Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by simondotau 12 days ago
The utility of current-era AI may well be overstated, and the business models of certain companies might be doubtful, but that doesn't make AI it a "cult".
2 comments

AI is not a cult, HN regarding AI is.

It's boring and it's viral and if you refuse to participate, there are still people annoying you with their beliefs.

It's a fucking tool, like a fucking shovel.

"It's a fucking tool, like a fucking shovel."

The difference is, if you talk with your shovel, you are talking with yourself.

But talking to AI gives you answers and more smart ones, than most humans do. So it is still a tool, but of a very different kind.

And here is where we disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

We are no further to general artificial intelligence than we were a decade ago.

Thanks, but I don't need to click, that to know what is inside.

And to be honest, a LLM could have give me the same response.

(But I made no claims of AGI btw.)

> And to be honest, a LLM could have give me the same response.

It could, or it could've hallucinated something :)

But then again, I could too, if I smoked enough or fell on my head.

Plus it would've produced more CO2 than I did, hopefully :)

> if I smoked enough or fell on my head.

Did it hurt, you know, when you fell?

The problem here is you're complaining about cult members, then acting like one of the anthrocentric cult members yourself. I agree that we should build a human centered world, but ignoring our many faults won't get us anywhere.

If you blindly ignore all the drawbacks, preach that "future is now" and whoever is not using the slot machine "will be left behind", then you're in a cult.
An opinion held, in my estimation, by a tiny (but noisy) minority of people who have always existed; the trend obsessed rebuild-the-world types who probably think that AI will soon be able to write unaided a kernel in Rust superior in 100% of metrics to Linux.