The fuck are all these comments? AI is shit, fuck AI. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
LLMs are shit, fuck LLMs. They fuel billionaires, destroy the environment, kill critical thinking, confidently tell you to off yourself, praise Hitler, advocate for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
And AI is a pipe dream no one is close to fulfilling, won’t be realized by feeding LLMs all of the data in existence, and billionaires are destroying our economy in their pursuit of it.
OK, and my point is that people are using the term “AI” so loosely as to be indistinguishable from “algorithm”.
We’ll still have the statistical protein folding models after this bubble eventually pops, we’re just not gonna call it “AI”. It’s a trendy marketing department word, and its usefulness as a description in Computer Science is rapidly diminishing.
I would say it just got widespread use, I definitely heard of MS Word doing autofill as ‘AI’ at the time when deep learning was freshly invented thing. People tried to label a lot of things ‘AI’, with LLMs the label just stuck better
AI to a layman just means “LLMs and Generative AI that rich assholes keep trying to force me to use or consume the output of”. i dont think its worthwhile to split semantic hairs over this. call the “good” stuff CNNs or machine learning if you really feel the need to draw a distinction.
Doesn’t work that way unfortunately. Ask a person on the street what AI is and theyll tell you whatever flavor slop generator they’re familiar with. You’re not going to see much pushback on ML around the Fediverse.
Change this out for any other technology that’s been innovated throughout human history. The printing press semiconductors the internet.
The anti-ai rhetoric on this platform is becoming nonsensical.
At this point it’s just bandwagon hate. These people don’t even understand the difference between llms and AIs and the various applications that they have.
Yes. These all qualify. They’re all massively successful technologies.
Well, aside from 3D TVs and smart glasses. But they’re generally innocuous. Yes I also understand that smart glasses es have privacy issues but then again in this day and age what doesn’t.
The metaverse had a billion dollars pumped into it, and yet for all they money they spent they have literally no users to show for it. Likewise for NFTs, a few idiots got suckered into paying for monkey JPGs and are now left holding a bag that no one wants.
The blockchain has a small cult trading money back and forth to make it look bigger than it really is. But it’s never achieved any kind of mainstream adoption as the currency true believers keep insisting it will be. And it never will, because it’s way too inefficient to ever scale.
In 2024-2025, estimates put the NFT market in the 30-40+ billion dollar range (market size or annual sales), with giving a projected 34.1 billion dollars valuation in 2025 and Q1 2025 sales over 8.2 billion dollars on their own.
https://fortunly.com/statistics/nft-statistics/
Figured I’d summon at least one person trying to defend crypto. Just because the US has issues doesn’t suddenly mean crypto is good.
Bitcoin has been around for almost two decades now, and still has not achieved anything beyond being a means for speculators to try and fleece each other. If it hasn’t reached widespread mainstream adoption by now, it never will.
Gold is also just digging something up and then re-burying it. If it hasnt replaced fiat then why are people buying it, why has it been going up 100% a year recently when theres no new industrial demand for it?
Its fine to not hold it, but all finite assets have some intrinsic value, because fiat keeps pumping via new debt issuance, which is inevitably debased. Like it was during Covid, or 2008, or 2001, etc…
Crypto has a higher volatility, but can have a higher return, and is more closer correlated to the Nasdaq; like all assets its generally efficiently priced. I’d say its closer to TQQQ than it is to VT or gold, which may be suitable for 1-10% of a portfolio depending on goals and risk tolerance. If they drop interest rates quickly to pump the stockmarket TQQQ and Bitcoin would likely both rise dramatically.
I feel like you just autopiloted into random cryptobro talking points that have nothing to do with the conversation. I don’t care if you like crypto, the reality is that rest of the world has already rejected it and moved on.
Well the crux of the argument is gold went from 2500$ to 7000$ in 2 years, and youre trying to convince people of the irrationality of a finite asset. I’m not saying its a sure thing, but I do think Blackrock suggesting a 2% allocation to Bitcoin is rational, and I’ve done very well myself with a small allocation like that; despite the idea the “world rejected it”.
If the US dollar goes through hyperinflation and becomes worthless, people in the US won’t switch to Bitcoin or other crypto as their main form of currency. We’ll do exactly what citizens of every country that experiences such a currency crash does - start using other more stable currencies. You would see businesses start accepting a mix of Canadian dollar, Mexican pesos, Euros, and Yuan.
