If LLMs used very little RAM and processing power, was light weight even for Mythos or Sol, would people be as opposed? Like no data centers, no memory shortages, like it was able to run on a calculator with the same performance.
LLM the technology is interesting and impressive. the way companies are shoving it into everything and trying to sell it as a replacement for employees is awful. The way the AI companies are behaving is awful.
This is pretty much my thoughts as well. My unsolicited rant:
The technology is good and anyone who says it’s “just autocorrect” are wrong. Having said that, I agree that LLMs are useful really for nothing more than low-risk, personal research and/or signposting to other sources. It’s in no way a replacement for a human (unless your definition of what a human does is that it’s just a thing that produces words at you - in which case, you’re probably a middle manager - very myopic, regardless). It’s also not appropriate for anything financial, professional, or confidential. Here, the first L in LLM is a hindrance. Local, small language models are more appropriate and cost-effective here.
Anyway. I don’t “use AI” like some people but over the last year I’ve used my access to Proton’s Lumo (already included in my subscription) a handful of times and been pleased with the results. The way that I see it is that all the LLM libraries are trained almost entirely on Reddit or websites that stole their content from Reddit anyway, so use it like you would Reddit: “LGBT horror movies before 2000,” “Summarize and cite criticisms of Camille Paglia,” “Was Bioshock 2 well-received at launch?” All very low-stakes. Doesn’t really matter. Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Anyway. More: Call it cope but I’ve been developing a theory/outlook that the internet as a thing is basically dead and that the Pandora’s Box of LLM tech, which can produce a basically infinite amount of what was once the internet’s currency (read: information, but really: text), has killed it. The Fediverse is utopian but I don’t think anyone here really believes it will ever be anything more than a cluster of fringe communities. Having said that, I justify good LLM use (like mine, lucky that) as being the “New Game Plus” mode of the internet. Everything is already there, everything’s unlocked. There is no challenge. It’s kind of cheating and you’re not really supposed to play the game like that. But at the same time, there is no going back to the real beginning, I just have the option of nostalgically re-creating it by going to old.reddit or postfixing before:2022 to all my
GoogleDDG searches. Fun, and game-ish in it’s own right, but also artificially limiting for no reasons beyond that./rant
cluster of fringe communities
I was already sold on it, you don’t have to keep buttering me up on the idea.
When everything is so searchable and indexable, obscurity is almost a feature
No because dead internet theory and it literally makes humans dumber.
Lower reading comprehension. Less able to write or even explain something.
Lower attention.
Lower proficiency in just about anything ai can do. Lower critical thinking.
There is a ton of research on this.
Ai also tells people they are always right and gives them bad advice. Sometimes fatal advice.
I think you are jumping to conclusions. Many of these things started happening before AI. This shit has been happening far longer than the past few 2-3 years.
Reading proficiency and critical thinking started their decline when tech was introduced in the classroom.
Now the constant affirmation of one’s thoughts and essentially echo chamber I can’t dispute.
Don’t get me wrong. I dislike AI and it’s proliferation into the world as much as the next person, but we can’t blame it on our societies failing schools or rather lack of true learning.
I’m not saying it’s all new problems.
Yeah you make a good point. Tech in the classrooms started the decline. Not to mention covid caused higher reliance on that tech.
And then primary schools have 1 teacher for 30 kids.
And they no longer hold kids back. Everyone passes rather they should or shouldn’t.
When I was a kid, the social shame of being held back was a strong motivator. Not just for the kid but the parents to put in more time making sure the kid caught up.
And then even after I finished, I heard that mandatory summer school was being used to get kids caught up.
But idk how common that is around the country.
But to come back to AI. There is a lot of research showing using llms literally reduces reading comprehension and critical thinking even in a short time of 1 semester.
Fair point. People don’t have to put in nearly as much effort to convey their point if they can use AI and say clean this up, make it more intelligible, etc.
The problem is it’s designed to bullshit you. Why would I trust a foundational problem?
