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AI Has Lost Its Magic
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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It wasn’t magic to begin with.
"Magic” is just technology that's ~~sufficiently advanced~~ hasn’t yet been commercially exploited.
Idk man curses are magic and ai has been a curse on our existance since gpt3 launched
Has it? I mean, all this “AI” news is pretty annoying, but how has it impacted our daily lives? ChatGPT has only made mine better.
Most search engines are practically unusable due to the massive amount of garbage AI generated sites that take up the search results while having just platantly false information.
I haven’t used a search engine since I started using ChatGPT. It does all the heavy lifting for me.
I am concerned to think of all the terrible and just plain wrong information you have been given.
How is that different from Google?
Not concerned enough to back any of that accusation up with evidence.
Most of the time, information that you’re doing something wrong should be enough to prompt you to dig deeper into the matter. It’s not the job of perfect strangers to educate you.
You’re wrong. Educate yourself.
You should tattoo “I’m wrong but I don’t want to educate myself” on your forehead so people know not to waste their time.
Lemmy has a tagging system, definitely recommend tagging this user so you get a warning that they might be wrong but don't want to educate themselves, then you can just ignore them and move on with your day.
I learned it by watching you
The problem with using it as a search engine is that if it doesn't know the answer it commonly makes things up. I tried using it for work but it got details wrong enough to make it useless.
You can’t trust search engine results either. It’s just another tool that you use to arrive at a conclusion. You still have to do work.
You could in the past. About 6 years ago or so the top 3 results were almost always correct.
Currently you can't because of the AI generated content that gets things wrong the same way as using an AI as a search engine.
I'm pretty sure the number of people that have lost their jobs over this shitty text generator has surpassed a million.
But that has nothing to do with ChatGPT. It’s what some people were blaming on all of the layoffs when it came out. That would have happened regardless. The news just loves a clickable headline.
Most of these companies will start rehiring again. They just did it to trim the fat, cut the high earners, and get people back in at a lower rate because they’re desperate for work.
Tale as old as time.
We get it you trust big tech and like sucking corporate dicks
That is not at all what I said, and you clearly didn’t read my comment. I’m not defending them. I’m saying it’s not the fault of AI. They were gonna fire them anyway to lower costs, and get cheaper workers. (A bad thing)
Apologize, you fucking cunt.
Well since you asked sooo nicely...
Being a jerk gets you a jerk
Oh I'm aware, but yk calling some a "fucking cunt" isn't the greatest way to get an apology, in other news sry for my initial response that was rude i was sleep deprived and my judgement wasn't at its best
Apology accepted.
If we're talking only about LLMs, then probably the biggest issues caused are threats to support line jobs, the enshittification of said help lines, blatant misinformation spread via those chat bots, and a variety of niche problems.
If we're spreading out to mean AI mor generally, we could talk about how facial recognition has now gotten good enough that it's being used to identify and catalogue pretty much anyone that passes a FR-equipped security system. Israel has actually been picking civilian targets via AI. We could also talk about "self driving" cars and the compeletely avoidable deaths they've caused. We could talk about how most convolution network AIs that identify graphic imagery and other horrific visuals use massive sweat shops to sort said graphic images for pennies. We could also talk about how mimicry AI has now been used to create both endless revenge porn of unwilling victims, and also faked the voice of others to try to scam them or make them not vote. There's plenty of damage AI as a whole has done, even if LLMs are the most minimal of all of them.
I don’t think that this is “AI more generally” as the public (and the current article) understands it. You’re lumping together any slightly self corrective algorithm under the AI umbrella. This might be technically correct, but it’s just operations, it’s not indicative of the current hype.
The limiting factor for self driving cars is hardware, not software. There is no commercially viable video technology available to allow taking the self driving technology out of the lab and into the consumer space. Unless you’re talking about Tesla-like systems which, of course, are neither a “self-driving” system nor consumer ready.