I’ve contemplated this myself, about competing currencies, and how that would leave the world if we had cheap and ubiquitous FX with little to no drag. Would it not cause a race to the bottom for inflation targeting, and lead to something similar to everyone using a fixed currency?
Why would I hold Canadian dollar or Pesos if their inflation target is 2% versus say the Swiss 1%? Is there enough new money supply for everyone to even attain the lowest inflation currency, or do they bid down the denomination as that countries FX value rises?
Why would I hold Canadian dollar or Pesos if their inflation target is 2% versus say the Swiss 1%?
No. No it wouldn’t.
Because ultimately you (assuming you’re in the US), have to pay your taxes in USD. People say that fiat currencies aren’t backed by anything, but that isn’t true. They’re backed by the fact that every single US citizen and resident has to gather up thousands of dollars every year and pay them to the government. Even if you could convince your employer to pay you in Euros, the IRS will still demand you pay whatever taxes you would owe if you were paid in an equivalent amount of dollars.
Sorry don’t remember any of those other technologies using so much resources, raising prices for everyone else as they don’t pay the actual cost. And being wrong about stuff.
They literally killed and excommunicated people after the invention of the printing press for producing unauthorized copies of the Bible. Figures like William Tyndale paid with their lives for translating scripture into English, challenging the Church’s authority.
There is illicit material circulating freely on Tor, demonstrating that technology can distribute both knowledge and criminal content.
Semiconductors underpin some of humanity’s most powerful and destructive technologies, from advanced military systems to cyberweapons. They are a neutral tool, but their applications have reshaped warfare and global power dynamics.
You are fully entitled to dislike AI or technologies associated with it. But to dismiss it entirely is ignorant. Whether you want to believe it or not, we are on the precipice of a technological revolution, the shape of which remains uncertain, but its impact will be undeniable.
Bullshit, fuck your false equivalency. This tech is good at generaating slop, propaganda, and destroying critical thinking. Thats it. It has zero value.
Same with the internet. Fuels billionaires, destroys the environment with data centers and cables, kills libraries and textbook research, spreads nazi propaganda. We need to stop using technology in general.
There are things you can do with the Internet that are impossible to do without the Internet. Everything you mentioned is very real harm that the Internet does to humanity in the world - even if you meant it sarcastically - but that harm has to be weighed against the benefits the Internet provides that can’t be replicated by anything else.
There’s nothing a LLM can do that a human can’t. The only thing LLMs are good at is convincing managers to replace human employees with LLMs. Because even though LLMs do a worse job than any human employee, they’re cheaper and won’t unionize.
The cost-benefit analysis for society is very different.
Perhaps your right, though the AI also allows natural language or voice, and further explanations.
When you visualize a cylinder, think of stacking many thin circular disks (each with a height Δh) to build up the height h. The volume of each individual disk is its area πr2 multiplied by its infinitesimally small height Δh. When you aggregate these over the full height h, you arrive at the volume of the cylinder.
Its also eroding all the bullshit we used to do, like cover letters and things that had no reason to exist besides wasting someones time. So truth be told I’m a fan, even if it is a massively unprofitable bubble, I also recognize its limitations given its hallucinations so I understand it shouldnt be relied upon for useful work.
I won’t argue about the value of explanation from a lying hallucinating machine.
But I like how your use case is “it does the things that I believe to be useless and time wasting for everyone involved. But instead of, pushing for the end of these time wasting acts, I waste a little less time with llms (instead of all of the time by not doing these time wasting acts) while still wasting the time of the reader.” What an efficient use case! We should violate IP law, waste drinking water and energy for it!
What you’ve given is an example of a problem where an LLM is inherently the wrong tool.
See, variation is built into LLMs. They’re programmed to evaluate probable responses and select from them on the basis of probability - to simplify ridiculously, if a particular word follows another 90% of a time, in 90% of the content it generates the LLM will have that word follow the other, and in the other 10% it won’t.
If you give an LLM the exact same prompt multiple times, you will get multiple different responses. They’ll all be similar responses, but they won’t be exactly the same, because how LLMs generate language is probabilistic and contains randomness.
(And that is why hallucination is an inherent feature of LLMs and can’t be trained out.)
But math isn’t language. Math problems have correct answers. When you use a software tool to answer a math problem, you don’t want variation. You want the correct answer every time.
To solve a math problem, you need to find the appropriate formula, which will be the same every time. Then you use a calculator, which always gives the correct result. You plug the numbers into the formula and calculate the result.
