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“AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers -- and Isn’t Intelligent
(techpolicy.press)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I've been making the same or similar arguments you are here in a lot of places. I use LLMs every day for my job, and it's quite clear that beyond a certain scale, there's definitely more going on than "fancy autocomplete."
I'm not sure what's up with people hating on AI all of a sudden, but there seems quite a few who are confidently giving out incorrect information. I find it most amusing when they're doing that at the same time as bashing LLMs for also confidently giving out wrong information.
Can you give examples of that?
The one I like to give is tool use. I can present the LLM with a problem and give it a number of tools it can use to solve the problem and it is pretty good at that. Here's an older writeup that mentions a lot of others: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence
I suspect it's rooted in defensive reactions. People are worried about their jobs, and after being raised to believe that human thought is special and unique they're worried that that "specialness" and "uniqueness" might be threatened. So they form very strong opinions that these things are nothing to worry about.
I'm not really sure what to do other than just keep pointing out what information we do have about this stuff. It works, so in the end it'll be used regardless of hurt feelings. It would be better if we get ready for that sooner rather than later, though, and denial is going to delay that.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I also wonder if people are getting tired of the hype and seeing every company advertise AI enabled products (which I can sort of get because a lot of them are just dumb and obvious cash grabs).
At this point, it's pretty clear to me that there's going to be a shift in how the world works over the next 2 to 5 years, and people will have a choice of whether to embrace it or get left behind. I've estimated that for some programming tasks, I'm about 7 to 10x faster when using Copilot and ChatGPT4. I don't see how someone who isn't using AI could compete with that. And before anyone asks, I don't think the error rate in the code is any higher.
I had some training at work a few weeks ago that stated 80% of all jobs on the planet are going to be changed by AI in the next 10 years. Some of those jobs are already rapidly changing, and others will take some time to spin-up the support structures required for AI integration, but the majority of people on the planet are going to be impacted by something that most people don't even know exists yet. AI is the biggest shake-up to industry in human history. It's bigger than the wheel, it's bigger than the production line, it's bigger than the dot com boom. The world is about to completely change forever, and like you said, pretending that AI is stupid isn't going to stop those changes, or even slow them. They're coming. Learn to use AI or get left behind.