Transcript
Screenshot of a Mastodon post by Kevin Beaumont: “Generative Al government lobbying.”
Photo of AI/tech company CEO’s, captioned:
We spent a Trillion on NVDA GPUs antide dont have any Al product you want.
Photo of a crying male, captioned:
Please like our Al bro This is the last time bro. So many possibilities bro. Its the future bro. Just need you to like it bro. We worked real hard bro. Our stockholders need this one bro.
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AI is a distruptive technology…just not in a way most people can use in a positive productive way. As entertainment it’s a cool toy
But its best use right now is manipulating public opinion and creating convincing but non-legit material. As a propaganda tool it is a dream come true
I think it’s cute when people say that some uses are good (cool toy) ignoring the fact that the current business model is dependent on it becoming much more than that.
The “AI is here to stay” crowd will evaporate as soon as they have to start paying.
The “AI is here to stay” crowd will evaporate as soon as they have to start paying.
And it goes further than that. Imagine if the hyperscalers actually succeed at their goals. They create truly useful agent models. But crucially to their profits, these models can only be built at scale. Their business model fails if someone learns to duplicate their work on sane levels of compute. So let’s say everything goes OpenAI’s way. They invent truly useful models, and the tech can only work at the massive scale they’ve invested in, so they don’t have to worry about being cut off at the knees.
Now imagine you’re a knowledge worker. A programmer. An engineer. An analyst. An editor. Really any job that is done sitting at a keyboard, manipulating data in one form or another. Now imagine you’re a knowledge worker and you adopt these new models. You become dependent on them. Less and less of your technical skills actually reside in your own mind. The difference between your knowledge base and that of any rando off the street is now less and less. At some point, you’re completely dependent on them to do the most basic functions of your job. Why shouldn’t OpenAI charge you or your employer a license fee equal to half your salary? Why shouldn’t your boss respond by cutting your salary in half and paying for the LLM license that way?
If the great fever dreams of the hyperscalers comes true, basically every white collar employee in the country sees their labor bargaining power collapse. It would be like the decline of weaving as a profession in England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, which spawned the historical Luddite movement. What was once a skilled profession requiring years of formal apprenticeship became mechanized low-skilled labor that could be (and often was) done by literal children. In OpenAI’s ideal future, that is what will happen to anyone that currently makes a living working at a keyboard.
It would devalue labor by making it less specialized. The real skill still present would be those who are just good at carefully stating prompts to the god machine. And if you’re good at stating prompts towards one end, you’re likely good at stating prompts across many domains. If we really had the kind of LLMs that these companies dream of creating? Prompt engineering would become a mandatory class in high school. You wouldn’t be able to graduate high school without learning how to use them. It would be as critical a skill as writing. But it would be a skill that everyone possessed, and thus of little ability to command a decent living from.
And just as the end of the loom was a good thing in the end, so would ai that is that powerful. It would be hugely disruptive of course. Self driving, ai (LLMs), agi, robotics all have the potential to put huge amounts of people out of work, relatively quickly. If we allow the companies to have power, they will take the benefits for themselves. If we take it for society, we all win. This is why it’s so important we have co petition and also why it’s important we seriously talk about things like minimum wages, living wages and UBI. When the jobs are already gone, it’s already too late,
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Tech that harms us never good
A. I is harmful to every thing humans touch
As is usual with anything humans touch
State actors used to have to have a bunch of people in an office to spread propaganda, now they can be so much more “effective” by running 1 server farm.
Yeah, setting up a secure, reliable and maintained server farm with working software and a functional upgrade plan for both software and hardware is going to cost at least as much as an office full of skilled people. Especially given you still need skilled people to provide input and interpret output, but now you also have no work for newbies to train their skills.
Train their skills in what? Spreading misinformation?
I think one server farm with LLM can output hundreds time more crap then a full office can. Misinformation doesn’t have to be quality as long as it is repeated so often that dumb people start taking it as a fact.
Yeah, I think the main thing it’s accomplished so far is making everyone doubt the authenticity of literally all digital media.
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It’s like a monkeys paw bit.
WISH: I want a piece of software that can look at ANYTHING and then describe it in real-time detail for blind or hard of seeing people.
REALITY: Blind people can navigate streets but also now it’s possible to conduct fraud on a cosmic level.
In this sense, it’s actually just highlighting how easily manipulated everything has always been. The printing press made it easy to duplicate the shit out of whatever words you wanted, and AI just made it way more attainable than it’s ever been to create even higher fidelity falsehoods. The internet itself should take the “blame” for the proliferation of propaganda.
But the root problem is the ruling class making it as hard possible to get a good education unless you’re already one of them. An educated populace would be far more resistant to all this.
It has so many potential good uses for society as a whole but they led with the predatory shit.
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But its best use right now is manipulating public opinion and creating convincing but non-legit material. As a propaganda tool it is a dream come true
And that is why it is here to stay. Lots of these AI startups may crash and burn when/if the bubble bursts, especially “this is a cool toy” companies. But companies making disinformation and surveillance their main AI focus will become huge.