What I’m getting at is, if you use a calculator to do the math problem yourself, and you put in the correct formula, you’ll always get the correct result. If you use a LLM to generate the answer to a math problem, there is always a non-zero chance it will give you the wrong answer.
But what if, you might ask, you don’t know the correct formula? What if you’re not good enough at math to calculate the correct answers, even with a calculator? Isn’t this a time when the LLM can be useful, to do something you can’t?
The problem is, the LLM could be wrong. And if you haven’t looked up the formula yourself, from a reliable source that is not an LLM, you have no way to check the LLM’s work. Which means you can’t trust it for anything important and you have to do the math yourself anyway.
(This is true for everything an LLM does, but is especially true for math.)
And if you have looked up the formula yourself, it’s just as easy to use a calculator the first time and skip the LLM.
Right? This is what I’m getting at. An LLM can do some of the same things a human does, but it’s always going to be worse at it than a human, because it’s not conscious, it’s not reasoning its way to a correct answer, it’s just generating a string of linguistic tokens based on probabilities. And math problems might be the clearest possible example of this.
Thats well put, I’m under no naive assumption that LLMs are AI. Though I do think youre discounting the usefulness, as it did give the right answer, which is a fine use for average people doing basic math or whatever project theyre working on. I’m under no delusion that its replacing workers, unless someones job is writing fancy emails or building spreadsheets, and I do still think its a massive bubble.
Yeah, I get that it seems like a fine use for average people doing basic math. The nonzero chance of error could end up not mattering. But it could matter very much, depending on the use case. If you’re asking an LLM the volume of a bucket, it’s not a big deal. If you’re asking an LLM “how many milligrams of this drug is the correct dose for a 80 kg man”, that’s a big fucking deal.
If people don’t know LLMs can’t be trusted to give the corect answer, they’re not going to realize they need to do the math themselves in important use cases. And that is certainly not something Microsoft and Google are encouraging people to learn.
Then there’s the efficiency issue - Big Tech spent trillions of dollars to develop and train machine learning processors, which perform quadrillions of energy-intensive processes per second, and they’re being marketed to do a job that a 99 cent solar powered calculator from the 1980s can do better.
God, I just realized tax season is coming up. And after all the layoffs and political firings and general dogebaggery at the American IRS, they’re going to have to deal with people using AI to do their taxes 😆
The fuck are all these comments? The internet is shit, fuck the internet. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing it. Stop using it.
t’s the same as any other commercial tool. As long as it’s profitable the owner will continue to sell it, and users who are willing to pay will buy it. You use commercial tools every day that are harmful to the environment. Do you drive? Heat your home? Buy meat, dairy or animal products?
I honestly don’t know where this hatred for AI comes from; it feels like a trend that people jump onto because they want to be included in something.
AI is used in radiology to identify birth defects, cancer signs and heart problems. You’re acting like its only use-case is artwork, which isn’t true. You’re welcome to your opinion but you’re welcome to consider other perspectives as well. Ciao!
The use in radiology is not a good thing. Hospitals are cutting trained technicians and making the few they keep double check more images per day as a backup for AI. If they were just using it as an aide and the humans were still analyzing the same number of picturea that would be fine but capitalism sees a way to save a buck and people will die as a result.
This isn’t a problem with AI though, it’s a problem with the people cutting trained technicians. In places where such incompetent people don’t decide that, you get the same number of trained technicians accepting (and being a part of) a change that gives them slightly more accurate findings, resulting in lives being saved overall. Which is typically what health workers want to begin with.
OK so why is AI so big right now because it isn’t profitable. Even there most expensive tier is losing them money. Then you have the data centers getting breaks on electricity so the rest of us cost goes up to make the difference. Where is this magical profitability that is driving AI.
It’s in part because people aren’t open to contradictions in their world view. In part you can’t blame them for that since everyone has their own valid perspective. But staying willingly ignorant of positives and gray areas is a valid criticism. And sadly there are plenty of influencers peddling a black-white mindset on AI, ignoring all other uses. Not saying intentionally or not, again perspective. I’m sure online content creation has to contend with a lot more AI content compared to the norm. But only on the internet do I encounter rabidly anti AI people, in real life basically nobody cares. Some use it, some don’t, most do so responsibly as a tool. And I work in the creative industry…
I work in a creative industry too and it is the bane of not only my group but every other company I’ve spoken to. Every artist and musician I know hates it too.
