4 taglines to a topic without any understanding if it even makes sense
I don’t know what it is, but sometimes it feels like debating a stupid 12 year old.
You missed the point. Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.
LLMs running under greedy decoding are deterministic finite state machines. A lot of work has gone into making their output nondeterministic because probabilistic next-token generation is more useful.
The more accurate characterization would be that LLMs are context-dependent deterministic state machines with adjustable nondeterministic sampling algorithms bolted onto the decoder.
Also, just as a side note:
They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
This almost perfectly describes human behavior.
This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.
With the exact state of training data, and the exact prompt history, you’ll get the same output. Problem is that you only get this scenario a single time. And as much as a spelling error, or simply repeating the same prompt twice, will not yield deterministic output.
So no, LLM garbage is not deterministic. Otherwise it would be possible to predict output before the matrix processes the input.
They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
This almost perfectly describes human behavior.
That’s nonsense. Most mammals have a high understanding of context, and humans are very much able to produce deterministic answers to a given problem.
don’t argue with it like its a person. even if IRS made of meat, it is engaging in bad faith.
- With greedy decoding (temperature set to 0) LLM output is deterministic. The same input will always result in the same output — every time. This is a fact.
- Just because something isn’t amenable to calculation does not mean it is nondeterministic, for example the Three Body Problem. This is a fact.
- Humans are stupid unpredictable base animals that hold almost no understanding of the world around them or their place within it, while at the same time their heard-level behaviors are almost, if not entirely, predictable. This is a cynical joke.
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
yes, absolutely. and? Still makes them AI. Just not AGI (what the tech bros think they sell).
Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
yes, and? You described an algorithm. If used in the context of game AI, it falls into the category of AI. The same way an LLM falls also the broad definition of AI. It’s just not AGI
This is exactly the stupid sematic discussion I mentioned above. You are fighting the wrong fight. Start focusing on calling their bullshit for not being AGI. That’s something you can actually attack. Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error. And weakins your argument
Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error.
I can’t just sit and watch people say this nonsense. It is not Intelligent. It is hardly artificial. It is a marketing concept and should be called out as such.
And frankly I think its worth calling out marketing bullshit because 1. people should be informed what is really going on here, and 2. that companies marketing it this way are trying to convince you that there is some intelligence behind it so you can trust and use it.
Could you inform me of what is really going on here?
Snake oil and wish fullfilment with a heavy dose of personal information data gathering/privacy invasion and addiction. That is whats going on here.
What people are actually using are probability engines. Statisical guessing machines. Nothing more. Every word and every letter is just a prediction based on the probability the next one is going to occur and fit. There is no desireable outcome that it cares about.
There is no understanding or consciousness. No decision making based on anything else, no feeling, no desire, nothing.
The term, in mathmatics and computer science is technically correct, as the field started around the late 1940’s. But this term is taken to mean far more than this and marketed as such. Hence why Trump tried to rebrand yet again with Super Intelligence, just more marketing.
These are money making schemes conflated with desire for power and a gold rush where no company wants to be late to the party. It’s an investment loop; a sleight of hand to move money.
Look at all the bullshit they build into the chatbots alone to try and humanize it: memories of you, telling you that you are very smart, agreeing by design, particularly to the point of making stuff up. The sycophany is used to drive engagement, even when the answer is wrong.
- No one talked about AGI, and of course video game NPCs do not have that.
- LLMs are - technically speaking - the shittiest subset of the broad field of AI research. However, since they have zero determinism, they are the absolute opposite of “intelligent”. They are artificial morons, if anything. And I object to the overuse of “AI” because words are important, and most humans are incredibly gullible and when everyone and their news station calls something “AI”, they will assume it is intelligent and will rely on its outputs. This will kill people.
Therefore: No, LLMs are not AI. They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
correction: this will kill more people. it’s been doing that for a while
They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
That very precisely describes a lot of people I know.
By any definition of AI, a rock could be intelligent. If you interpret it as doing something that resembles intelligence, that is intelligence as we understand it. It wouldn’t likely be widely accepted, but the going definition of intelligence accepts that broadness.
they literally are. AI is a very broad term. They are just not AGI.
People need to learn that categories exist and have grouping hirarchies. You’re proving my point wonderfully
Exactly. My farts are AI. I agree!
It most definitely is AI, and the guy is a Nobel Price winner for making a breakthrough in AI programming.