My buddy works for the government in contracts and he’s mid level. Anyways he has like 5 people directly under him, and they’re younger, were low 40s they’re like upper 20s. He said sometimes he gets things written for multimillion dollar contracts that are fucking crazy because they use AI sometimes. He’s like “I don’t care if you do, but for the love of God read it once or twice”.
It’s also designed to eliminate your job and leave you for dead.
Yeah except the parasitic sociopathic class is already trying to find ways of getting rid of most of us from the for profit margins. Every employee takes money from the profit.
There are 3 reasons people hate AI right now:
- Being used poorly and mostly resulting in slop, or malicious/unethical/deadly uses, and psychosis
- Being forced down the public’s throat and put into places where it adds no value, job losses, quality drops, plagiarism
- Datacenter/environmental concerns, part prices
So switching to local AI fixes problem 3 (mostly). But we also need the hype bubble to pop so number 2 goes away. Unfortunately the first problem will be hardest to fix and right now requires the public backlash as new norms are being formed and bad actors need to be called out.
That said, I think we’re about 1 to 3 years away from the bubble popping and everything starting to balance out to where AI is treated more like just a tool rather than a genie in a box. The hype will fade out and one or two of the big players will die, but at this point I don’t think generative AI use is going away
The trouble is that intellectual property laws are so far behind technology that there’s basically no way to implement this technology without fucking over the creators of IP.
This song says it perfectly:
We made AI so we could do the fun stuff
While it could do the dumb stuff
But now it does the fun stuff
And we’ve become the dumb stuffIt’s taking all the interesting and fun creative work, leaving people to make sure all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted.
Where I think the bulk of the hate comes from is less the tech, but more the political and business elite pushing this tech.
These people are going full mask off trying to delete those they deem the lower class, so much so they are blinded in how much they require people outside the LLMs to maintain society.
LLMs as they are now, are basically the Golden Calf scenario all over again; it is ungrateful people build a statue to claim superiority and mock that which put them in good places.
Yes. Cause the resource intensity isn’t the main problem people have with it.
It’s the theft.
The main problem for me is that it’s so confident in it’s tone, like that idiot friend who just makes stuff up, but totally believes it. So there’s no clue (like you would get with a normal person) that the thing has no clue if what it just wrote is true or not. I could bear it more if it said “I’m not sure, but…” But then if did that then none of the idiot CEOs would buy it, so here we are…
It is functioning in similar vain to idol statues placating and validating the idolmaker. In fact, that’s my go to term for it because it’s ridiculous for they practically deify this tech.
These ‘AIs’ are still dependant on human input and human information (not knowledge) and the fact they follow a business model and not academical, means they are always seeking to earn a customer’s approval as opposed to teaching a student what they need to know.
I suspect yes. Even if you take these considerations out of the equation, AI is largely still just a glorified plagiarism machine being shoved down our throats.
If it were truly actually accurate maybe not… but the issue is it is a syncophancy machine being obtusely oversold as capable of multitudes of things it cannot intrinsically do accurately or as well as a person with critical thinking and is being trained on fallible data sets that include human error and now hallucination from LLMs.
If it actually were capable of doing everything the people selling you on AI are trying to get you to believe it would be an incredible tool, but it isnt, and it isnt being treated as a tool.
I think it also does us a disservice as human beings because we are at risk of losing the ability to do our own problem-solving and process of logic bedause it can be offloaded to something else and that imho can manifest as a learned helplessness.
it cannot intrinsically do accurately or as well as a person with critical thinking
Yeah…we’re running out of those people.
it’s one segment of the problem but not all of it by far
LLM and AI are two circles in a Venn diagram.
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It’s designed to be scalable. You can already run basic models on home hardware, but available resources determine speed and power.
If you could get today’s results on 1/10 the RAM/electricity, that would be good, but the big companies would just scale up to use the same resources anyway.
It wouldn’t be hated as much if it wasn’t forced upon us; if we had the chance to decide whether or not we actually wanted to use it.