I never said it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry people in your area are being negatively affected if so. But the point still stands. My experience is just as valid.
I’m pretty anti AI as it is a tool of the billionaire class to enslave the masses. Look up TESCREAL, its the digital eugenics billionaires and fringe philosiphers believe in and it is the driving force in the AI push.
That being said I can see a use for a focused, local LLM/AI assistant. I have to search a lot of confidential technical manuals, schematics and trust cases in my job. We are thinking about testing out Ollama to upload all our documents too to make searching them easier.
Even before our current time, “nobody cares” is not a thermostat reading of what “really matters”. It almost sounds like you believe people know what’s best for themselves, when the truth of the matter is that humanity has long proved otherwise.
I don’t believe that. What I’m saying is that these are all people I work with look very critically and skeptically at the world, as that’s pretty much an inherent requirement for the creative industry. We all know what AI is and what it does, and most arguments against it hold no water to people with a realistic view of the industry to the point it simply cannot be black and white like some claim it to be.
There are a few good reasons to dislike AI, but those don’t apply to all of AI. Some are value based, and other people have other values that are equally valid. And some can be avoided entirely. Like how you could ship packages with a coal rocket instead of a train on electricity, or just shipping less packages to begin with.
There is trust and experience between one another in the industry that we aren’t using it unnecessarily, wastefully, and incorrectly, and AI is not anywhere near a requirement by consumers nor healthy minded businesses.
I fully agree. I still remember the time when using Photoshop was seen by some as not being “real artist”, because “any idiot with a mouse can draw now”. I’m not under any illusion this will last forever, the negative sentiment is boiling because of the bubble and it’s negative externalities, not by the technology itself. So once that bursts, things will hopefully be a lot more peaceful.
Which ai and for which use? It’s a tool. It’s like getting mad cause a guy invented a hammer. It’s not the tool hurting you dude, it’s the people wielding it.
If that hammer also had massive environmental impacts and hammers were pushed into every aspect of your life while also stealing massive amounts of copyrighted data, sure. It’s very useful for problems that can be easily verified, but the only reason it’s good at those is from the massive amount of stolen data.
All those things you said are vague and nebulous and every day people are not gonna understand that message and will just think you’re hysterical or a conspiracy guy. The way the message is put forwards is super important
Arguably, hammers also have a massive impact on the environment. They are also part of everyday life. Building you live in? Built using a hammer. New sidewalk? Old one came out with an automatic hammer. Car? Bet there was a type of hammer used during assembly. You can’t escape the hammer. Stop running. Accept your inner hammer. Embrace the hammer, become the hammer. Hammer on.
The fuck are all these comments? AI is shit, fuck AI. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
How does AI fuel billionaires?
who owns the datacenters?
Why is that relevant? AI is a massive money loser.
Separate LLMs and AI.
LLMs are shit, fuck LLMs. They fuel billionaires, destroy the environment, kill critical thinking, confidently tell you to off yourself, praise Hitler, advocate for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing, stop using it.
And AI is a pipe dream no one is close to fulfilling, won’t be realized by feeding LLMs all of the data in existence, and billionaires are destroying our economy in their pursuit of it.
You are referring to AGI not AI.
The broad category of AI is most definitely real.
Could you define that category? Or give us an example of a programme that fits under it and one that doesn’t?
Stuff like ML, Computer Vision, Alpha Fold?
AI contains LLMs and Machine learning and AGI.
My main point is that you shouldn’t throw out computerised protein folding and cancer detection with your hatred of LLMs.
OK, and my point is that people are using the term “AI” so loosely as to be indistinguishable from “algorithm”.
We’ll still have the statistical protein folding models after this bubble eventually pops, we’re just not gonna call it “AI”. It’s a trendy marketing department word, and its usefulness as a description in Computer Science is rapidly diminishing.
I would say it just got widespread use, I definitely heard of MS Word doing autofill as ‘AI’ at the time when deep learning was freshly invented thing. People tried to label a lot of things ‘AI’, with LLMs the label just stuck better
AI to a layman just means “LLMs and Generative AI that rich assholes keep trying to force me to use or consume the output of”. i dont think its worthwhile to split semantic hairs over this. call the “good” stuff CNNs or machine learning if you really feel the need to draw a distinction.
To a layman, yes I agree.
Not many laymen on lemmy. We can afford to be precise with our language.
