Change My View

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PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works

Generative AI isn't going anywhere, and will replace a number of jobs. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago by PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works to c/changemyview@sh.itjust.works

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Generative AI has a number of uses that are already widespread, and I don't see going anywhere. Things like clipart and stock art, and initial contact customer support. AI automates these jobs, making it far, far cheaper than hiring a human to do the same job. It only takes one higher-end PC to do a job that a human would have had to be paid for. The economic incentive is already there.

Furthermore, Generative AI is a genie thats been let out of the bottle, and I don't see ever being put back in. These models are just files, which have already been replicated and become widespread. Sure, progress may slow as the "We're making a general purpose AI." bubble bursts, but if these tools work, they'll continue to be developed, and people will continue to get better at manipulating or augmenting them. I don't see any reason that would stop generative AI from continuing to exist from this point forward.

Generative AI isn't going anywhere, and will replace a number of jobs.

Change my view.

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[–] shads@lemy.lol 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

What this all comes down to is that we are talking about tech that has existed for decades, the big difference is that we now have the capability to run massive parallel computation, yes there have been advancements in technique and efficiency, but one of the major reasons we aren't seeing widescale software patents on all this stuff is that it's all fundamentally existing art done much faster and wider than we could before.

The biggest thing that is being enabled by all these technologies is the grift economy. Name me any other technology where we would accept circular "investments" to make up a significant proportion of the world's economic activity.

I am less interested in the anecdotal "evidence" on either side of the argument, I consider individual artists not liking the output of LLMs to be about as worthwhile as the former big business lackeys turned AI start up founders who talk about how employees should be using agentic workflows or get left behind. I am concerned about the teachers who keep telling me that they have kids who are allowing chatbots to entirely replace their critical faculties, the managers who are frothing to sack all their human staff to replace them with barely, if at all, functional agents. I worry about how many people are letting themselves get caught up in the fantasy that there is some sort of intelligence in this high speed Chinese room.

I also worry that worldwide we are going whole hog on a technology that just isn't what people are being tricked into thinking it is.

I personally think that the generative AI bubble is this generations leaded petrol or radium. Eventually we will realise how hideously corrosive it is and by that stage the generational damage will be done, and as bad as it is for the economy, it's going to be far worse for our kids and I don't think it's OK that we are throwing them under the bus so that Nvidia can be the richest company ever and the US can pretend to not be in the grip of a recession. I don't think a bunch of virtual junior devs is worth it at that cost.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago

Parallelism was a big deal several times before this boom, and what they lacked vis-a-vis neural networks is differentiable activation functions. That's why OCR was a thing for ages but Not Hotdog was recent and sudden.

No kidding this is the world's most obvious bubble. And yet: the tech does the thing. You can in fact generate photorealistic video, in seconds, on consumer hardware, even if all you have is a description. Three years ago "Will Smith eating spaghetti" produced amusingly shite gloopy nonsense. As of a year ago all you could nitpick was the shape of his chin. Five years ago the cutting edge bragged about icon-sized images of an avocado chair. Everything has moved at a breakneck pace, and will continue grinding forward after whatever fresh hell follows several predictable collapses.

In LLMs specifically, they're still dumb, but they're smart enough that we can say they're dumb. They have a measurable IQ. These chatbots vastly exceed anything made through human cleverness alone, and they've disproved many assertions that a computer could never [blank] unless it was truly conscious. Simply typing 'rewrite this in Rust' might Just Work and provide significant performance benefits. Like compilers slowly obviating assembly hackers, we have to contend with the rising capabilities of software that writes software.

I worry about how many people are letting themselves get caught up in the fantasy that there is some sort of intelligence in this high speed Chinese room.

John Searle was a troll. The Chinese Room should never be taken seriously, because he pointed at a hard drive and said "processor." Demanding a blind idiot instruction-follower must understand the whole intent of the software happening to it... is just Cartesian dualism. Except instead of a soul, you get a Steve, and he better be paying attention! If he gets the same results while zoning out, they don't count. As if some guy emulating a calculator app would follow the low-level floating-point bit-banging necessary to find the area of a circle.

Sorry. Pet peeve.

We do need to distinguish intelligence, comprehension, consciousness, and sapience. LLMs definitely aren't alive, in any sense. But saying they lack all intelligence veers toward saying calculators only simulate math. Intelligence is a process, and if it's necessary for certain observed decisions in humans... we also observe those decisions in some models. Like figuring out you can't walk to a car wash.

I cannot get excited over yet another moral panic where kids these days have a crutch for... whatever. The internet, calculators, slide rules, the printing press, the written word. Some little shits are always giving teachers a hard time. Surely they're still routinely judged with nothing but pencil and paper in a silent room.