Comment on Having grown up on sci-fi I always knew there would be people who reject robots and AI on a visceral level, I just thought it wouldn't be me.

• knightly@pawb.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Folks don’t seem to realize what LLMs are, if they did then they wouldn’t be wasting trillions trying to stuff them in everything.

  Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space that remain coherent for tens of thousands of tokens, but there’s no way you can chain these stochastic parrots together to get around the fact that a computer cannot be held responsible, algorithms have no agency no matter how much you call them “agents”, and the people who let chatbots make decisions must ultimately be culpable for them.

  It’s not “AI”, it’s a n-th dimensional globe and the ruler we use to draw lines on that globe. Like all globes, it is at best a useful fiction representing a limited perspective on a much wider world.

  source

  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space

    Yeah. Like thats objectively a very interesting technological innovation. The issue is just how much its been overhyped.

    The hype around AI would be warranted if it were, like, at the same level as the hype around the Rust programming language or something. Which is to say: it’s an useful innovation in certain limited domains which is worth studying and is probably really fascinating to some nerds. If we could have left the hype at that level then we would have been fine.

    But then a bunch of CEOs and tech influencers started telling us that these things are going to cure cancer or aging and replace all white collar jobs by next year. Like okay buddy. Be realistic. This overhype turned something that was genuinely cool into this magical fantasy technology that doesn’t exist. 

    source

    • knightly@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, the hype is really leaning on that singularitarian angle and the investor class is massively overextended.

      I’m glad that the general public is finally getting on down the hype cycle, this peak of inflated expectations has lasted way too long, but it should have been obvious three years ago.

      Like, I get that I’m supposedly brighter and better educated than most folks, but I really don’t feel like you need college level coursework in futures studies to be able to avoid obvious scams like cryptocurrency and “AI”.

      I feel like it has to be deliberate, a product of marketing effects, because some of the most interesting new technologies have languished in obscurity for years because their potential is disintermediative and wouldn’t offer a path to further expanding the corporate dominion over computing.

      source