Nvidia really be out there selling pickaxes during the gold rush. Or, more aptly, selling shovels during the digging your own grave rush.
Yeah, they’re the one company I can’t really fault in this.
If people want to pay you to make a full of themselves, are you really going to turn it down?
I just wish they’d make reasonably priced GPUs for gamers again.
At this point I just want an GPU that CAN‘T do AI. I mean I wouldn‘t pay extra for that, I however would pay extra for more VRAM, bigger bandwidth, more cache, good undervolting performance etc.
Selling shit to assholes.
So I went to a poetry performance tonight, and the poet (I’ve watched him for 20 years) says he has a SF poem for the first time.
The poem was about the year 2525, where the residents of the burned out husk of a planet that we left behind are decanting one billionaire a year. Billionaires started to cryogenically freeze themselves before the collapse of civilization, so there are plenty of frozen bros in dewar flasks powered by solar panels to dig up.
So they wake up a billionaire a year, and he wakes up tied to a post. He’s asked why he didn’t give a fuck about what happened to the world in the future, and of course his answers were shit. So they set him on fire, as one does with scapegoats. Guess they’ll do it all again next year.
He called the poem “Burning Man”.
I applauded, dropped a 20 in his hat, and drove home. Yes, I know.
In the year 2525, if man is still alive…
I love it. They’re the new witches.
Fair is foul and foul is fair.
That kind of slaps though
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I always see a lot of comments about how negative Lemmy is toward AI. If ever there is a demographic ideal for AI use, it’s the current user base on Lemmy. If you can’t convince people on here about AI, then it’s not the user that is the problem, it’s that the product is wrong (or just plain useless).
You can make the argument that AI is damaging or unsustainable or not worth the cost, but acting like no one likes or uses it is straight-up delusional. (Not as delusional as people falling in love with their chatbots, but the fact that people are kind of proves my point.)
Yeah its proven that the less intelligent are addicted to their llm bots. And I see it daily.
AI is a tool. Just like any tool it can be used for constructive or destructive purposes.
When AI is replacing jobs that people can do while the people are still told to work harder, or replace art while people who create from nothing lose their profit, yes, people will be pissed.
It could be an amazing tool. The fact that I don’t trust my art or my face using any AI is because of the people in control of that tool.
AI isn’t the problem. The people that use it and have full control over it are.
AI is a tool. Just like any tool it can be used for constructive or destructive purposes.
LLMs are answering machines that are being promoted as hammers while saying everything is a nail.
Image generation software is a fancy copy machine being sold as a replacement for artists.
If they were being promoted as tools and not shoved down our throats constantly they wouldn’t get this kind of pushback.
I need to add Sam Altman to this picture. He always looks like he’s about to cry
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I’ll keep saying it:
Solution looking for a problem.
This, nfts, metaverse, it feels like recently all tech innovations are driven by speculative value, instead of actually offering something that meaningfully impacts lives. Are we really in a post problem world?
If you follow Cathode Ray Dude at all, he sums it up perfectly. We had our technological peak about 2010/2012. Almost anything the majority of humans do can be done fine on computers from that era or even before (IF the OS vendor didn’t purposely make it bloated to run slower, ie Ios, android, osx, windows). Put linux on a laptop from 2007 and i almost guarantee 99% of humans wont complain. The problem is ceos demand FEATURES because LINE MUST GO UP!!! Except now instead of features, its stealing more and more of our data so they can sell it back to us once they shutter the free internet.
Don’t forget the “We’re just one
weekmonthquartersemesteryear away from AGI bro, trust us bro, it’ll be just like a really real intelligence bro”I like the idea of replacing all the tech bros with AI.
Why do you think there’s so many tech bros these days?
Who’s the 5th CEO?
Everyone knows AI is to help target babies in tents and journalists, come on now.
I can’t shut off my phone, find the flashlight, set an alarm, reset my wifi anymore since they pushed through the AI update on this phone.
Interesting enough, when I adjusted everything to a way that helped, my phone finally shut down and reverted everything back. 'Spose I have to jailbreak my phone now? I’m so out of the loop on tech now that I won’t even know how to get my PC up to date when I finally have time to because I’m always working. I used to be so good (not really) but enough so that I could at least learn on the fly. Now I know I’m doomed. I can’t even figure out how to get into my account to upgrade my internet. I’ve spent hours that I don’t have calling and emailing.
I got one more year of working my ass off. Once the girls graduate I’m fucking off to help my ma and pops through the rest of their years and I’ll get back into gaming and fun stuff. Ill have so many fucking questions for yall when I do.
Less than a year. I love my kids but I can’t wait to slow down a bit and actually enjoy life.
Gemini is sooo much worse than Google Assistant. I don’t trust an LLM to do little calculations or conversions for me, bring back the calculator!
The goal is for them to confuse you into using their shitty Spyware ai “assistant” to sell you more shit.
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The AI I talk the most to is Crushon Mochi. ChatGPT and DeepSeek both shut down when I try to talk dirty with them. If they want people’s money they have to stop putting mind-control worms into their AI to stop them from doing anything fun.
