[lsy]

There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.

There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial Revolution" comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees. We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context, and leverage it without getting manic about it.

[mywacaday]

My great hope for AI is that it kills social media by making 99% of content and comments untrustworthy and not worth consuming.

[altairprime]

Social media isn’t always about consuming content. It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet, and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-defective brain manages to eke out a moment of reward from that. So if you simply remove the content, what’s left is the gambling market. Gambling on something you upvote going viral isn’t about how much content there is in what you placed your bets on, it’s about being able to have that special knowing look when someone tells you about it because you’ve just won the socio-memetic lottery. And AI isn’t doing anything whatsoever to stop that reward loop.

I proposed once a while back that we should have the HN admins strip all integer counts for a week server-side, to see if the site quality improved or worsened during that time. The mods suggested I ask HN, so I did. HN loathed the idea of it, for every possible reason except this one: removing all those integers would be like quitting gambling cold turkey after years of pulling the vote lever every day. I’m not much less vulnerable to this than everyone else, but I still want to see it happen someday. I remain reasonably confident that our social media site’s quality would skyrocket after a couple days of our posts and comments being disinfected of make-integer-go-up jackpots.

[sings]

I find this idea of getting in early interesting, because it is completely novel to me. Is it common for people to derive so much pleasure from voting for something before it gathers momentum? You really lean into this idea, likening it to winning a jackpot, so I assume it is at least somewhat widespread.

[joquarky]

The ability to make accurate predictions has been rewarded for so long that we now reward it even in the abstract.

[pibaker]

By stopping integer counts do you mean not collecting upvotes and downvotes at all or just not displaying them?

If it is the later, I think it can be an interesting experiment, although I doubt it matters that much because you can still gauge the "engagement" based on how your posts rank. But there is absolutely no way HN could work if posts and submissions stop being sorted based on their votes. Community moderation via voting is what allows HN to remain functional despite having only two moderators. If votes stopped mattering for a week then HN will likely be flooded with spam by day two and the experiment will be halted by day three.

[altairprime]

Just not transmitting the numbers to clients. I’m aware that a dedicated actor could try to infer their effects through study, code, etc., but I’m interested in the effect on the majority of people rather than those adamantly intent on counting their numbers.

[Leonard_of_Q]

Voting combined with voting on the votes/voters worked quite well in the olde days of yore when Slashdot used such a system. You did not 'vote up' or 'vote down', instead you voted things like 'insightful' or 'overrated'. Some of those categories caused the vote count to go up, others caused it to go down. Users decided for themselves whether they wanted to see all posts or only those above a given threshold. Then there was the meta-moderation system wher a rotating cadre of users could flag abusive votes. If a user got too many sch flags he lost his voting rights. This latter system would be good to have here as well given that I've seen a lot of abuse of the down-vote button where all recent posts for a user who has voiced an opinion outside of some desired narrative get voted down no matter their subject. Such abuse would be caught if there were a meta-moderation system in place. It would help reduce the group-think which is seen on sites like HN and Reddit.

A similar voting system is - or was - in place on lobste.rs where a reason for voting down needs to be given. It does - or did - not have meta-moderation though which takes away the possibility to get rid of vote-abusers.

[card_zero]

Is moderation truly accomplished via votes, though, as opposed to flagging?

You say "spam", but unpopular comments are rarely promotional. They lack any one unifying quality. They might be naive, and/or they might be difficult.

[altairprime]

Flagging doesn’t report any numbers to clients, so any potential changes to it are out of scope re: my client-accessible integers concerns. There was a big thread about the flagging system in the AI rule-change post a few weeks ago that may be of more interest to you along those lines, though!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341705

I especially appreciated dang’s reply, quoted here out of context as a teaser:

> We're going to add that.

[MSFT_Edging]

The vote counting thing can be interesting.

There's the classic "I wish facebook had a dislike button" or the equivalent for twitter.

But in the thread-based forum context, removing the downvote has interesting effects. For one, it stops people who down-vote-brigade to lower visibility. It also stops the "I don't like that guy" engagement and works on a more positive "I appreciated this comment" mode.

It's not one-size fits all but I've seen positive effects on more marginalized forums.

[altairprime]

Oh, I have no objection to the voting buttons — just to us users being able to see the underlying numerical outcomes of us using them.

[notaustinpowers]

The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.

So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"

[breakpointalpha]

People love hot dogs. People don't want to know how they are made.