Doesn’t work that way unfortunately. Ask a person on the street what AI is and theyll tell you whatever flavor slop generator they’re familiar with. You’re not going to see much pushback on ML around the Fediverse.
On the fediverse I think we can be more precise in our language.
So what is AI in your opinion because LLMs fall under that umbrella.
My opinion. AI is a way to improve a computer models accuracy over time based on new data.
I could even argue that ChatGPT etc. are not AI because the LLMs are not directly learning from the inputs they are receiving.
Change this out for any other technology that’s been innovated throughout human history. The printing press semiconductors the internet.
The anti-ai rhetoric on this platform is becoming nonsensical.
At this point it’s just bandwagon hate. These people don’t even understand the difference between llms and AIs and the various applications that they have.
Any other technology? How about 3D TVs, smart glasses, blockchain, NFTs, the Metaverse?
Yes. These all qualify. They’re all massively successful technologies.
Well, aside from 3D TVs and smart glasses. But they’re generally innocuous. Yes I also understand that smart glasses es have privacy issues but then again in this day and age what doesn’t.
If you think any of these are massively successful, I question what reality you are living in.
The blockchain nfts the metaverse aren’t successful?
These three things generate massive amounts of revenue. The metaverse especially is a billion dollar IP.
The word success doesn’t have a positive connotation to it in this case.
The metaverse had a billion dollars pumped into it, and yet for all they money they spent they have literally no users to show for it. Likewise for NFTs, a few idiots got suckered into paying for monkey JPGs and are now left holding a bag that no one wants.
The blockchain has a small cult trading money back and forth to make it look bigger than it really is. But it’s never achieved any kind of mainstream adoption as the currency true believers keep insisting it will be. And it never will, because it’s way too inefficient to ever scale.
Literally everything you said in the comment above is wrong and you probably made it up on the spot.
There are 300,000 to 500,000 bit coin transactions per day with over 700 million users worldwide. I’d say that’s scaled pretty fucking high. https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2025/
Global metaverse related revenue was about 17-18 billion USD in 2023 and is projected to exceed 50 billion USD by 2028, implying strong top-line growth even though profitability is uneven. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/metaverse-market
In 2024-2025, estimates put the NFT market in the 30-40+ billion dollar range (market size or annual sales), with giving a projected 34.1 billion dollars valuation in 2025 and Q1 2025 sales over 8.2 billion dollars on their own. https://fortunly.com/statistics/nft-statistics/
Even 3d TVs generated 100s of billions of dollars globally before they fizzled out in the 2010s. https://www.360iresearch.com/library/intelligence/3d-tv
I will however admit the glasses where a full on bust.
Blockchains in an age of Trump choosing a new Fed chair after trying to have Powell arrested.
Trust your government over software and cryptography, which has no basis in reality outside of the laws of physics and mathematics.
Figured I’d summon at least one person trying to defend crypto. Just because the US has issues doesn’t suddenly mean crypto is good.
Bitcoin has been around for almost two decades now, and still has not achieved anything beyond being a means for speculators to try and fleece each other. If it hasn’t reached widespread mainstream adoption by now, it never will.
Crypto is a failed technology, full stop.
Gold is also just digging something up and then re-burying it. If it hasnt replaced fiat then why are people buying it, why has it been going up 100% a year recently when theres no new industrial demand for it?
Its fine to not hold it, but all finite assets have some intrinsic value, because fiat keeps pumping via new debt issuance, which is inevitably debased. Like it was during Covid, or 2008, or 2001, etc…
Crypto has a higher volatility, but can have a higher return, and is more closer correlated to the Nasdaq; like all assets its generally efficiently priced. I’d say its closer to TQQQ than it is to VT or gold, which may be suitable for 1-10% of a portfolio depending on goals and risk tolerance. If they drop interest rates quickly to pump the stockmarket TQQQ and Bitcoin would likely both rise dramatically.
I feel like you just autopiloted into random cryptobro talking points that have nothing to do with the conversation. I don’t care if you like crypto, the reality is that rest of the world has already rejected it and moved on.
Well the crux of the argument is gold went from 2500$ to 7000$ in 2 years, and youre trying to convince people of the irrationality of a finite asset. I’m not saying its a sure thing, but I do think Blackrock suggesting a 2% allocation to Bitcoin is rational, and I’ve done very well myself with a small allocation like that; despite the idea the “world rejected it”.
