[im3w1l]

Businesses can't just wave a magic wand and make the models perfect. It's early days with many open questions. As these models are a net positive I think we should focus on mitigating the harms rather than some zero tolerance stance. We shouldn't allow the businesses to be neglectful, but I don't see evidence of that.

[mindslight]

> We shouldn't allow the businesses to be neglectful, but I don't see evidence of that.

Calling it "AI", shoving it into many existing workflows as if it's competently answering questions, and generally treating it like an oracle IS being neglectful.

[derbOac]

Here on HN we talk about models, and rightfully so. Elsewhere though people talk about AI, which has a different set of assumptions.

It's worth noting too that how we talk about and use AI models is very different from how we talk about other types of models. So maybe it's not surprising people don't understand them as models.

[vrighter]

Even if they had a magic wand, they still couldn't make them perfect. Because they are by nature, imperfect statistical machines. That imperfection IS their main feature.

[HacklesRaised]

It can't be perfect right? I mean the models require some level of entropy?

[watwut]

Businesses should be able to not lie. In fact, they should be punished for lying and exaggersting much more often - both by being criticised and loosing contracts and legally.

[ares623]

> As these models are a net positive

Uhhh… net positive for who exactly?

[water-data-dude]

For the shareholders of a few companies (in the short term).

[im3w1l]

Chatgpt has 800 million weekly active users. I think it's a net positive for them.

[IAmBroom]

Well, since that's 10x the number of weekly active opioid users, it's at least 10x more positive than fentynal.

Or am I not following your logic correctly?

[im3w1l]

You are not arguing in good faith.

[vel0city]

You seem to be missing the obvious point: popularity of a product doesn't ensure the benefit of said product. There are tons of wildly popular products which have extremely negative outcomes for the user and society at large.

Let's take a weaker example, some sugary soda. Tons of people drink sugary sodas. Are they truly a net benefit to society, or a net negative social cost? Just pointing out that there are a high number of users doesn't mean it inherently has a high amount of positive social outcomes. For a lot of those drinkers, the outcomes are incredibly negative, and for a large chunk of society the general outcome is slightly worse. I'm not trying to argue sugary sodas deserve to be completely banned, but its not a given they're beneficial just because a lot of people bothered to buy them. We can't say Coca-Cola is obviously good for people because its being bought in massive quantities.

Do the same analysis for smoking cigarettes. A product that had tons of users. Many many hundreds of millions (billions?) of users using it all day every day. Couldn't be bad for them, right? People wouldn't buy something that obviously harms them, right?

AI might not be like cigarettes and sodas, sure. I don't think it is. But just saying "X has Y number of weekly active users, therefore it must be a net positive" as some example of it truly being a positive in their lives is drawing a correlation that may or may not exist. If you want to show its positive for those users, show those positive outcomes, not just some user count.

[ares623]

Net positive to me, means that the negative aspects are outweighed by the positive aspects.

How confident are you that 800M people know what the negative aspects are to make it a net positive for them?