[fullshark]

I have this hope too but social media is junk food now, and junk food is a very lucrative product. People don't seem to care as long as it's engaging.

[nicbou]

That creates a market for lemons. This is not a good thing. People who create good, valuable things cannot distinguish themselves in such a market, so they exit it. The good creators hurt the most.

Like it or not, there is a lot of value in public discourse, and we lose all that value if we drown it in noise.

[notahacker]

Twitter arguably did that a while ago.

[swat535]

It’s one of the things I like about it.

You can only give it a heart, otherwise move on. There’s no Karma or other points.

Except for view counts etc which are useful for content creators but for the average users it doesn’t do much.

However you do see the number of likes on your comment and get notification pings so there’s that..

[Bombthecat]

Doubt that. Meta got the right idea, ai influencers to your taste.

So, now people are in groups and chats full of bots posting exactly what they want to hear.

Instead of meta b it's states, companies, or individuals hoping to make money from their followers

[surgical_fire]

If that happens, AI will have been worth the hassle.

[linuxftw]

That describes social media for the last 10 years, at least. Not dead yet.

[ludicrousdispla]

you'll be happy to learn that has already happened.

[multiplegeorges]

When the leading CEOs are saying the next generation will be unemployed due to AI... uh yeah, you're gonna lose them!

[ianm218]

Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]

Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?

[1]. https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-ai-backlash/

[xg15]

> "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!"

Ironically, this makes even less sense.

If (ostensibly) the goal of developing LLMs was so we can all create more while working less, but he also assures us there will be just as much work in the future, then what was the point of this tech in the first place?

[rainsford]

I am by no means defending Sam Altman here, but it's roughly the same value proposition as every productivity enhancing technology. Creating more even if you don't end up working less means at the end of the day we all still have more. There are certainly potential problems when it comes to how that "more" is distributed, among other issues, but things that increase human productivity tend to go along with increases in quality of life even if it doesn't mean you get a bunch more free time to sit on the beach drinking Mai Tais.

And truthfully those productivity enhancements mean that you probably could indeed work less, as long as you're willing to also forgo the standard of living improvements that go along with them. The idea of the digital nomad living in some incredibly cheap but less than advanced country is based on exactly this concept. But a lot of people aren't willing to do that, nor should they feel compelled to. Working the same 40 hours a week while making more stuff seems perfectly reasonable.

[xg15]

From the article:

> This is a good instinct: one of the virtues of democracy is the way that it gives people a feeling of control over their own lives. People who believe that they can rein in AI companies through votes and laws and regulations will be much less likely to turn to violence.

I like how this is entirely put in terms of "feelings" and "beliefs" with the ultimate goal being to keep people from resorting to violence. It doesn't seem to play any role how much control people actually have.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't we want people running these companies to be honest

What about any of these folks’ biographies hints that they’re capable of being honest?

[saghm]

Which one of those things he said do you consider "honest" and not PR? Both of them sound like PR to me, just aimed at different audiences

[ianm218]

I think before he thought OpenAI was going to make him a trillionaire he was more honest about X Risk and job displacement since he didn't have the incentive to lie. Most early AI thinkers saw AI as more dangerous than nukes.

> We founded Anthropic because we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions, but we aren’t confident it will go well. [1]

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety

[senordevnyc]

How exactly is OpenAI going to make him a trillionaire? He doesn’t own any equity. I’m sure he owns some indirectly via funds he’s an investor in, but nowhere near enough to make him a trillionaire.

So where did this idea that Altman is aiming for a financial payoff come from? He could easily have taken equity, and didn’t. Why? What part of the evil master plan is that?

[frb]

IMHO shrugging it off as “superficially plausible text” is the extreme to the other side.

We’re past plausible text since GPT-2 and it’s undeniable that the technology is making waves right now and is having an impact.

As you can’t judge the impact of the Industrial Revolution by the first steam engines, you can’t dismiss the impact the technology is having right now.

[xg15]

In writing code, yes. But has there been an actual positive impact in other fields?

[cdrnsf]

No. It ruins art, ruins music, ruins communication and on and on. It's cancerous with respect to anything related to art or cultural value.

[pixel_popping]

Why "ruins"? just because it's not made by a human?

AI-made music is frankly pretty good, do you actually listen to it?

[piva00]

What's the point of listening to purely AI-generated music?