This is not AI. The technology behind the voice or image manipulation has existed for some time and has been used for fake porn and for fake voice calls for a long while. We’re only discussing about it now because they can generate traffic if they’re tied to a hype like AI. Very few people would read a story about a student sticking faces of his colleagues over naked bodies, but say the student used AI and suddenly everyone wants to find out what happened. It’s even worse: headlines are discussing the reaction of X celebrity to porn fakes in the context of AI even though porn sites have been having a fake porn section ever since the late 90s and they’re available to anyone with the mental capacity to click “I’m over 18”. Maybe you’re too young to remember, but google wasn’t always censoring search results. Before 2010-ish, fakes like these would routinely appear in google searches of a celebrity’s name. I’m not really sure why AI makes this any different
You are pulling a no true Scotsman fallacy here. AI has always been a somewhat vague term, and it's explicitly a buzzword in today's systems.
This AI front has also been taking the current form for more than a decade, but it wasn't a public topic until now, because it was terrible up until now.
The relevant things is that AI is automating a normally human-centric practice via extensive training on a data model. All systems I've mentioned utilize that machine learning practice at some point in their process.
The statement about the deepfakes is just patently incorrect on your part. It is a trained model which takes an input, and outputs a manipulated output based on its training. That's enough to meet the criteria. Before it was fairly difficult and almost immediately identifiable as AI manipulated. It's now popular because it's gotten good enough to not be immediately noticeable, done fairly easily, and is at the point where it can be mostly automated.
I never claimed that the current software didn’t use machine learning. I simply said that faking video/images has been happening long before machine learning was involved in it and I completely disagree that it is harder to identify fakes now than it used to be. Maybe it wasn’t a technology that was easily available, but image manipulation is something we have been seeing for a long time. If anything, the fact that it is know public knowledge that image, voice and movie clips can be faked will help people to stop trusting them when they shouldn’t
This is your straight statement, and your only argument was saying it was done before AI was used in it. That's a poor argument. That's like arguing that self driving isn't AI because remote control car piloting existed.
Automated image manipulation vs having 100s of hours in Photoshop. That's AI vs what came before. Inputting a source file and getting a manipulated file after some amount of time, vs hours of meticulous work trying to get minor details right.
If we want to compare oldschool manipulation vs AI Manipulation, then yes, fakes now are on par with the insane skill of some image doctoring artists - you're just looking for different things - but it's at an exponentially lower cost than hiring a professional. Compare AI to itself, though? It's night and day. Early AI manipulation was atrocious. And modern AI manipulation is only going to get better. That is all due to breakthroughs in AI. imagine what the hell will happen when Sora becomes usable by anyone.
Machine learning has taken an originally hard thing to do and made it cheap and easy. Now, any schmuck can pump out doctored footage in an afternoon. That's why the AI porn is big- you can pay dirt cheap and give the model photos of any random woman and it'll make porn of them - and that fact has turned it into a much more viable business model than before, that's currently creating massive amounts of non consensual porn fakes- exponentially more than before.
I think I explained in the rest of the paragraph what I meant by that. What’s the point of replying to someone while truncating their message? I know what I said and why.
Sure, but I don’t see how this is a problem except maybe for the workers of the porn industry? And in general, with generated content (text or anything else) the major concern seems to be quantity. Exponential growth of content means nothing. The consumer cannot grow the consumption exponentially so this will just end up using storage space
A lot of what you’ve mentioned has existed for decades in some fashion. It’s just code.
And making these tools mass market instead of being something niche that requires actual talent to do is absolutely something to blame ChatGPT for.
I saw through chat GPT’s gimmic right away.
Having said that, image generation to me was and still is magic. Not because I don’t understand it, but because I saw it as a way to get people with imagination but no skill to actually make art.
Having said that, the reality and how it is used is different.
I love it for asset creation and texture for games. As a programmer with 0 artistic skill it has been a god send to be able to do far higher quality UI while not bogging down my prototyping time.
But for like truely unique art... It's kind of a mess. Like try to get an AI to make a dwarf warrior with a Lance riding on the shoulders of an anthropomorphic cat person, who is dressed in monk robes.
AI struggles so hard with unique scenes like that... For now...
I think it's amazing and terrible at the same time. It clearly produces some amazing looking things, but I've never been able to get it to create what I want.
It was entirely magic and very little verified reality.