[wulfstan]

In July 2023, I wrote this to a friend:

"...being entirely blunt, I am an AI skeptic. I think AI and LLM are somewhat interesting but a bit like self-driving cars 5 years ago - at the peak of a VC-driven hype cycle and heading for a spectacular deflation.

My main interest in technology is making innovation useful to people and as it stands I just can't conceive of a use of this which is beneficial beyond a marginal improvement in content consumption. What it does best is produce plausible content, but everything it produces needs careful checking for errors, mistakes and 'hallucinations' by someone with some level of expertise in a subject. If a factory produced widgets with the same defect rate as ChatGPT has when producing content, it would be closed down tomorrow. We already have a problem with large volumes of bad (and deceptive!) content on the internet, and something that automatically produces more of it sounds like a waking nightmare.

Add to that the (presumed, but reasonably certain) fact that common training datasets being used contain vast quantities of content lifted from original authors without permission, and we have systems producing well-crafted lies derived from the sweat of countless creators without recompense or attribution. Yuck!"

I'll be interested to see how long it takes for this "spectacular deflation" to come to pass, but having lived through 3 or so major technology bubbles in my working life, my antennae tell me that it's not far off now...

[tim333]

>can't conceive of a use of this which is beneficial beyond a marginal improvement in content consumption

AlphaFold is having a big influence in medical research. There's more to AI than chatbots.

It's quite interesting the work they are doing there now - article on it https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/alpha-fold-3-drug-discover... I've got a personal interest because my sister has ALS and I think an in silico breakthrough is the only thing that could fix that before her dying.

[Seb-C]

I don't think that anyone is dismissing machine learning itself. This bubble is more about generative AI, and especially language models.

Machine learning has been there for quite a while and is a useful tool. But it's only a tool among many other ones, like programming languages and libraries. It's not a product. At most it can be the engine of a specific feature.

[whywhywhywhy]

> but everything it produces needs careful checking for errors, mistakes and 'hallucinations' by someone with some level of expertise in a subject

Nah you just post it, if people point out the mistakes the comment is treated as a positive engagement by the algorithm anyway, unfortunately for anyone that cares.