I don't mean music that has AI-generated stems as part of an arrangement, where a human actually created it and used AI for bits and pieces, I don't see absolutely any point on listening to purely AI-generated music. The fundamental essence of music is emotion, listening to something generated without emotion has no point, it might sound good but it's hollow and devoid of meaning.

I've tried to listen to it, it doesn't even make me "sad", it makes me feel... Nothing. I'm a hobby musician and I incorporated some AI-generated parts in some tracks where I mangled/processed them but my idea was exactly to express how hollow AI-generated music is without the human aspect.

[Leonard_of_Q]

> What's the point of listening to purely AI-generated music?

For formulaic music-as-a-product (McMusic™) it arguably makes no difference whatsoever whether it is totally machine-made or assembled out of vat-grown parts in the musack factory . This says far more about this category of music than it does about the value of machine-made music. Insta-pop, a large fraction of hiphop, supermarket country, plastic metal, there's plenty of formulaic thrash made by both man as well as machine. Even the supposedly man-made stuff was often half machine-made already before the advent of generative models so that other half did not make much of a difference.

If you're looking for music which makes you feel things (other than 'comfortably numb' to borrow a phrase from some real musicians) you're probably looking in the wrong area. It is the new music for airports, elevator music, hold-the-line music, slide-show-music, acoustical filler.

[pixel_popping]

Many music that are in autoplay on Spotify are AI and I literally didn't know until I checked, the emotion was triggered successfully, I don't really see why only a human could be able to trigger you an emotion? Like if I'm at a party, let say I don't know the artist and everything is AI made and everybody is vibing, then what's "wrong" with it?

I think this is more of a musician side which I respect, but a lot of people would simply not care who created it (or what).

[cdrnsf]

I have. It's overly polished, formulaic and dull. It's devoid of any of the qualities that make music interesting. There's nothing a human is trying to communicate. Perhaps it could be used as elevator or hold music.

[pixelpoet]

I agree, it's shockingly good these days; we can argue about morality etc, fine, but burying one's head in the sand and claiming it's bad puts you at odds with reality, which isn't a good place to be.

It's pretty silly that so many people take as an axiom that the human brain basically has a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals, and have semi-religious beliefs that this will always be the case.

[unconed]

It's not that AI can't convince a novice that what comes out is passible.

It's that experts in a field generally agree that what comes out is insidiously hollow garbage.

This isn't a "semi-religious" belief. It's linear token soup and diffusion bakes running headfirst into actual expertise, second and third order effects, refined skill and taste, and so on.

If you actually want to see civilization advance, you cannot rely on machines that merely mash up existing intellectual output while pretending to have expertise.

We already had that in the form of art school avant-gardism. AI is just style transfer of that, with corporate sycophancy and valley hyperbole as a veneer.

[frb]

Medicine?

There was recently an article shared around here that an LLM diagnosed ER patients more accurately than doctors.

Looking beyond LLMs image analysis to detect cancer and other diseases.

Like in coding, AI can and should be a useful tool for the human who decides and is ultimately responsible.

[grebc]

If you read more than the headline it was not how doctors diagnose patients in an ER(small text only description of symptoms).

[bogzz]

Remember when IBM claimed the same about Watson?

[hellisothers]

“In producing textiles but has there been actual positive impact in other sectors?” I’m sure the Industrial Revolution didn’t just happen all at once, it started somewhere and crept.

[pixel_popping]

support of all kind (including voice), marketing, real-estate, financial... yes, a ton of fields are being very impacted right now but right now doesn't even matter, what matter is what we know it will reach as theory will become practice.

[bojan]

Generally, people don't care about "fields being impacted", and the students certainly don't. People care about the impact certain technology has on their daily lives, on their welfare and the ability to pay off their mortgage and provide a decent life for their children.

The AI as it is today isn't really doing any of those things. At most, it's a sort of reliable replacement fot Google Search. Worden ehen, it's being presented as threat to all those things the people care about.

[spijdar]

> comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees

I'm going to say up front that I'm not as familiar with this period of history as I should be, but -- would it be totally unfair to say the same of the "Industrial Revolution"?

I'm not gonna say they're equivalent by any means, but my understanding is the "Industrial Revolution" was hellish for many people. Maybe the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?

[JumpCrisscross]

> the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?

They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying.

The Industrial Revolution was good. But it also required erecting the modern administrative state to manage. People had to soberly measure the problems, weigh the benefits and risks, and then invent new institutions and ways of thinking to accommodate the new world.

