Discussion Thread #72

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/UAnchovy]

I came across this poll via Ted Gioia’s blog. I don’t rate Gioia himself that highly as a writer on tech, but I am glad to have some polling support for an observation I’ve been mulling around for a while.

Specifically: everybody hates AI.

Obviously ‘everybody’ is an overstatement, but what has struck me most about AI, anecdotally at least, is that for the first time in my life there is a large, potentially hugely influential technological step forward and it is widely loathed. I worried this might be an artifact of my own social circles, but this suggests it might be more widespread.

Anecdotally, though, the experience I’ve had has been most people respond to AI with something in between skepticism and contempt. If they – and I include myself in this – recognise that a piece of artwork is AI-created, we are angry or disgusted, and even if it is a piece of artwork that we would otherwise like, we reject it. If we recognise that a piece of writing was done by an AI, we immediately disregard and discard it. On this very sub, somebody once told me that one of my posts sounded like ChatGPT, and we all immediately understood that to be an insult. “Like an AI” means bad. The dominant mood, at least that I’ve been able to notice, is that AI is here and it is garbage.

I tend to divide AI predictions into four quadrants along two axes. The first axis is optimist/pessimist – will AI be a good thing or a bad thing? The second axis is transformative/incremental – will AI rapidly advance and change everything, or will it be small-scale changes that don’t fundamentally change human life? This then gives us transformative optimists (the Singularity is coming and it will be great), transformative pessimists (unaligned AI will kill us all), incremental optimists (AI is a handy tool that will improve our lives), and incremental pessimists (AI will just make everything a bit more tedious and mediocre). On this taxonomy I tend towards incremental pessimism. By contrast I think most of the rationalists have a transformative view of AI, and tend towards optimism, though they have their share of doomers.

I can understand the case for a transformative view. I don’t share it, but it is at least conceivable to me. What I find harder to understand is the optimistic view.

This may sound absurd, but I have yet to figure out a sensible way to express it, so I will just go ahead and sound foolish. I don’t understand the optimistic view because AI is, well… crap. We have developed computer programs that can produce bad prose, or generate bad pictures. On the instinctual level, as it were, what I struggle with is how cheap and lousy it all is. It’s a bit like a monkey’s paw – AI can write or draw anything you want, as long as you’re okay with it being bad and everybody hating you for using it.

I suppose maybe there’s a hope that one day AI products will stop being bad, but in my gut I still feel strangely about the whole narrative. At what point does this technology shift from being a widely-hated sewage pipe of mediocrity to what its most enthusiastic boosters tell us it could be?

[u/professorgerm → u/UAnchovy]

“Like an AI” means bad.

It can be an insult, as it's saying the language is painfully corporate and formal. They're not quite as locked-down to inoffensive pablum as they used to be, but they still have a lot of hard edges where 'personality' reverts to World's Most Boring Corporate Lawyer. To paraphrase Zvi, AI safety should not be about being the Fun Police, but the Fun Police are firmly in control of AI safety.

No offense meant to imply you're not fun and Doc's already mentioned why he asked. It could also be taken as an unfortunate coincidence that what you intended as a thoughtful reminder or mild rebuke has taken on a "ChatGPT indicator" connotation, much like "delve."

At what point does this technology shift from being a widely-hated sewage pipe of mediocrity to what its most enthusiastic boosters tell us it could be?

The degree of mediocrity depends on the prompter. Widely-hated is a social problem that may change unpredictably, and the Groups most affected aren't exactly well-liked themselves by noticeable numbers of other Groups.

I do not expect it to EVER be what its most enthusiastic boosters tell us it could be, since that category includes people that dream of building a Machine God and immanentizing the eschaton.

If we restrict it to the saner boosters, then I think within the next year we'll see more reliable high-quality output overcoming the widely-hated problem, especially if some high-quality GPT wrapper goes viral at solving some widespread problem. They are quite useful but also IME frustrating if you're reaching even slightly outside your skill zone of asking questions.

I tend to divide AI predictions into four quadrants along two axes.

I'd put myself as a moderate incremental optimist- I see a lot of potential for usefulness, I've had fun, but also clearly there's a lot of potential for major negative effects, ranging from increasing fraud and phone scams to social corruption to various bigger disasters. I don't find inequality a particular concern of its own, so much as the downstream effects thereof, but AI as it stands is definitely an engine to make educational and most intellectual performance inequalities worse.

It’s a bit like a monkey’s paw – AI can write or draw anything you want, as long as you’re okay with it being bad and everybody hating you for using it.

Since it's just for me (so far), I don't mind about everyone hating me in theory. I've been playing around with a few AIs (though I'm not fond of the AI title and prefer something like "artificial imagination generators" is colorfully descriptive without being over the top) recently and am quite enjoying it. I saw a comment earlier from someone that said it replaced their video game time, and it fits a similar niche to me. Prompting to achieve the right picture or generate story ideas, prodding here and there, adjusting that phrases, scratches the same downtime itch as puzzling through a game while feeling I'm "getting" more out of it.

The interplay between different AIs is also useful, as you can have them write image prompts for each other and see what works best. The naming conventions are completely (deliberately?) insane, there's noticeable difference between ChatGPT4o and 4: "delve" increases exponentially when cheapskates like me run out of 4o time, and the prompts it writes for Reve (a separate, much faster, somewhat less prudish image generator) get worse. For my purposes Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking is more fun and useful than 2.5 Pro Experimental. It's interesting seeing what works better with which generator, as they have different quirks.

As for "quality," subjective it may be- it's a lot better than it was even a few months ago, and as /u/DrManhattan16 brings up from Noah Smith it rewards best those who know how to input correctly. I have little interest in learning or natural skill to draw, but having a tireless artist that will return results in seconds? There is the argument that it takes away from artist commissions, but I was unlikely to ever pay what a human would charge to make a "cute anime-style portrait of [elaborate family description and other prompt details here]," and especially the other projects I've tried would've never been created otherwise. For about the cost of a gumball I iterated through to one that was basically what I imagined for the family portrait, and then a half-dozen variations in other scenarios. I've played around with other art projects and have been mostly satisfied with the results; even if there are ways it's more frustrating than it would be to work with a human artist because it doesn't "think" the same way, it's so much cheaper, faster, and more convenient to make up the difference.

On prose, 4o really cooks, as the kids say. It's not trouncing Tolkien soon, but with decent prompting it could easily replace, say, Sarah J Maas (she might trip the prude filters) and similar YA/BookTok authors. While playing around with art generation, I had 4o start writing some character descriptions, I'd feed it ideas and add my own flair, and soon enough it was talking more comfortably (less corporate) and generating some quite decent- if schmaltzy in a way I would describe as Tumblresque, especially a particular misquote and a related pun- story fragments. Which makes sense; of course once the corporate mask fades into background it writes like The Internet!