Contrary to you, he actually knows what he is talking about.so there is a field of ai. it’s a real thing. we don’t have it yet, but, like cold fusion, we’re pretty sure its possible and the steps along the way are fascinating. even partial steps have wide reaching applications and philosophical implications. it is the absolute coolest shit, and gets exactly 0 funding these days.
the thing all the data centers RAM water electricity and economy are backing right now is not ai. it’s what happens when a magic trick and a ponzi scheme fuck on a pile of cocaine in a Pharaoh’s tomb. I say that to the audience here, because there’s really no point talking to someone who’s still a partisan the other way.
so there is a field of ai. … even partial steps have wide reaching applications and philosophical implications. it is the absolute coolest shit, and gets exactly 0 funding these days.
the thing all the data centers RAM water electricity and economy are backing right now is not ai. it’s what happens when a magic trick and a ponzi scheme fuck on a pile of cocaine in a Pharaoh’s tomb.
These two positions seem to be mutually exclusive, and your response is, on the whole, incoherent. Could you please explain what it is you are trying to communicate?
I thought I already had, so maybe I can’t. not to you at least.
We most definitely have AI, on the other hand cold fusion is NOT possible, you are wrong on both counts.
Edit:
Wow downvoted on a FACTUAL statement!!!
IDK maybe some here are confused and think AI = AGI which is artificial General intelligence, also called strong AI.
We don’t yet have strong AI, but that’s a completely different issue than just AI, which we have in abundance.Regarding cold fusion it is only a hypothesis, a hypothesis that all evidence disproves. So no cold fusion is NOT possible, and there is absolutely no reason to believe it is except ignorance about the issue.
Oh look its the physics knower. What do you mean cold fusion isn’t possible? Did you come up with the theory of everything and fail to mention it to the rest of us? We DONT KNOW what is possible. Science is not even 5% of the way towards figuring out the entire universe. Such a definite answer is in no way verifiable. You could say it’s not possible for us to do it right now. That’s true. But saying it’s entirely not possible is about as backed by evidence as your typical religious claim.
Cold fusion is not an acknowledged physical theory, it’s not even an acknowledged hypothesis. In fact all physical theory talks against it.
IDK why I’m downvoted and you are upvoted? Cold fusion is a hoax and has never happened.
It’s a phenomenon only debated seriously among the ignorant.Physics is literally not correct. We know that to be a fact. We have an approximation of how to calculate certain things, and we have some of the pieces correct, but we have no actual understanding of how things work at a fundamental level. Hence there is no way to rule out anything definitively. Fucking MAGIC could be real under the right circumstances for all we know. It’s UNLIKELY but it is not 100% known to be fake. THe language you used was definitive. That is what I take issue with.
we also have warp travel the warhammer kind not the star trek kind.
I have no idea about what warp speed warhammer style is, but the idea of traveling faster than light using warp speed is a fantasy that doesn’t work even in theory, because you can’t bend space faster than light either, because gravity too can’t travel faster than light. So the idea of traveling faster than light because you are moving within a warped field can never work, because you can’t move the warp field faster than light anyway.
Never really got into the warhammer universe, I know it’s HUGE, maybe some day I’ll get around to it.
this thing you said isn’t true
well I beg to differ. I met my girlfriend there!
There are actually several ways that faster than light travel would work mathematically. We just are nowhere near having the resources to test them.
Just because he has a novel prize doesn’t make him immune to propaganda.
I never made any claims about that, that doesn’t change that claiming it’s not AI is moronic. We absolutely have AI, and have had it since at least the 80’s.
Claiming we don’t is moronic.
It’s a problem with human greed, not AI. If we didn’t have greedy oligarch parasites then AI wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem. NIMBYism is destroying the future of the USA.
That is only some of the problem.
See the study where they compared brain activity with or without. Also, if the AI users were cut off from being able to use, they at least in the moment became less capable of doing the tasks than they were before they were being allowed to use AI. Study can’t speak to lasting impact, but they clearly showed people would get worse in the moment.
Studies have shown that folks that employ a rich writing style early in life are less likely to show dementia late in life and people who have very lazy writing styles are likely to have dementia. Obviously too early to say for sure if this applies to LLM, but leaning on LLM for writing might be similarly lazy.
Not so sure, the younger generations have zero critical thinking skills, can’t problem solve without a road map. Need to be able to figure shit out on your own creating your own road map
Yea that’s what happens when we stop investing in education.
Yup. No need for researching or critical thinking kids! your buddy chat gpt can give you all the answers.
They also grew up with full internet in their house, I didn’t have internet until I was 14 maybe 15 and it was dial up
Why this generation more than the one before?
Maybe it’s because the system is working as the old ghouls pushed it.
It’s always fascinating that the blame is put on the individuals while mega corps are distilling hijacking our brains and gaming our systems to get more money and control.
Society at large is built up for people to succumb to the pitfalls, but still individuals get blamed when the pressure is simply too much or when the system is made to make individuals fail.