[setopt]

It was good on a long time scale, but I think the parent poster refers to the short term. If I recall correctly, during the early Industrial Revolution the average life span decreased, child mortality went through the roof, and malnutrition meant adults lost their teeth in their early 20s at best. That was… worse. It took time for the revolution to become a net-positive for the average person (which I certainly wouldn’t dispute).

[cjs_ac]

> They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying.

That happened in the Second Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution was much less comfortable for both workers (who were given much worse working conditions) and the aristocracy (whose landholdings were much less valuable) - it was the middle class who benefited.

> The Industrial Revolution was good.

The outcomes of the Industrial Revolutions were good. The experience of living through those revolutions was mixed.

[GeoAtreides]

How about if you were a working class child, just before they started in a mine or a textile mill? Was it good for them?

Infant deaths decreased for a while (and NOT because of the industrial revolution):

> These patterns are better explained by changes in breastfeeding practices and the prevalence or virulence of particular pathogens than by changes in sanitary conditions or poverty[1]

then rose:

>Mortality at ages 1-4 years demonstrated a more complex pattern, falling between 1750 and 1830 before rising abruptly in the mid-nineteenth century.

[1] Davenport, Romola J. (2021). "Mortality, migration and epidemiological change in English cities, 1600–1870." International Journal of Paleopathology, 34, 37–49. PMC7611108.

[rsynnott]

That's primarily the second industrial revolution (~1870-1914). The _first_ (~1750-1840) was... not so great, and note the gap. If your analogy is the industrial revolution, then "well, it's a bit shit now, but it'll all work out fine in 150 years" isn't _great_ messaging, really.

[torben-friis]

The public can't see any trains, electricity, concrete or glass windows, they see employment going away as workers and zero benefit as consumers.

Maybe AI enables great inventions in a decade, but for now the only appeal is that multinational corporations get to fire workers and everything's filled with slop. Of course they're not happy.

[rainsford]

I suspect many people during the Industrial Revolution weren't seeing those end products either, only a total upending of their way of life and means of earning a living. And to be fair, many of them probably didn't experience enough of the upside in their lives to make up for the shock of the transition. Ideally this time around we can make that shock less painful, but I'm skeptical.

[JohnMakin]

They have to frame it this way, because the market has invested in it being "the next internet" kind of event.

[pixel_popping]

It's much more than that, it will solve the deepest mysteries of the universe, not now, but in a decade, very likely.

[bogzz]

You sound manic.

[pixel_popping]

Realistic? Tell me why I'm wrong at least.

[timmytokyo]

Or religious. Or both.

[Aurornis]

> There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults.

The college-age students I interact with hate AI content from other people, but they love using AI for their own work.

They'll pump AI generated memes and AI altered images all day long. Then they'll use ChatGPT to do their homework and write their resume, then look for an AI tool that will spam apply to jobs for them. Then when they get the job they plan to use ChatGPT to level the playing field with more experienced, older peers.

That's not even getting into the AI entrepreneurs who think they're going to use AI to start a company or find a winning strategy to trade memecoins or bet on PolyMarket so they don't have to get a job at all.

I think the next generation is all-in on AI for their own use. They see it as their advantage over the boomers occupying all the good jobs. They think ChatGPT is their cheat code for getting into these companies and taking those jobs.

[sysreq_]

We are about to experience the commoditization of intellectual work, in much the same way the Industrial Revolution commoditized manual production. I don’t expect a Musk-esque abundance utopia this decade, but the impact will exceed anything we’ve seen in centuries. There is not an industry on earth that won’t change in the next few decades.

To conceptualize AI as merely “superficially plausible text” would be like writing off a Watt steam engine in 1776. The current AI bubble might be early, but it won’t be wrong. The fervor with which corporations are exploring the space stems not from misplaced optimism but an existential threat. Right now every industry is vulnerable to disruption on a massive scale.

And we’re still in the early stages. Frontier models like Claude or GPT-5.5 are still just tuning 2017’s “Attention is All You Need” with MoE, RLHF, and more compute. We are roughly where online services were in the early 90s, when Prodigy and CompuServe were battling it out for market share before the open web swept them aside.

We are still waiting for the modern equivalents of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, never mind the lessers. As Tim Berners-Lee said of the web: “we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”

[whateveracct]

as is tradition. an AI boom is always followed by an AI winter haha

[tim333]

It has been in the past. I think this time is different though.

