A.I. is B.S.

GasBandit

Staff member
People ask me, shit-eating grins on faces, if I'm worried AI is going to take my programming job.

I tell them "not particularly." For the reasons in the video Nick posted, along with the fact that there is a startling amount of tech gear out there that does not work the way it says it works. And I have to find that on the fly and code my way around it, in a production environment, in such a way that means that I have to understand the code, the designer's intent, and the user's desired functionality.

There's just no way to make all that work with an "AI" that is really just a language pattern engine. Could it be a useful tool for me? Maybe. But right now it's just basically just searching stackoverflow with an extra step.
 
I'm less concerned with a robot uprising and more with capitalists using it as a way to screw over workers.

Especially creators like writers or artists. I'm sure many Hollywood execs would LOVE to not have to pay writers or artists. They barely pay them as it is.
 
People ask me, shit-eating grins on faces, if I'm worried AI is going to take my programming job.

I tell them "not particularly." For the reasons in the video Nick posted, along with the fact that there is a startling amount of tech gear out there that does not work the way it says it works. And I have to find that on the fly and code my way around it, in a production environment, in such a way that means that I have to understand the code, the designer's intent, and the user's desired functionality.

There's just no way to make all that work with an "AI" that is really just a language pattern engine. Could it be a useful tool for me? Maybe. But right now it's just basically just searching stackoverflow with an extra step.
Yeah, let me know when an AI can actually interpret what a person is telling you they want correctly, and I'll start worrying.
Right now, most AI is still just a more advanced version of the chatbots on all kinds of websites "can I help you look?" that just respond to specific words.
 
AI is going to shake up the translation sector, more than Google Translate and other machine translation engines we have now, but I'm currently not too worried. Translators may be hard hit, but translation editors are still needed.
 

figmentPez

Staff member


On one hand, the phrase "it's so over" is almost always attached to crap.

On the other hand, gloating about how terrible AI is feels like gloating that John Henry won against the Inkypoo.
 
gloating about how terrible AI is
I have seen actual, published fantasy art on the cover of a Conan novel which had the bicep/tricep pair of Conan’s sword arm running along either side of his upper arm rather than top/bottom. So it ain’t like there’s a guarantee that a “real human artist” has any kind of automatic guarantee to be better.

—Patrick
 
I have seen actual, published fantasy art on the cover of a Conan novel which had the bicep/tricep pair of Conan’s sword arm running along either side of his upper arm rather than top/bottom.
I'm trying to visualize what you're saying here, but I have no idea how that would work. Do you remember which book it is?
 
I'm trying to visualize what you're saying here, but I have no idea how that would work. Do you remember which book it is?
Took a few minutes, all I could remember for sure was “80’s, Conan on horseback”
The upper arm is consistent IF he was holding the sword at a downward angle of ~30deg, but he isn’t.
80’s me only knew “Something about this picture is unnatural.”

—Patrick
 
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Hm. His upper arm seems more or less fine to me. The brachialis(?) maybe looks a little off, but I couldn't say if it's anatomically incorrect. If anything I think the forearm looks a bit wonky, but forearm muscles are weird anyway.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I was watching a video on locusts today, and how swarm intelligence works, when it dawned on me that the biggest threat from computer AI may not be an AI intentionally developing human intelligence, but a whole bunch of AI unintentionally developing a swarming behavior, like those runaway "out of office" email auto-replies.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Elon Musk had an interview with Tucker Carlson where he announced "TruthGPT", another bullshit project that claims to be “a maximum truth seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”.

I can't be bothered to find out any more.
 
I only see two possible outcomes. One is that they succeed but then kill it because they can’t handle the Truth. The other is that they exclude the stuff they don’t like from the training data “to remove bias” and instead create an Onion article generator.

—Patrick
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I recently saw an AI generated post in r/food. I ate the ultimate peanut butter cake (Recipe in Comments), and it bothers me that people are already testing the limits of what they can get away with using AI to post. I don't know if this is an attempt to automate the karma accumulation process for bot accounts, or if someone is just testing out AI for the lulz, but I'm not looking forward to trying to moderate Reddit amidst a flood of AI bullshit.

This example wasn't too hard to be sure was AI. The "recipe" didn't include any sort of method, and probably would not have made anything like the image, but that cake does look pretty tasty if you're just scrolling past and not looking too close. As programs continue to advance, I suspect it will become ever more difficult to distinguish between a real post and AI fakery, at least for simple stuff like food photos and recipes.
 
I recently saw an AI generated post in r/food. I ate the ultimate peanut butter cake (Recipe in Comments), and it bothers me that people are already testing the limits of what they can get away with using AI to post. I don't know if this is an attempt to automate the karma accumulation process for bot accounts, or if someone is just testing out AI for the lulz, but I'm not looking forward to trying to moderate Reddit amidst a flood of AI bullshit.

This example wasn't too hard to be sure was AI. The "recipe" didn't include any sort of method, and probably would not have made anything like the image, but that cake does look pretty tasty if you're just scrolling past and not looking too close. As programs continue to advance, I suspect it will become ever more difficult to distinguish between a real post and AI fakery, at least for simple stuff like food photos and recipes.
I'm already trying to figure out out how to remove writing from my courses for the most part. I was doing this already before ChatGPT came along as I didn't find much value in assigning writing sans feedback and editing. I might actually turn more towards editing as an assignment, except this is something ChatGPT is capable of as well. It will be increasingly difficult to assess people via the internet, I think, forcing us back into methods of assessing in person (blue books, etc.) I'm not sure how I feel about that possibility yet.
 
As a relatively new moderator on Reddit, I'm seeing AI-generated posts and comments on the subreddit I mod. It's our policy to remove them on sight and ban the user because there are often errors in the content. The problem is that I'm not always sure what's AI-generated these days. It really is getting harder to tell.
 
As a relatively new moderator on Reddit, I'm seeing AI-generated posts and comments on the subreddit I mod. It's our policy to remove them on sight and ban the user because there are often errors in the content. The problem is that I'm not always sure what's AI-generated these days. It really is getting harder to tell.
Lack of internal consistency, grammatical errors, hallucinations, caps lock, circular reasoning, repeating the same sentiment in five different ways,... All clear indicators you're dealing with a human :troll:

Yeah, no, it really is getting harder.
 
A German magazine has published the first interview with Michael Schumacher since his skiing accident back in 2013. Except not, because the entire "article" was AI-generated. If this is not actively illegal it is at the least extremely distasteful & disrespectful and the Schumacher family are planning legal action.
 
I got one of those AI art programs, it's really struggling to make a realistic picture of Bill Clinton making pizzas with a tyrannosaurus rex.

20230420_134652.jpg
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I got one of those AI art programs, it's really struggling to make a realistic picture of Bill Clinton making pizzas with a tyrannosaurus rex.
Did you try with a Republican? I hear the libs are teaching chatbots to lie.
 
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