If the US dollar goes through hyperinflation and becomes worthless, people in the US won’t switch to Bitcoin or other crypto as their main form of currency. We’ll do exactly what citizens of every country that experiences such a currency crash does - start using other more stable currencies. You would see businesses start accepting a mix of Canadian dollar, Mexican pesos, Euros, and Yuan.
I’ve contemplated this myself, about competing currencies, and how that would leave the world if we had cheap and ubiquitous FX with little to no drag. Would it not cause a race to the bottom for inflation targeting, and lead to something similar to everyone using a fixed currency?
Why would I hold Canadian dollar or Pesos if their inflation target is 2% versus say the Swiss 1%? Is there enough new money supply for everyone to even attain the lowest inflation currency, or do they bid down the denomination as that countries FX value rises?
Because ultimately you (assuming you’re in the US), have to pay your taxes in USD. People say that fiat currencies aren’t backed by anything, but that isn’t true. They’re backed by the fact that every single US citizen and resident has to gather up thousands of dollars every year and pay them to the government. Even if you could convince your employer to pay you in Euros, the IRS will still demand you pay whatever taxes you would owe if you were paid in an equivalent amount of dollars.
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Sorry don’t remember any of those other technologies using so much resources, raising prices for everyone else as they don’t pay the actual cost. And being wrong about stuff.
Bitcoin and Ethereum PoW used resources and raised (GPU and electricity) prices for everyone.
They literally killed and excommunicated people after the invention of the printing press for producing unauthorized copies of the Bible. Figures like William Tyndale paid with their lives for translating scripture into English, challenging the Church’s authority.
There is illicit material circulating freely on Tor, demonstrating that technology can distribute both knowledge and criminal content.
Semiconductors underpin some of humanity’s most powerful and destructive technologies, from advanced military systems to cyberweapons. They are a neutral tool, but their applications have reshaped warfare and global power dynamics.
You are fully entitled to dislike AI or technologies associated with it. But to dismiss it entirely is ignorant. Whether you want to believe it or not, we are on the precipice of a technological revolution, the shape of which remains uncertain, but its impact will be undeniable.
Bullshit, fuck your false equivalency. This tech is good at generaating slop, propaganda, and destroying critical thinking. Thats it. It has zero value.
Ok. This is clearly rage bait.
You’re an ignorant fool and I’m probably not the first person to tell you that.
Same with the internet. Fuels billionaires, destroys the environment with data centers and cables, kills libraries and textbook research, spreads nazi propaganda. We need to stop using technology in general.
There are things you can do with the Internet that are impossible to do without the Internet. Everything you mentioned is very real harm that the Internet does to humanity in the world - even if you meant it sarcastically - but that harm has to be weighed against the benefits the Internet provides that can’t be replicated by anything else.
There’s nothing a LLM can do that a human can’t. The only thing LLMs are good at is convincing managers to replace human employees with LLMs. Because even though LLMs do a worse job than any human employee, they’re cheaper and won’t unionize.
The cost-benefit analysis for society is very different.
Lets see a standard problem I’m randomly making up using a free AI, you tell me if this kind of thing can be useful to someone:
If I have a bucket that is 1 meter tall and 1 meter wide how much volume can it hold?
The volume V of a cylinder can be calculated using the formula:
V=πr2h
Where:
r is the radius, h is the height.
In this case, the bucket is 1 meter tall and 1 meter wide, which means the diameter is 1 meter. Therefore, the radius r is:
r=21 meter=0.5 meters
Now substituting the values into the volume formula:
V=π(0.5m)2(1m) V=π(0.25m2)(1m) V≈0.7854m3
Thus, the volume the bucket can hold is approximately 0.785 cubic meters.
Using llms for math questions is probably the worst usage for llms.
And all of this is easily calculated without ai. You can literally google it and let google do the math for you without ai.
Perhaps your right, though the AI also allows natural language or voice, and further explanations.
Its also eroding all the bullshit we used to do, like cover letters and things that had no reason to exist besides wasting someones time. So truth be told I’m a fan, even if it is a massively unprofitable bubble, I also recognize its limitations given its hallucinations so I understand it shouldnt be relied upon for useful work.
I won’t argue about the value of explanation from a
lyinghallucinating machine.But I like how your use case is “it does the things that I believe to be useless and time wasting for everyone involved. But instead of, pushing for the end of these time wasting acts, I waste a little less time with llms (instead of all of the time by not doing these time wasting acts) while still wasting the time of the reader.” What an efficient use case! We should violate IP law, waste drinking water and energy for it!
