Lots of people on Lemmy really dislike AI’s current implementations and use cases.
I’m trying to understand what people would want to be happening right now.
Destroy gen AI? Implement laws? Hoping all companies use it for altruistic purposes to help all of mankind?
Thanks for the discourse. Please keep it civil, but happy to be your punching bag.
If we’re going pie in the sky I would want to see any models built on work they didn’t obtain permission for to be shut down.
Failing that, any models built on stolen work should be released to the public for free.
Definitely need copyright laws. What if everything has to be watermarked in some way and it’s illegal to use AI generated content for commercial use unless permitted by creators?
The problem with trying to police the output is there isn’t a surefire way to detect the fact it’s generated. That’s why I prefer targeting the companies who created the problematic models.
But let’s say the model is released for free but people use it for commercial purposes. It seems the only solution is to mandate that all content a model is trained on and accesses has provided express permission or is original content. Nobody can release a model to the public which generates content based on “illegal” material.
I agree with that I think.
Genuine curiosity. Not an attack. Did you download music illegally back in the day? Or torrent things? Do you feel the same about those copyrighted materials?
Nah not really. I think piracy is a complex issue though, with far less wide reaching collateral damage. I wouldn’t compare the two, personally.
I want people to figure out how to think for themselves and create for themselves without leaning on a glorified Markov chain. That’s what I want.
People haven’t ”thought for themselves” since the printing press was invented. You gotta be more specific than that.
Speak for yourself.
Maybe if the actual costs—especially including environmental costs from its energy use—were included in each query, we’d start thinking for ourselves again. It’s not worth it for most things it’s used for at the moment
So your argument against AI is that it’s making us dumb? Just like people have claimed about every technology since the invention of writing? The essence of the human experience is change, we invent new tools and then those tools change how we interact with the world, that’s how it’s always been, but there have always been people saying the internet is making us dumb, or the TV, or books, or whatever.
Get back to me after you have a few dozen conversations with people who openly say “Well I asked ChatGPT and it said…” without providing any actual input of their own.
Oh, you mean like people have been saying about books for 500+ years?
I totally understand your point of view. AI seems like the nail in the coffin for digital dominance over humans. It will debilitate people by today’s standards.
Can we compare gen AI tools to any other tools that currently eliminate some level of labor for us to do? e.g. drag and drop programs tools
Where do we draw the line? Can people then think and create in different ways using different tools?
Some GPT’s are already integrating historical conversations. We’re past Markov chain.
I agree with this sentiment but I don’t see it actually convincing anyone of the dangers of AI. It reminds me a lot of how teachers said that calculators won’t always be available and we need to learn how to do mental math. That didn’t convince anyone then
I want real, legally-binding regulation, that’s completely agnostic about the size of the company. OpenAI, for example, needs to be regulated with the same intensity as a much smaller company. And OpenAI should have no say in how they are regulated.
I want transparent and regular reporting on energy consumption by any AI company, including where they get their energy and how much they pay for it.
Before any model is released to the public, I want clear evidence that the LLM will tell me if it doesn’t know something, and will never hallucinate or make something up.
Every step of any deductive process needs to be citable and traceable.
Before any model is released to the public, I want clear evidence that the LLM will tell me if it doesn’t know something, and will never hallucinate or make something up.
Their creators can’t even keep them from deliberately lying.
Exactly.
Clear reporting should include not just the incremental environmental cost of each query, but also a statement of the invested cost in the underlying training.
… I want clear evidence that the LLM … will never hallucinate or make something up.
Nothing else you listed matters: That one reduces to “Ban all Generative AI”. Actually worse than that, it’s “Ban all machine learning models”.
If “they have to use good data and actually fact check what they say to people” kills “all machine leaning models” then it’s a death they deserve.
The fact is that you can do the above, it’s just much, much harder (you have to work with data from trusted sources), much slower (you have to actually validate that data), and way less profitable (your AI will be able to reply to way less questions) then pretending to be the “answer to everything machine.”
The way generative AI works means no matter how good the data it’s still gonna bullshit and lie, it won’t “know” if it knows something or not. It’s a chaotic process, no ML algorithm has ever produced 100% correct results.
That’s how they work now, trained with bad data and designed to always answer with some kind of positive response.
They absolutely can be trained on actual data, trained to give less confident answers, and have an error checking process run on their output after they formulate an answer.
There’s no such thing as perfect data. Especially if there’s even the slightest bit of subjectivity involved.
Even less existent is complete data.
Perfect? Who said anything about perfect data? I said actually fact checked data. You keep movimg the bar on what possible as an excuse to not even try.
They could indeed build models that worked on actual data from expert sources, and then have their agents check those sources for more correct info when they create an answer. They don’t want to, for all the same reasons I’ve already stated.
