Sure but that’s really the fault of the moron, not the AI for existing. Definitely could blame the AI sellers who would be happy to say AI can do it.

It’s a useful tool but like fire, if idiots get their hands on it bad things will happen.

It’s a massive new disruptive technology and people are scared of what changes it will bring. AI companies are putting out tons of propaganda both claiming AI can do anything and fear mongering that AI is going to surpass and subjugate us to back up that same narrative.

Also, there is so much focus on democratizing content creation, which is at best a very mixed bag, and little attention is given to collaborative uses (which I think is where AI shines) because it’s so much harder to demonstrate, and it demands critical thinking skills and underlying knowledge.

In short, everything AI is hyped as is a lie, and that’s all most people see. When you’re poking around with it, you’re most likely to just ask it to do something for you: write a paper, create a picture, whatever, and the results won’t impress anyone actually good at those things, and impress the fuck out of people who don’t know any better.

This simultaneously reinforces two things to two different groups: AI is utter garbage and AI is smarter than half the people you know and is going to take all the jobs.

Yeah, LLMs seem pretty unlikely to do that, though if they figure it out that would be great. That’s just not their wheelhouse. You have to know enough about what you’re attempting to ask the right questions and recognize bad answers. The thing you’re trying to do needs be within your reach without AI or you are unlikely to be successful.

I think the problem is more the over-promising what AI can do (or people who don’t understand it at all making assumptions because it sounds human-like).

My oldest daughter is giving birth later this month. It’s not my first grandchild, but it’ll be the first one I get to have in my life. (Long story, in short one of my daughters didn’t take her mom and dad’s divorce well, nor her mom’s subsequent marriage to me.)

So a new chapter of life begins. Concurrent with all the other ongoing chapters, of course…

Our purpose with this column isn’t to be alarmist

[x] Doubt

The amount of math that goes into training an AI and generating output exceeds human capacity to calculate. So does the Big Bang, but we have some pretty good ideas how that went.

when given access to fictional emails during safety testing, threatened to blackmail an engineer over a supposed extramarital affair. This was part of responsible safety testing — but Anthropic can’t fully explain the irresponsible action.

Because human writing, both fiction and non-fiction is full of this sort of thing, and all any LLM is doing is writing. Why wouldn’t it take a dark turn sometimes? It’s not like it has any inherent sense of ethics or morality.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay in April called “The Urgency of Interpretability,” warned: “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” Amodei called this a serious risk to humanity — yet his company keeps boasting of more powerful models nearing superhuman capabilities.

Is this true? Don’t we have drugs that we don’t fully understand how they do what they do? I’m reading that we don’t fully understand all the mechanisms of aspirin.

I get that this is a quote and not the author of the article, but this quote is just included without deeper analysis. Also, a car has superhuman capabilities; a fish has superhuman capabilities. LLMs are not superhuman in any way that matters. They are not even superhuman in ways different from computers of 40 years ago.

But researchers at all these companies worry LLMs, because we don’t fully understand them, could outsmart their human creators and go rogue.

This is 100% alarmism. AI might at some point outsmart humans, but it won’t be LLMs.

None of this is to say there are absolutely no concerns about LLMs. Obviously there are. But there is no reason to suspect LLMs are going to end humanity unless some moron hooks one up to nuclear weapons.

You probably could train an AI to play chess and win, but it wouldn’t be an LLM.

In fact, let’s go see…

• Stockfish: Open-source and regularly ranks at the top of computer chess tournaments. It uses advanced alpha-beta search and a neural network evaluation (NNUE).

• Leela Chess Zero (Lc0): Inspired by DeepMind’s AlphaZero, it uses deep reinforcement learning and plays via a neural network with Monte Carlo tree search.

• AlphaZero: Developed by DeepMind, it reached superhuman levels using reinforcement learning and defeated Stockfish in high-profile matches (though not under perfectly fair conditions).

Hmm. neural networks and reinforcement learning. So non-LLM AI.

you can play chess against something based on chatgpt, and if you’re any good at chess you can win

You don’t even have to be good. You can just flat out lie to ChatGPT because fiction and fact are intertwined in language.

“You can’t put me in check because your queen can only move 1d6 squares in a single turn.”

“Precise logic” is specifically what AI is not any good at whatsoever.

AI might be able to write a program that beats an A2600 in chess, but it should not be expected to win at chess itself.

I think a lot of ground has been covered. It’s a useful technology that has been hyped to be way more than it is, and the really shitty part is a lot of companies are trying to throw away human workers for AI because they are that fucking stupid or that fucking greedy (or both).

They will fail, for the most part, because AI is a tool your employees use, they aren’t a thing to foist onto your customers. Also where do the next generation of senior developers come from if we replace junior developers with AI? Substitute in teachers, artists, copy editors, others.

Add to that people who are too fucking stupid to understand AI deciding it needs to be involved in intelligence, warfare, police work.

I frequently disagree with the sky is falling crowd. AI use by individuals, particularly local AI (though it’s not as capable) is democratizing. I moved from windows to Linux two years ago and I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t had AI to help me troubleshoot a bunch of issues I had. I use it all the time at work to leverage my decades of experience in areas where I’d have to relearn a bunch of things from scratch. I wrote a Python program in a couple of hours having never written a line before because I knew what questions to ask.