What you’ve given is an example of a problem where an LLM is inherently the wrong tool.
See, variation is built into LLMs. They’re programmed to evaluate probable responses and select from them on the basis of probability - to simplify ridiculously, if a particular word follows another 90% of a time, in 90% of the content it generates the LLM will have that word follow the other, and in the other 10% it won’t.
If you give an LLM the exact same prompt multiple times, you will get multiple different responses. They’ll all be similar responses, but they won’t be exactly the same, because how LLMs generate language is probabilistic and contains randomness.
(And that is why hallucination is an inherent feature of LLMs and can’t be trained out.)
But math isn’t language. Math problems have correct answers. When you use a software tool to answer a math problem, you don’t want variation. You want the correct answer every time.
To solve a math problem, you need to find the appropriate formula, which will be the same every time. Then you use a calculator, which always gives the correct result. You plug the numbers into the formula and calculate the result.
What I’m getting at is, if you use a calculator to do the math problem yourself, and you put in the correct formula, you’ll always get the correct result. If you use a LLM to generate the answer to a math problem, there is always a non-zero chance it will give you the wrong answer.
But what if, you might ask, you don’t know the correct formula? What if you’re not good enough at math to calculate the correct answers, even with a calculator? Isn’t this a time when the LLM can be useful, to do something you can’t?
The problem is, the LLM could be wrong. And if you haven’t looked up the formula yourself, from a reliable source that is not an LLM, you have no way to check the LLM’s work. Which means you can’t trust it for anything important and you have to do the math yourself anyway.
(This is true for everything an LLM does, but is especially true for math.)
And if you have looked up the formula yourself, it’s just as easy to use a calculator the first time and skip the LLM.
Right? This is what I’m getting at. An LLM can do some of the same things a human does, but it’s always going to be worse at it than a human, because it’s not conscious, it’s not reasoning its way to a correct answer, it’s just generating a string of linguistic tokens based on probabilities. And math problems might be the clearest possible example of this.
Thats well put, I’m under no naive assumption that LLMs are AI. Though I do think youre discounting the usefulness, as it did give the right answer, which is a fine use for average people doing basic math or whatever project theyre working on. I’m under no delusion that its replacing workers, unless someones job is writing fancy emails or building spreadsheets, and I do still think its a massive bubble.
Yeah, I get that it seems like a fine use for average people doing basic math. The nonzero chance of error could end up not mattering. But it could matter very much, depending on the use case. If you’re asking an LLM the volume of a bucket, it’s not a big deal. If you’re asking an LLM “how many milligrams of this drug is the correct dose for a 80 kg man”, that’s a big fucking deal.
If people don’t know LLMs can’t be trusted to give the corect answer, they’re not going to realize they need to do the math themselves in important use cases. And that is certainly not something Microsoft and Google are encouraging people to learn.
Then there’s the efficiency issue - Big Tech spent trillions of dollars to develop and train machine learning processors, which perform quadrillions of energy-intensive processes per second, and they’re being marketed to do a job that a 99 cent solar powered calculator from the 1980s can do better.
God, I just realized tax season is coming up. And after all the layoffs and political firings and general dogebaggery at the American IRS, they’re going to have to deal with people using AI to do their taxes 😆
Found the Mennonite.
The fuck are all these comments? The internet is shit, fuck the internet. It fuels billionaires, destroys the environment, kills critical thinking, confidently tells you to off yourself, praises Hitler, advocates for glue as a pizza topping. This tech is a war on artists and free thought and needs to be destroyed. Stop normalizing it. Stop using it.
t’s the same as any other commercial tool. As long as it’s profitable the owner will continue to sell it, and users who are willing to pay will buy it. You use commercial tools every day that are harmful to the environment. Do you drive? Heat your home? Buy meat, dairy or animal products?
I honestly don’t know where this hatred for AI comes from; it feels like a trend that people jump onto because they want to be included in something.
AI is used in radiology to identify birth defects, cancer signs and heart problems. You’re acting like its only use-case is artwork, which isn’t true. You’re welcome to your opinion but you’re welcome to consider other perspectives as well. Ciao!
The use in radiology is not a good thing. Hospitals are cutting trained technicians and making the few they keep double check more images per day as a backup for AI. If they were just using it as an aide and the humans were still analyzing the same number of picturea that would be fine but capitalism sees a way to save a buck and people will die as a result.