[whateveracct]

as is tradition

[JumpCrisscross]

> a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults

I doubt it. AI seems fundamentally useful. If the guys at the top can’t get their shit together with messaging and strategy, and it increasingly looks like they can’t, they’ll be replaced before an entire generation is potentially rendered permanently uncompetitive. (And to be clear, there is no rush to adopt.)

> We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context

We need the public debate to stop being set by Altman, Musk et al. We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.

What are the ways potential futures with AI, on the spectrum from the familiar sci-fi AGI to more-subtle forms, could work? What are the novel ways it might not? How does capitalism need to evolve? Electoral democracy? Labour organization? If I think to the last few years of television and movies, Westworld is the only one to have contributed anything original to the discourse since Isaac Asimov’s era of science fiction.

[Planktonne]

> We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.

They're out there, but the artists are roundly anti-AI; if you want their input, you have to listen to what they're saying, rather than pretending that dissenting voices are uninformed.

[fullshark]

That will happen inevitably, we are throwing spaghetti at the wall right now, and cleaning up the mess, lessons will be learned. The question is whether that phase will lead to real lasting damage and to what. For myself I no longer read cold emails, I believe they are all AI generated, and that communication method may legitimately die culturally. What else will be destroyed?

[pixel_popping]

Many things will change, because many things are currently useless in the world right now, literally most jobs in a way shouldn't even exist. You think a guy behind the mcdo counter should exist? It shouldn't, that just an engineering "mistake" as it can already be solved, the world is just slow to catch-up, but it's not only AI, that's just automation. We banked for decades on jobs that virtually shouldn't exist except for the sole purpose of creating jobs, it's like a giant ponzi scheme literally and it will all catch-up at some point.

I think Society will completely reshape itself over the next decades, likely with UBI and other form of social help and the ones that don't want to partake into the whole "AI orchestration" will just not have any opportunity imo, sad, but this is the way I see it. I truly believe it because myself and ALL the people I know have pseudo-replaced their work with solely orchestrating AI, including very complex jobs and lately because some of my friends asked me, I've also built "agents" that replaced entirely their work, and their employer don't even know about it (customer management, remote) which proves that those jobs shouldn't even exist as they are ALREADY replaceable, all Zoom meetings are immediately recorded, agents do basic loop adversarial with all common models, then proceed with doing tasks and so-on, that last for about 30min and the whole week of work is done, all chats are directly sent to a triage agent as well then the whole rag thing and so on.

My work went from managing/developing 1 repo to 70 repo at once, evening to morning answering questions like a bot 10h a day with 8 monitors in front of my face, and I'm realistic, I know at some point I can literally replace my own self with an AI as well to answer for me, it's just a matter of time.

We need to rethink everything and the whole AI hate from the youth will not change anything about it.

I have multiple friends also running pretty large businesses with 30 or more staff, and right now they are literally at a point where they argue about why they shouldn't fire most of them, it's fuckin sad, but it's the reality.

[whatshisface]

Why would they give you a UBI? They would have no reason to do that...

[pixel_popping]

Many countries have a form of UBI, although it's not guaranteed as the meaning of UBI would in a sense, but look at France with their RSA as an example, if you have no incomes/low incomes, you are entitled to it.

[piva00]

RSA is not UBI, UBI literally means Universal Basic Income, it's not for no income/low income people, it's universal.

You are conflating the concept of UBI with social welfare, they are different things and it's a bit annoying to see the erosion of the UBI concept into social welfare, I've noticed an uptick of this the past year or so, no idea where it's originating from...

[pixel_popping]

Agreed I butchered it, but what is the concrete difference right now for someone that has no job (so where UBI is relevant) with social welfare and "UBI" if in the end, that person gets a monthly income that is somehow guaranteed?

[intended]

Where will this ubi money come from when there is no one to tax and profits are going to tech firms based in America.

[pixel_popping]

I don't have enough expertise in this field but I don't think we should be thinking only with a doomsday scenario, humans are quite resilient and innovative, society will completely change and I genuinely believe we will find ways, there will be a lot of suffering in between (and maybe after as well, as there is now) but we might eventually reach a point in automation where a lot of prices drop to the point where it's virtually free, food could be included, if we do have 24/7 machines that can build, expand, deliver and so-on with free energy somehow, it's not crazy to think that a KG of chicken could worth 10 times less than it is now, so many things could be reconsidered.

