this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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A big issue that a lot of these tech companies seem to have is that they don't understand what people want; they come up with an idea and then shove it into everything. There are services that I have actively stopped using because they started cramming AI into things; for example I stopped dual-booting with Windows and became Linux-only.
AI is legitimately interesting technology which definitely has specialized use-cases, e.g. sorting large amounts of data, or optimizing strategies within highly restrained circumstances (like chess or go). However, 99% of what people are pushing with AI these days as a member of the general public just seems like garbage; bad art and bad translations and incorrect answers to questions.
I do not understand all the hype around AI. I can understand the danger; people who don't see that it's bad are using it in place of people who know how to do things. But in my teaching for example I've never had any issues with students cheating using ChatGPT; I semi-regularly run the problems I assign through ChatGPT and it gets enough of them wrong that I can't imagine any student would be inclined to use ChatGPT to cheat multiple times after their grade the first time comes in. (In this sense, it's actually impressive technology - we've had computers that can do advanced math highly accurately for a while, but we've finally developed one that's worse at math than the average undergrad in a gen-ed class!)
I understand some of the hype. LLMs are pretty amazing nowadays (though closedai is unethical af so don't use them).
I need to program complex cryptography code for university. Claude sonnet 3.5 solves some of the challenges instantly.
And it's not trivial stuff, but things like "how do I divide polynomials, where each coefficient of that polynomial is an element of GF(2^128)." Given the context (my source code), it adds it seamlessly, writes unit tests, and it just works. (That is important for AES-GCM, the thing TLS relies on most of the time .)
Besides that, LLMs are good at what I call moving words around. Writing cute little short stories in fictional worlds given some info material, or checking for spelling, or re-formulating a message into a very diplomatic nice message, so on.
On the other side, it's often complete BS shoehorning LLMs into things, because "AI cool word line go up".