It’s possible, it does not “doom” LLM, it just massively increases its accuracy and actual utility at the cost of money, effort and killing the VC hype cycle.
The original thread poster (OTP?) implied perfection when they emphasized the “will never” part, and I was responding to that. For that matter it also excludes actual brains.
Let’s say I open a medical textbook a few different times to find the answer to something concrete, and each time the same reference material leads me to a different answer but every answer it provides is wrong but confidently passes it off as right. Then yes, that medical textbook should be banned.
Quality control is incredibly important, especially when people will use these systems to make potentially life-changing decisions for them.
especially when people will use these systems to make potentially life-changing decisions for them.
That specifically is the problem. I don’t have a solution, but treating and advertising these things like they think and know stuff is a mistake that of course the companies behind them are encouraging.
This is awesome! The citing and tracing is already improving. I feel like no hallucinations is gonna be a while.
How does it all get enforced? FTC? How does this become reality?
I want clear evidence that the LLM will tell me if it doesn’t know something, and will never hallucinate or make something up.
Every step of any deductive process needs to be citable and traceable.
I mostly agree, but “never” is too high a bar IMO. It’s way, way higher than the bar even for humans. Maybe like 0.1% or something would be reasonable?
Even Einstein misremembered things sometimes.
OpenAI, for example, needs to be regulated with the same intensity as a much smaller company
not too long ago they went to Congress to get them to regulate the ai industry a lot more and wanted the govt to require licences to train large models. Large companies can benefit from regulations when they aren’t easy for smaller competitors to follow.
And OpenAI should have no say in how they are regulated.
For sure, otherwise regulation could be made too restrictive, lowing competition
Before any model is released to the public, I want clear evidence that the LLM will tell me if it doesn’t know something, and will never hallucinate or make something up.
I think thats technically really difficult, but maybe if the output of the model was checked against preexisting sources that could happen, like what Google uses for Gemini
Every step of any deductive process needs to be citable and traceable.
I’m pretty sure this is completely impossible
Like a lot of others, my biggest gripe is the accepted copyright violation for the wealthy. They should have to license data (text, images, video, audio,) for their models, or use material in the public domain. With that in mind, in return I’d love to see pushes to drastically reduce the duration of copyright. My goal is less about destroying generative AI, as annoying as it is, and more about leveraging the money being it to change copyright law.
I don’t love the environmental effects but I think the carbon output of OpenAI is probably less than TikTok, and no one cares about that because they enjoy TikTok more. The energy issue is honestly a bigger problem than AI. And while I understand and appreciate people worried about throwing more weight on the scales, I’m not sure it’s enough to really matter. I think we need bigger “what if” scenarios to handle that.
TBH, it’s mostly the corporate control and misinformation/hype that’s the problem. And the fact that they can require substantial energy use and are used for such trivial shit. And that that use is actively degrading people’s capacity for critical thinking.
ML in general can be super useful, and is an excellent tool for complex data analysis that can lead to really useful insights…
So yeah, uh… Eat the rich? And the marketing departments. And incorporate emissions into pricing, or regulate them to the point where it only becomes viable to non-trivial use cases.
Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.
I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.
Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.
Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.
I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.
I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.
Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.
I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.
Fwiw, I’ve been getting called an alarmist for talking about Trump’s and Republican’s fascist tendencies since at least 2016, if not earlier. I’m now comfortably living in another country.
My point being that people will call you an alarmist for suggesting anything that requires them to go out of their comfort zone. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, it just shows how stupid people are.
Did you move overseas? And if you did, was it expensive to move your things?
It wasn’t overseas but moving my stuff was expensive, yes. Even with my company paying a portion of it. It’s just me and my partner in a 2br apartment so it’s honestly not a ton of stuff either.
The technology side of generative AI is fine. It’s interesting and promising technology.
The business side sucks and the AI companies just the latest continuation of the tech grift. Trying to squeeze as much money from latest hyped tech, laws or social or environmental impact be damned.
We need legislation to catch up. We also need society to be able to catch up. We can’t let the AI bros continue to foist more “helpful tools” on us, grab the money, and then just watch as it turns out to be damaging in unpredictable ways.
I agree, but I’d take it a step further and say we need legislation to far surpass the current conditions. For instance, I think it should be governments leading the charge in this field, as a matter of societal progress and national security.
First of all stop calling it AI. It is just large language models for the most part.
Second: immediate carbon tax in line with the current damage expectations for emissions on the energy consumption of datacenters. That would be around 400$/tCO2 iirc.