Fuck this noise. We would have been the same as this generation if we had the same monetized dopamine hooks as they grew up with.
I won’t deny that, we’d be the same. Doesn’t matter though, they have to do better and grow out of it or future generations are fucked. We can put blame on the mega corps but that’s just a rocketing chair, gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere
Nah. Humans are just complete shits in general.
It isn’t AI (although, again, that doesn’t even exist, all we have are statistic machines) that is the problem. Its that we are not anywhere near enlightened enough to be responsible for anything as a species.
We’ve extincted plenty of other species. Eventually we’d start on ourselves.
Start? We’ve been embracing the Great Filter like a long lost friend.
I’d have said that killing ourselves because we ran out of everything else is a very human thing to do, but it’s not like we haven’t been killing each other all along too.
i wonder how he ended up on “might”?
You’ll find in general that smart people very rarely speak in absolutes on things such as this. Because the more you know about something the more you realize how much you don’t know.
You’ve got to have a little wiggle room. Just in case.
I ‘might’ not eat a tub of ice cream later on and then sit on the toilet crying until my legs go numb, buuuuuut…
This is why I wanted a TV in the bathroom…
We don’t know the end result yet.
You don’t use it, you lose it. And many people are already bankrupt in the old brain department as is…
I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I have an old iOS project that I want to revive, but I genuinely wonder if I still have the ability to do anything with it. Fortunately, my motivation has tanked even harder than my programming skills.
bet you’re still better than me! take a shot! need drugs to help?
need drugs to help?
Probably so. I also haven’t smoked weed since 2021, and I never coded sober.
that might be a bigger issue. someone get this lady a joint!
I’m no lady! It’s a Kids in the Hall reference. And I can’t smoke any more because I’m now a school bus driver.
well, at least there’s still LSD.
wait not even on your day off?
Ha ha I loved LSD back in the day, but I know I couldn’t handle it now.
No, can’t even smoke on my day off. They randomly drug test and if you’re positive for THC you’re gone. Even a medical marijuana card can’t help you, it’s DOT shit because you need a CDL to drive a school bus. It’s for the best in my case – I smoked many lifetimes worth of weed.
This is a good use for an LLM, to help ease you back into things, and get you up and running with some momentum.
Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Did calculators or abacuses do the same thing? This argument has no merit.
Tools allow you to do you work better and be able to focus on doing other parts better. It’s not like people can’t do basic math, yet people want to say AI means we will go back to banging rocks? Yeah that makes sense…
Scroll the comments, we’ve had this exact argument.
People literally do struggle with basic maths also
Yes? Of course some people are gonna struggle with stuff. Some people are illiterate as well, and have had zero access to technology. What do you think that supports or proves? There’s also people who have every limited mental functions, through no fault of their own.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.
Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
- you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
- you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
- news and media have become so much easier to impact
- not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
- and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this. etc.
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.
you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
You don’t have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.
You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it’s an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It’s fine to have those objections, but you can’t say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that’s just taking away the enjoyment of others.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere?
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
I love the appropriate application of Kant!
But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.
You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.
I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.
Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.
Maybe the pace of development would’ve been slower, giving us more time to react to it. Or it wouldn’t get shoved down our throats every second, or it’d be renoved from the places it’s more harmful, if making money wasn’t the only concern
Maybe yeah. There’s certainly ways it could have played out better.
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.
We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.
A large question is if the “skill atrophy” is more than just having to lean on AI and if it contributes to broader mental decline over time. Years down the line we might have a huge bump in dementia. People aren’t using it to manage information that was merely beyond their reach like tools to date, they are offloading writing communication. Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions, which seems absurd.
I will say that at least some folks I know personally that went all in on conversational AI use now seem… Off compared to before when talking to them face to face.
Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions
How is that any different than the million bot farms that already exist?
Like, shit posting isn’t a critical value added skill.
Note that the discussions were at least intended to be an earnest debate. However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement but to try to just re-emphasize their perspective.
While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.
However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement
This presupposes sincere engagement prior to LLMs. You’re assuming this guy wasn’t just regurgitating talking points cobbled up the old fashioned was, as though repeating lines you heard from Jordan Peterson or JD Vance on a Joe Rogan podcast.
Alternatively, that this person remains totally sincerely in their beliefs and simply leverage the LLM to recall obscure, vaguely remembered historical details. Or to clean up their poor grammar or clumsy prose.
LLMs have no impact on critical thinking in either case. At least, no more than spell check or a Wikipedia fact lookup or a brain saturated by other people’s professed views.
While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.
The argument that someone is “using LLMs” becomes a superficial excuse to disengage.
And hey, maybe that’s good. Maybe less people treating the Internet as a real place with sincere people will convince folks to engage more in MeatSpace.
