2y ago

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI

www.theonion.com

38 comments

This, but like, unironically. It's literally an averaging machine. Sure, not everyone can be above-average in everything, but if you think it produces really good texts, maybe your standards just aren't very high...
- I don’t use as much now, but there was a period where I was using ChatGPT where it was great for just laying down the scaffolding for what I was going to write. It’s an incredible tool for getting out of writers block for D&D and such.
  
  Unironically I think that writing broad strokes of fiction is one of the best uses for LLMs. One of my first real personal tests for ChatGPT was having it create a test DnD campaign and it did a great job for the most part.
  If I were running a campaign, I'd definitely use it as a helper.
- It's not an average machine though. It's a non-linear predictive system. Averages suck in non-linear predictions
Parker added that as someone whose contributions to society would almost certainly be measured cumulatively as a net loss, he also saw great potential in the future of the metaverse.
Lol
Metaverse catching strays. The Onion is on fire lately.
his name is elon musk
- yess!!
Salty writer fears being made obsolete by beep boop. Insults every AI enthusiast as well successful engineers and scientists.
i hate how popular it's become to hate on AI amongst people who know little to nothing about it.
Id forgive it if it were clever or funny, but this is really just obviously salty ad hominem strawmanning by someone who doesn't understand or appreciate the technology
Guess what fam, we are in the copilot tool phase. You can learn how to use these new tools AND learn how to be creative. Maybe then you could ask it to critique the humour in your satire article. Perhaps it would be more clever than "people who like this thing I don't like are dumb, and can't be creative or better than me In any way, because I'm cooler than AI will ever be!!! You nerds are stooooopid!!"
Because that's how it read.
- As an IT Professional i hate AI, because many People favor AI in Situations where statistical Algorithms are already good.
  it has huge energy needs to train a model on thousands on input data, compared to simply having a concise statistical algorithm who does the thing you want to do. Think Spam filtering (usually an statistical Algorithm) vs Captcha (in Google's case AI)
  It is much harder to debug and fixup after it has gone wrong. structrual Bias in the input data (think sexism, racism) is hard to remove on a big scale. Algorithms are easy to change.
  As Software Developer, i favor mimimalist but useful technology. Very few things AI can do (which Algorithms can't) are actually helpful to society.
  I think of Software Development as an Art of Craftmanship - AI is far away from that, it is like searching for needles in a hay stack in terms of finding solutions. And when you found a solution, you don't know why it works, you can't adapt it to other Problems easily.
  I agree that AI can be helpful and inspiring for new Algorithms but in many cases AI is used to replace Algorithms, wasting huge energy resources in the process - instead of just improving said Algorithms.
  
  The huge energy needs are... yeah
  There was an article in our newspaper not long ago about the possibility of using AI to optimize the CO2 footprint of concrete.
  Like, everyone was suuuper into it, and it genuinely did a good job at what they needed it to do. But actually using this at a large scale throws the benefits completely out of the window in terms of raw energy consumption to even run it.
  
  I feel like this is inevitable with any new tech. Social media, cryptocurrency, instant messaging, the Internet itself. ML is the new kid that people want to use any way possible to make money, until they realize as you said it can only help in so many situations.
  More often than not a nice sql query and some programming gets the job done.
  I don't think it'll stay this way forever, just a lot of annoying hype atm, but I don't fault the technology itself for that.
  I actually did an ML project at my job, much to my chagrin, to develop a chat app that lets us ask questions about our product.
  It actually turned out really cool and was dead simple to implement. Now our employees (customer service team esp) can ask questions with a "trust but verify" approach to solve customer problems and surface information quickly. Saves a lot of time otherwise spent sifting thru documentation and support articles.
  
  AI is a broad family of statistical and simulation algorithms.
  They don't replace algorithms, they are algorithms very powerful for some cases. For other cases they are less powerful, or overkill and they shouldn't be used. But there is no dichotomy, as one (AI) is part of the other (algorithms)
  
  There is one thing you have left out though; machine learning lowers barriers. It takes years to become a good statistical analyst, data engineer, or what have you. Now, I can train an AI to analyse the data and sure, when done right the results will be 90% as good as if I studied statistics for 10 years and did it myself, and yes there are pitfalls to be wary of, but now there are a lot of people with access to these tools that were previously out of reach.
  
  hey, that's a better critique or commentary than in the onion article.
  while i don't doubt people are trying to shove AI into a lot of places it's not optimal yet, (which is entirely fair and reasonable to point out) i don't think that's a fair reason to poo-poo any use or positivity about AI in any context.
  rather, it's become a really big fad to hate on AI and insult anyone who uses it. i mean, the technology is still young, but the stuff it's already doing was "impossible" and "never going to happen" a few years ago. now we are developing things like text to 3d, which makes me excited for a future environment where you can dictate design and animation for entire animated experiences/movies.
  independent creatives will have a blast with it. salty onion article writer will be angrily yelling at his computer.
- Salty writer fears being made obsolete by beep boop.
  i hate how popular it's become to hate on AI amongst people who know little to nothing about it.
  Id forgive it if it were clever or funny, but this is really just obviously salty ad hominem strawmanning by someone who doesn't understand or appreciate the technology
  The fucking irony of your own words is incredible. Oh my fucking god.
  Oh man... to throw my towel in the ring as someone who knows about it: it's fucking dumb, no it is not the future of everything. LLMs aren't even "artifically intelligent" they're just machine learning.
- the sentiment being any positive opinion on AI? yes, like i said i'd forgive it if were funny or clever.
  it is literally just "people who like this thing are bad and dumb and useless and the world hates them."
  really top quality satire. they sure did show how useless AI is and how dumb the fans are.
  maybe they could at least target the failure use-cases? some bad business AI ideas that are doomed to fail?
  nope, just reddit comment quality insults.
  
  Somebody has ate the onion!
- Salty writer fears being made obsolete by beep boop. Insults every AI enthusiast as well successful engineers and scientists.
  You open by complaining about broadly applied insults/generalization as you broadly apply an insult/generalization to all writers who dare critique AI. I mean surely you see the irony here?
- i hate how popular it's become to hate on AI amongst people who know little to nothing about it.
  I completely agree, but the inverse is also true:
  I hate how popular it's become to depend on AI amongst people who know little to nothing about it.
  Honestly the article is actually dissing the people, not the technology. It's about a dude who has no other contributions to society just wanting to absorb in AI tech and rely on it for literally everything.
  I'm an AI enthusiast, but I absolutely do not have the same perspective on it being used in that way. To me, they are picking on a subculture of incel/antisocial humans who want to use AI as a crutch, which doesn't really make any sense, which is why they're idiots.
  That said I think you may be right about the strawman. I mean, I personally haven't met anyone obsessed with AI like the onion dude is described. Could be a made up persona, but with the way tech companies are going I don't think so.
- It's satire. Chill.
- The article targets a specific type of person who buys AI marketing wholesale rather than someone who just has a positive opinion of AI.

38 comments