this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
831 points (93.1% liked)
solarpunk memes
4083 readers
120 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Eh, most of the marketing around ai is complete bullshit, but I do use it on a regular basis for my work. Several years ago it would have just been called machine learning, but it saves me hours every day. Is it a magic bullet that fixes everything? No. But is it a powerful tool that helps speed up the process? Yes.
Who is getting the reward for speeding up your work? Do you get to slack off more? How long will that last? Or does more work get piled on, making your employer richer not you?
I do, I’m freelance, I make more money.
Not a problem of the AI
Most people free up hours of writing emails to do their actual job.
What does it do to save you so much time?
I've lately tested AI if it can allow me to practice Russian in a natural sounding dialogue. While it didn't sound 100% human (it was too formal and technical), it was a good practice.
So I wouldn't say that it can't be used for good things.
load more comments
(2 replies)
There are plenty of applications for machine learning, logic engines, etc. They've been used in many industries since the 1970s.
This post isn't contributing to a healthy environment in this community.
Well thought out claim -> good source -> good discussion
LLMs helped me with coding and debugging A LOT. I'd much rather use AI than have to try and parse stack exchange and a bunch of other web forums or developer documentation directly. AI is incredible when i get random errors and paste them in to say "fix this" and it does and tells me HOW and WHY it did what it did.
I keep seeing programmers use this as an example of what LLMs are good for, and I've seen other programmers say that the people who do that are bad programmers. The latter makes sense because trusting an LLM to do this is to fundamentally misunderstand what your job is and how the LLM works.
The LLM can't tell you HOW or WHY because it doesn't know those things. It can only give you an approximation of words that sound like someone explaing HOW and WHY. LLMs have no fidelity.
It could be completely wrong, and you wouldn't know because you've admitted you're using the LLM instead of reading the documentation and understanding yourself.
That is so irresponsible. Just RTFM like good programmers have done forever. It's not that much work if you get into the habit of it. Slow down, take the time to understand HOW and WHY to do things yourself, and make quality code rather than cranking out bigger volumes of crap that you don't understand. I'm sure it feels very productive in the moment but you're probably just creating more work for whoever has to clean up your large quantities of poorly thought out code.
And it only consumes the equivalent in electricity of what an American house uses for a few tears.
you're leaving out the main question: do they increase profit? YES.
so nothing anyone says matters. prepare your anus
Does it though?
How long before anyone actually looks up and says the emperor has no clothes?
ITT: LLM helps me with mundane tasks so fuck the enormous energy requirements and its impact on environment!
I mean the students around me, that would have failed by now without chatgpt probably DO want it. But they dont actually want the consequences that come with it. The academic world will adapt and adjust, kind of like inflation. You can just print more money, but that wont actually make everyone richer long term.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah... who doesn't love moral absolutism... The honest answer to all of these questions is, it depends.
Are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable:
AI doesn't just exist of LLMs, which are indeed notoriously expensive to train and run. Using an image generator for example can be done on something as simple as a gaming grade GPU. And other AI technologies are already so light weight your phone can handle them. Do we assign the same negativity to gaming even though it's just people using electricity for entertainment? Producing a game also costs a lot more than it does for an end user to play. It's all about the balance between the two. And yes, AI technologies should rightfully be criticized for being wasteful, such as implementing it in places that it has no business in, or foregoing becoming more efficient.
The ethicality of AI is also something that is a deeply nuanced topic that has no clear consensus. Nor does every company that works with AI use it in the same way. Court cases are pending, and none have been conclusive thus far. Implying it is one sided is just incredibly dishonest.
but do they enable great things that people want?
This is probably the silliest one of them all, because AI technologies are ground breaking in medical research. They are seemingly pivotal in healing the sick people of tomorrow. And creative AIs allow people who are creative to be more creative. But they are ignored. They are shoved to the side because they don't fit in the "AI bad" narrative. Even though we should be acknowledging them, and seeing them as the allies they are against big companies trying to hoard AI technology for themselves. It is these companies that produce problematic AI, not the small artists, creatives, researchers, or anyone using AI ethically.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons?
Who, exactly? You must realize there are far more parties than Google, Meta and Microsoft that create AI right? Companies and groups you've most likely never heard of before, creating open source AI for everyone to benefit from, not just those hoarding it for themselves. It's just so incredibly narrow minded to assign maliciousness to such a large group of people on the basis of what technology they work with.
Maybe you're not being negative enough
Maybe you are not being open minded enough, or have been blinded by hate. Because this shit isn't healthy. It's echo chamber level behaviour. I have a lot more respect for people that don't like AI, but base it on rational reasons. There's plenty of genuinely bad things about AI that have to be addressed, but instead you have to find yourself in a divide between people cuddling very close with spreading borderline misinformation to get what they want, and genuine people that simply want their voice and concerns about AI to be heard.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I am on an internship with like really nice people in a company that does sustainable stuff.
But they honestly have a list of AI tools they plan to use, to make automated presentations... like wtf?
load more comments
(3 replies)
Most AI is being developed to try to sustain the need for content for social networks. The bots are there to make it feel lived in so they can advertise to you. They are running out of people who are willing to give them free content while they make billions off your art. So then, they just replace the artist.
Ok. Been thinking about this and maybe someone can enlighten me. Couldn't LLMs be used for code breaking and encryption cracking. My thought is language has a cadence. So even if you were to scramble it to hell shouldn't that cadence be present in the encryption? Couldn't you feed an LLM a bunch of machine code and train it to take that machine code and look for conversational patterns. Spitting out likely dialogs?
That would probably be a task for regular machine learning. Plus proper encryption shouldn't have a discernible pattern in the encrypted bytes. Just blobs of garbage.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Could there be patterns in ciphers? Sure. But modern cryptography is designed specifically against this. Specifically, it's designed against there being patterns like the one you said. Modern cryptographic algos that are considered good all have the Avalanche effect baked in as a basic design requirement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect
Basically, using the same encryption key if you change one character in the input text, the cipher will be completely different . That doesn't mean there couldn't possibly be patterns like the one you described, but it makes it very unlikely.
More to your point, given the number of people playing with LLMs these days, I doubt LLMs have any special ability to find whatever minute, intentionally obfuscated patterns may exist. We would have heard about it by now. Or...maybe we just don't know about it. But I think the odds are really low .
Very informative! Thank you.
This is a good question and your curiosity is appreciated.
A password that has been properly hashed (the thing they do in that Avalanche Effect Wikipedia entry to scramble the original password in storage) can take trillions of years to crack, and each additional character makes that number exponentially higher. Unless the AI can bring that number to less than 90 days - a fairly standard password change frequency for corporate environments - or heck, just less than 100 years so it can be done within the hacker's lifetime, it's not really going to matter how much faster it becomes.
The easier method (already happening in fact) is to use an LLM to scan a person's social media and then reach out to relatives pretending to be that person, asking for bail money, logins etc. If the data is sufficiently locked down, the weakest link will be the human that knows how to get to it.
view more: next ›