But “technology is making us dumber” is a line I see floated endlessly. It reads more as misanthropy and elitism than any real critique of the new technology
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.
Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.
The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in
{a}+{b}and returning{c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is{a}+{b}to give us the result{c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.
Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings
I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this.
I have, not in education (I have relatives who work in higher education and they claim as such, but both of these are anecdotes anyway) but the interview process. My work has struggled to hire anyone and its driving me bananas. They either get candidates who used AI to pass the non-technical phone screen and show up for the first interview clearly asking AI about industry standards and they flunk almost immediatly. The second group are full on tripple threats, they can sing, dance and act, but balk at the first talk of pay (my business daddy has not kept up with the competition in a narrow field, they can get a lot more across the street).
We are looking down the barrel of the last cohorts of classically trained professionals working through their careers, the world is about to be a much weirder and worse place because of [gestures broadly to everything] but mostly AI.
Can I ask in which field you work? And also, can you give some tips for interviewing? As in, what would you like from a candidate?
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
I’m not sure what you mean by “if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful” - but taking a leap, I don’t see how that matters.
If I allow a machine to code for me, and don’t regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn’t matter how important I think the skill is - I’ve given it away.
No question the average person is worse at arithmetic since the invention of the calculators. But we probably wouldn’t have our current standard of living if we hadn’t invented the calculator either. And calculators wre so ubiquitous and basic…
So… On balance it was a net benefit. On the other hand AI affects more than a single skill. Will the QoL improvements outweigh the negative behavioural effects? I think the jury is still out on that one.
Absolutely, I’m not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.
Go back to growing your own food than. It’s not laziness to take advantage of efficiency gains. Do you know how to grow a large varieties of vegetables? Or has your reliance on grocery stores and farmers atrophied your intelligence?
…said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)
Why don’t you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.
Can’t help but notice that in addition to being weirdly smug, all you did was show that someone else has come to similar conclusions.
Writing things down is a great way to offload the cognitive load of remembering things.
Fortunately, it’s hard to paywall writing. The same isn’t true for AI.
That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.
It’s not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.
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Thankfully, removing literacy from someone is cost prohibitive.
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
Better. Significantly better.
I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.
He’s not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.
People certainly don’t seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.
Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.
I mean, that’s a curious anecdote. But it doesn’t explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970
As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.
I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.
Them’s the breaks over text sometimes.
What if AI was only used for skill building?
what if twinkies were only used for critical nutrition? then they would be healthy!
It has potential, though I wonder if that’s genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.
It can definitely feel more dynamic, I’m not convinced the outcomes are provably better.
I imagine something like a tutor. You have an interactive system for 1 on 1 attention that teachers and parents can’t always provide.
Nothing I’ve seen is nearly ready for this, but at the same time, its not completely useless.
This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.
and create better educational resources
Exactly! Like individualized and infinitely patient always available personal tutors. Oh, wait…
What is even the benefit
I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
In this case it’s basically the same technology (LLMs); you don’t get one without the other.
Sure you do. We don’t have to have every permutation of every technology.
That’s like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.
Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.
Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
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Well, for starters, if you want to translate a written work to another language, it has never been easier.
LLMs are excellent tools for modeling large languages.
That is all they are good for. They are ok for translation, although even then they miss a lot of nuance like someone who can speak a language but isn’t fluent.
Well, there are a lot of malicious uses, but passable translation is the one positive use case.
They could replace the CEOs. Huge cost savings for stock owners.
I mean, a drunk chicken could replace a CEO.
A sociopathic drunk chicken, maybe
That is all they are good for.
Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.
Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.
I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.
There are better AI options that could be developed for that over a massive all in one inefficient LLM like Copilot. If the same amount of money was thrown at dedicated development AI and searches it would require far less energy, pollution, hardware, and could be run locally in many cases with the same or better results.
There are better AI options
You can take that up with management. I don’t get to pick what AI agent my boss decided to pay for.
You have, and let me be clear on this, absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Also, not all AI is LLMs
I was replying to a post about LLMs and the article is about LLMs so while it is true that AI predates LLMs and the label isn’t literally limited to only LLMs and genAI those two things have taken over the label and are what nearly everyone means when they say AI.
They aren’t talking about the AI used to find exoplanets, or the AI used with lidar to find structures in jungles, or to do actual medical science, or all of the other types that are useful tools. The article is about LLMs implemented by the big companies that are designed to steal and manipulate data in ways that are detrimental to society.
what ai!? there is no ai!
down with killing the oligarchs though.
🍿
I really didn’t need a world-renowned subject matter specialist to tell me that, but I’m glad to hear him say it nonetheless.
