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AI crap - Why ML will make the world worse, not better (drewdevault.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.

AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These are easily avoidable problems. There are always reputable authors on topics and why would a self published foraging book by some random person be better than an AI one? You buy books written by experts, especially when it’s about life or death.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the idea is that someone buying a basic book on foraging mushrooms isn't going to know who the experts are.

They're going to google it, and they're going to find AI-generated reviews (with affiliate links!) of AI-generated foraging books.

Now, if said AI is generating foraging books more accurate than humans, that's fine by me. Until that's the case, we should be marking AI-generated books in some clear way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now, if said AI is generating foraging books more accurate than humans, that’s fine by me. Until that’s the case, we should be marking AI-generated books in some clear way.

The problem is, the LLM AIs we have today literally cannot do this because they are not thinking machines. These AIs are beefed-up autocompletes without any actual knowledge of the underlying information being conveyed. The sentences are grammatically correct and read (mostly) like we would expect human written words to read, however the actual factual content is non-existent. The appearance of correctness just comes from the fact that the model was trained on information that was (probably mostly) correct in the first place.

I mean, we should still be calling these things algorithms and not "AI" as "AI" carries a lot of subtext in people's minds. Most people understand "algorithms" to mean math, and that dehumanizes it. If you call something AI, all of a sudden people have sci-fi ideas of truly independent thinking machines. ChatGPT is not that, at all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I agree. And ML may never be able to cross that line.

That said, we've been calling it AI for decades now. It was weird enough to me when people started using ML more. I remember the AI classes I took in college, and the AI experts I met in my jobs. Then one day it was "just ML". In most situations, it's the same darn thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Easily avoidable" if you know to look for them or if they're labelled appropriately. This was just an example of a danger that autocomplete AI is creating today. Unscrupulous people will continue to shit out AI generated nonsense to try to sell when the seller does zero vetting of the products in their store (one of the many reasons I no longer shop at Amazon).

Many people, especially beginners, are not going to take the time to fully investigate their sources of knowledge, and to be honest they probably shouldn't have to. If you get a book about mushrooms from the library, you can probably assume it's giving valid information as the library has people to vet books. People will see Amazon as being responsible for keeping them safe, for better or worse.

I agree that generally there is a bunch of nonsense about ChatGPT and LLM AIs that isn't really valid, and we're seeing some amount of AI bubble happening where it's a self feeding thing. In the end it will shake out, but before that all happens you have some outright dangerous and harmful things occurring today.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, people should at least check if the publisher is reliable for any information source.