This isn’t a problem with AI though, it’s a problem with the people cutting trained technicians. In places where such incompetent people don’t decide that, you get the same number of trained technicians accepting (and being a part of) a change that gives them slightly more accurate findings, resulting in lives being saved overall. Which is typically what health workers want to begin with.
That big ol list of things didn’t do it for you, huh?
That sensationalized list? No, not really.
Did you try reading the comment you just replied to?
OK so why is AI so big right now because it isn’t profitable. Even there most expensive tier is losing them money. Then you have the data centers getting breaks on electricity so the rest of us cost goes up to make the difference. Where is this magical profitability that is driving AI.
It’s in part because people aren’t open to contradictions in their world view. In part you can’t blame them for that since everyone has their own valid perspective. But staying willingly ignorant of positives and gray areas is a valid criticism. And sadly there are plenty of influencers peddling a black-white mindset on AI, ignoring all other uses. Not saying intentionally or not, again perspective. I’m sure online content creation has to contend with a lot more AI content compared to the norm. But only on the internet do I encounter rabidly anti AI people, in real life basically nobody cares. Some use it, some don’t, most do so responsibly as a tool. And I work in the creative industry…
“I’ve never seen it it must not exist”
I work in a creative industry too and it is the bane of not only my group but every other company I’ve spoken to. Every artist and musician I know hates it too.
I never said it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry people in your area are being negatively affected if so. But the point still stands. My experience is just as valid.
I’m pretty anti AI as it is a tool of the billionaire class to enslave the masses. Look up TESCREAL, its the digital eugenics billionaires and fringe philosiphers believe in and it is the driving force in the AI push.
That being said I can see a use for a focused, local LLM/AI assistant. I have to search a lot of confidential technical manuals, schematics and trust cases in my job. We are thinking about testing out Ollama to upload all our documents too to make searching them easier.
You are the exact person I didn’t mean 😄 the first is a very valid reason to dislike AI.
Even before our current time, “nobody cares” is not a thermostat reading of what “really matters”. It almost sounds like you believe people know what’s best for themselves, when the truth of the matter is that humanity has long proved otherwise.
You sound like a cartoon supervillain, Lex Luthor ranting to superman about the common animals not knowing what’s best for themselves.
Republicans.
I don’t believe that. What I’m saying is that these are all people I work with look very critically and skeptically at the world, as that’s pretty much an inherent requirement for the creative industry. We all know what AI is and what it does, and most arguments against it hold no water to people with a realistic view of the industry to the point it simply cannot be black and white like some claim it to be.
There are a few good reasons to dislike AI, but those don’t apply to all of AI. Some are value based, and other people have other values that are equally valid. And some can be avoided entirely. Like how you could ship packages with a coal rocket instead of a train on electricity, or just shipping less packages to begin with.
There is trust and experience between one another in the industry that we aren’t using it unnecessarily, wastefully, and incorrectly, and AI is not anywhere near a requirement by consumers nor healthy minded businesses.
Look up dot com bubble. We still have the internet. Just because AI is over-hyped and in a bubble doesn’t mean it won’t still have uses.
I fully agree. I still remember the time when using Photoshop was seen by some as not being “real artist”, because “any idiot with a mouse can draw now”. I’m not under any illusion this will last forever, the negative sentiment is boiling because of the bubble and it’s negative externalities, not by the technology itself. So once that bursts, things will hopefully be a lot more peaceful.
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Which ai and for which use? It’s a tool. It’s like getting mad cause a guy invented a hammer. It’s not the tool hurting you dude, it’s the people wielding it.
If that hammer also had massive environmental impacts and hammers were pushed into every aspect of your life while also stealing massive amounts of copyrighted data, sure. It’s very useful for problems that can be easily verified, but the only reason it’s good at those is from the massive amount of stolen data.
All those things you said are vague and nebulous and every day people are not gonna understand that message and will just think you’re hysterical or a conspiracy guy. The way the message is put forwards is super important
Arguably, hammers also have a massive impact on the environment. They are also part of everyday life. Building you live in? Built using a hammer. New sidewalk? Old one came out with an automatic hammer. Car? Bet there was a type of hammer used during assembly. You can’t escape the hammer. Stop running. Accept your inner hammer. Embrace the hammer, become the hammer. Hammer on.
Is the hammer making nude images of children?
Yup. you can use a chisel or even just a hammer, you just need the right person with it
A camera can, ban cameras
So do computers.