Third: Make it obligatory by law to provide disclaimers about what it is actually doing. So if someone asks “is my partner cheating on me”. The first message should be “this tool does not understand what is real and what is false. It has no actual knowledge of anything, in particular not of your personal situation. This tool just puts words together that seem more likely to belong together. It cannot give any personal advice and cannot be used for any knowledge gain. This tool is solely to be used for entertainment purposes. If you use the answers of this tool in any dangerous way, such as for designing machinery, operating machinery, financial decisions or similar you are liable for it yourself.”
Agreed LLMs for mass consumption should come with some disclaimer
deleted by creator
"This tool is exclusively built to respond to your chats how a person would. this includes claiming it knows things reguardless of it actually does. it’s knolage is limited to it’s ‘training’ process’ "
Other people have some really good responses in here.
I’m going to echo that AI is highlighting the problems of capitalism. The ownership class wants to fire a bunch of people and replace them with AI, and keep all that profit for themselves. Not good.
Nobody talks how it highlights the success of capitalism either.
I live in SEA and AI is incredibly powerful here giving opportunity for anyone to learn. The net positive of this is incredible even if you think that copyright is good and intellectual property needs government protection. It’s just that lop sided of an argument.
I think western social media is spoiled and angry and the wrong thing but fighting these people is entirely pointless because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Big tech == bad, blah blah blah.
You don’t need AI for people to learn. I’m not sure what’s left of your point without that assertion.
You’re showing your ignorance if you think the whole world has access to fit education. And I say fit because there’s a huge difference learning from books made for Americans and AI tailored experiences just for you. The difference is insane and anyone who doesn’t understand that should really go out more and I’ll leave it at that.
Just the amount of frictionless that AI removes makes learning so much more accessible for huge percentage of population. I’m not even kidding, as an educator, LLM is the best invention since the internet and this will be very apparent in 10 years, you can quote me on this.
You shouldn’t trust anything the LLM tells you though, because it’s a guessing machine. It is not credible. Maybe if you’re just using it for translation into your native language? I’m not sure if it’s good at that.
If you have access to the internet, there are many resources available that are more credible. Many of them free.
Again you’re just showing your ignorance how actually available this is to people outside of your immediate circle, maybe you should travel a bit and open up your mind.
You shouldn’t trust anything the LLM tells you though, because it’s a guessing machine
You trust tons of other uncertain probability-based systems though. Like the weather forecast, we all trust that, even though it ‘guesses’ the future weather with some other math
That’s really not the same thing at all.
For one, no one knows what the weather will be like tomorrow. We have sophisticated models that do their best. We know the capital of New Jersey. We don’t need a guessing machine to tell us that.
For things that require a definite, correct answer, an LLM just isn’t the best tool for it. However if the task is something with many correct answers, or no correct answer, like for instance writing computer code (if its rigorously checked against its actually not that bad) or for analyzing vast amounts of text quickly, then you could make the argument that its the right tool for the job.
Nobody talks how it highlights the success of capitalism either.
it definitely does both
What do I really want?
Stop fucking jamming it up the arse of everything imaginable. If you asked for a genie wish, make it it illegal to be anything but opt in.
I think it’s just a matter of time before it starts being removed from places where it just isn’t useful. For now companies are just throwing it at everything to see what sticks. WhatsApp and JustEat added AI features and I have no idea why or how it could be used for those services and I can’t imagine people using them.
Rename it to LLMs, because that’s that it is. When the hype label is gone, it won’t get shoved into everywhere for shits and giggles and be used for stuff it’s actually useful for.
Idrc about ai or whatever you want to call it. Make it all open source. Make everything an ai produces public domain. Instantly kill every billionaire who’s said the phrase “ai” and redistribute their wealth.
Ya know what? Forget the ai criteria let’s just have this for all billionaires
I’m all for open source
but you know I was totally with you until you said kill all the billionaires
Yeah not everyone has the stomach for class genocide
low-key maybe killing tons of people isn’t a nice idea
There’s loads of people who I don’t mind being killed. No tears for hung Nazis. No remorse for guillotined royals. No problem with dead billionaires. They watch people die for profit, I’d watch them die for liberation.
That stealing copyrighted works would be as illegal for these companies as it is for normal people. Sick and tired of seeing them get away with it.
For it to go away just like Web 3.0 and NFTs did. Stop cramming it up our asses in every website and application. Make it opt in instead of maybe if you’re lucky, opt out. And also, stop burning down the planet with data center power and water usage. That’s all.
Edit: Oh yeah, and get sued into oblivion for stealing every copyrighted work known to man. That too.
Edit 2: And the tech press should be ashamed for how much they’ve been fawning over these slop generators. They gladly parrot press releases, claim it’s the next big thing, and generally just suckle at the teet of AI companies.
I’m not against it as a technology. I use it for my personal use, as a toy, to have some fun or to whatever.
But what I despise is the forced introduction everything. AI written articles and AI forced assistants in many unrelated apps. That’s what I want to disappear, how they force in lots of places.