I’m very excited for a future with LLMs helping us out. But everyone is fixated on AI gen (image, voice, text) but it’s not great at that. What it excels at is very quickly giving feedback. You have to be smart enough to know when it’s full of shit. That’s why vibe coding is a dead end. I mean it’s cool that very simple things can be churned out by very inexperienced developers, but that has a ceiling. An experienced developer can also leverage it to do more faster at a higher level, but there is a ceiling there as well. Human input and knowledge never stops being essential.

So welcome to Lemmy and discussion about AI. You have to be prepared for knee-jerk negativity, and the ubiquitous correction when you anthropomorphize AI as a shortcut to make your words easier to read. There isn’t usually too much overtly effusive praise here as that gets shut down really quickly, but there is good discussion to be had among enthusiasts.

I find most of the things folks hate about AI aren’t actually the things I do with it, so it’s easy to not take the comments personally. I agree that ChatGPT written text is slop and I don’t like it as writing. I agree AI art is soulless. I agree distributing AI generated nudes of someone is unethical (I could give a shit what anyone jerks off to in private). I agree that in certain niches, AI is taking jobs, even if I think humans ultimately do the jobs better. I do disagree that AI is inherently theft and I just don’t engage with comments to that effect. It’s unsettled law at this point and I find it highly transformative, but that’s not a question anyone can answer in a legal sense, it’s all just strongly worded opinion.

So discussions regarding AI are fraught, but there is plenty of good discourse.

Enjoy Lemmy!

Liked him since Dark City which could be another candidate for this list.

Most tedious part I’ve seen so far is there is so fucking much to upgrade. At least 20 buildings and probably a fair bit more with construction, and they all go C, B, A, S and every upgrade takes time and can only be done one at a time, so getting your town built up is pretty tedious. Time will tell if the rewards are worth it. At least you can get your rewards from all settlements (max 4 I think) just stopping at one. So once you’re built up maybe it’s fine?

I love it. Starts off cringe but then once the Golden Years kicks in it’s magical.

“I will fong you. I will fong you until your entrails become extrails! I will—pain! Lots of pain!”

I read Voyager has plans to support PieFed once it hits 1.0 (not sure if “it” refers to Lemmy, Voyager, or PieFed.)

A Knight’s Tale. Not only is it a good movie but it was my introduction to Paul Bettany and Alan Tudyk and they were brilliant in it.

Dark Star was fucking nuts but it was fun to watch with friends. Also the music won’t be new to anyone who has ever seen a John Carpenter film. I think I remember the same music in They Live and Vampire$.

One of the things I miss about web rings and recommended links is it’s people who are passionate about a thing saying here are other folks worth reading about this. Google is a piss poor substitute for the recommendations of people you like to read.

Only problem with slow web is people write what they are working on, they aren’t trying to exhaustively create “content”. By which I mean, they aren’t going to have every answer to every question. You read what’s there, you don’t go searching for what you want to read.

I’m 51. Sometimes I ask AI to explain memes that are already plain English.

Okay KnowYourMeme is a better source but these days AI will probably just read it from there anyway.

Alright. Way too many socialists in this post who don’t know how 'Murica works, god dammit. Here’s real advice:

You woke up, so you aren’t dead yet. In most cases, that’s a good sign. Give it 30 minutes. If you feel better, great! This is where I preposterously tell you to follow up with your family doctor and we both have a good chuckle.

(Edit to explain: we have no idea who our family doctor is and we haven’t been there in so long we would be considered a new patient.)

If you don’t feel better, might well give it another hour. Most of the damage from a heart attack or stroke is done in the first 30 minutes, so you’re probably not going to get any worse.

If you’re still not dead after that, you’re probably clear to make it through the weekend.

Next question is do you have sick leave? If not, congratulations, you’re fine! If you do have sick leave, go ahead and make an appointment first thing Monday. They won’t do anything, just send you for labs, maybe or just leave that part to the specialist they will refer you to.

So now it’s 6 weeks later and the specialist is calling to confirm the appointment you’re forgotten about. Do you feel better or are you out of sick leave? Congratulations, you’re fine.

Next, is your deductible over 10% of your annual income? (5% if it’s after Nov.15. You’re gonna wind up paying that whole thing for diagnostic tests this year and the actual treatment will hit you after Jan 1 and you’re double fucked.) If it is, congratulations, you’re fine!

If you reach this point, you probably are in need of medical attention and can afford it. Congratulations on getting the help you need.

Bask in the superiority of the best healthcare in the world, you European nancies!

Obviously the tone is meant to be humorous, but this is basically the reality. The only thing I’ve omitted is that you can just go to the hospital and get the treatment you need and then avoid answering unknown numbers for 7 years. I have yet to see anyone sued over medical debt.

I signed up with Matrix and it was not seamless but maybe a private server would be great and they could go from there (but that feels like a long term commitment to supporting those users). I haven’t really played much with it. Tried getting the folks in my discord server to give it a try but they haven’t and they are tech folks. I would say it’s not ready for normies, but I really wish it was.

I still have it installed on my phone, but I don’t really have anywhere interesting to go. Same with Signal TBH—it’s installed but no one I know uses it. Still waiting on my invite from the Secretary of Defense.

It is shocking sometimes. I used to lean conservative. You’d think every once in a while some Republican would say something I agree with just based on probability, but no. If words have come out of a Republican mouth in the last 6 years, I can be nearly certain I disagree with them.