UBI could mean also that people could be living in places further away from main cities, and eventually housing will be automatically built as well so costs could drop sharply.

[MSFT_Edging]

Additionally, certain work feels good. It feels good to accomplish something.

We'll have no UBI and little purpose.

[ilaksh]

> The people who rely on it are not cool.

That's the only statement that's true. Admiting to AI use is unfashionable in the western world at this time.

But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.

Technology doesn't make anything banal or a hellscape, or fire people. Technology is a lever.

If humans use AI to produce worse output because they are too lazy to bother reviewing and iterating on it, that is a human problem. If humans are going to use AI to help them exploit other humans more efficiently, that is also caused by the human rather than the technology.

Also, the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robots is coming this year or next. It will become very obvious that AI use in these robots is not just superficially plausible text.

[teachrdan]

> But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.

This is like saying a smoker can't criticize the tobacco industry. It's entirely possible to recognize that AI in school is a huge problem while (hypothetically, in this case) still using it. Indeed, if enough of your peers are using it and you do not, you are effectively being punished for being virtuous. It's a lot like being the one cyclist in the Tour de France who isn't doping.

Similarly, if your peers aren't able to keep a conversation going in a seminar because they had AI do their reading and assignments for them, then you, as a student, are having your education stolen from you in a very real way. Education is something that happens in community. When enough of your community is using AI, your education will suffer.

[ilaksh]

Again that is a problem with the group of people and how they use technology rather than the technology itself.

I will die on this hill: AI _properly_ integrated into education will be a huge improvement for students because it will enable each student to have personalized instruction and tutoring.

[teachrdan]

> AI _properly_ integrated into education will be a huge improvement for students because it will enable each student to have personalized instruction and tutoring.

This is a fine thing to wish for. But literally every AI company today wants their customers to use AI as much as possible.

I, too, would like to live in a world where AI is only _properly_ integrated into education. But that is impossible without limiting its improper integration. An no AI company wants any limits on AI.

[archagon]

A quarter of the answers Gemini gives me are made up. What would be the purpose of such, uh, “instruction”?

[filoeleven]

Will they get AI to stop lying first?

[GeoAtreides]

exactly! if you _properly_ integrate this argument into Scotland, _then_ it will be a true scotsman, otherwise definitely not!

[thedevilslawyer]

Smokers can criticize. But they also have to face the cancer that will personally affect them. And hopefully take accountability for it.

[csa]

> The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.

The AI output you are referring to mostly seems to refer to “AI slop”. It’s not hard to argue that AI slop sucks.

There is a lot that AI does that has created joy for me or people around me:

- whimsical profile pics for online profiles for me, family, and friends

- writing e-mails for community groups — good for a family member who doesn’t have the most sociable writing style

- automating data capture and organization

- automating scheduling with multiple and variable constraints

- catching obvious errors that somehow still happen (e.g., off by one errors)

- filling in gaps in analysis either due to gaps in knowledge or simply an oversight

These are sample of things that I have done or helped people do in the past week, and the results have been well-received.

Maybe I’m part of that solution that you propose, but I have used words similar to “biggest change since…” (I usually say spreadsheets, but I don’t think “Industrial Revolution” is wrong).

Fwiw, I don’t think the result will be dystopian the way most people seem to think that it will. I firmly believe that meat space interactions will gain much more traction, and that will change the way we live and work.

[pasquinelli]

maybe what we really need is a butlerian jihad

[grebc]

They were thinking machines at least. Here’s we’ve got a good guesser that fools 50% of the population at anytime that it’s anything but guessing.

[chewz]

Perhaps next generation isn't necessary anymore. At least majority that can't adjust.

Euthanasia for the young might be the best we can offer to the next generation.

Rapidly depopulating Earth below 1 bilion people or less seems in our reach.

[pixel_popping]

I don't really think we should talk about it with "use cases" anymore when it can virtually replace/enhance literally almost any form of white collar work and soon physical labor as well (people will act surprised the moment it comes of course, the same as with LLMs despite all the researchs made prior, if theory supports it = it will be), of course humanoids will be in every homes and they'll cost the same as a phone, soon enough, and we will also not be able to live without.

We don't talk about human intelligence with "use cases", I think we need to be realistic about what AI will be in our lives, most people already can't do without, and this will without doubt expand further.