It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much.
Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent. “Sure, people are suffering because of this, but two friends of mine are better off for it” – is that really worth it?
I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them.
Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.
Are they overhyped? Probably.
LLMs in particular, and dangerously so. People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing. They deliver a convincing imitation, but there have been too many instances of that imitation not holding up to any reasonable standard. For a more benign example, Ford had to hire back its fired engineers because it turned out that GenAI can’t actually do their job. Less benign are things like giving harmful “health advice” or reinforcing their users’ delusions and psychoses to the point where they commit violence against themselves or others.
They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.
Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes.
This is where we need to specify just what we mean by AI.
Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient. Specialised models may make decent assistants for certain types of specialists.
They certainly aren’t capable of the type of “nobody has to work any more” utopia that conmen like Musk and Altmann are selling to the gullible. They’re fundamentally unreliable and their consumption of resources dwarfs their sloppy utility.
So while some form of AI might hold a key to a radically better world, LLMs and generative AI aren’t it.
Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes.
Probably? Have you taken a look around or read the whole list you replied to? The hype already is destroying lives, and there’s a slew of experts calling out the fraudulent scheme they’re pulling on the stock market.
The one point I’ll concede to the scammers is that it has fundamentally altered our world.
Just not for the better.
I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.
It starts with being honest and clear about what “this” actually is, understanding what it isn’t and not making excuses for a deeply destructive technological complex just because the mathematical parrot emits some useful responses now and then.
First of all, thank you for your extensive response. I think discussions like this are important. Here’s my 2 cents, sorry if I’m not that eloquent - I’m not a native English speaker so some of this is a bit hard to put into words for me.
Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent.
Well, surely my two friends can’t be the only people AI has helped, that would be highly unlikely. So I do think it is a valid point along the other ones - AI does create value. Otherwise there would be no hype. I just think it’s dishonest to claim that AI is completely useless. If we want to turn this into something positive, we have to be honest about all the aspects.
Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.
Of course it’s not. We’re totally on the same page here. I just think it’s not a matter of the technology itself, it’s how those companies (are allowed to) act. That doesn’t seem like an AI problem to me, it’s a capitalism problem. We might have different perspectives on this btw because I live in the EU. People don’t lose their home or water supply here because of AI companies.
People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing.
Yes. And I do think AI companies are at fault here for marketing their products dishonestly to people who don’t understand how the technology works. They exploit stupid people, and mostly stupid people in positions with too much power.
They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.
I think we might fundamentally disagree on this. Advice from a human is nothing but a multivariate combination of things that person has learned in the past. It’s way more complex - brains are orders of magnitude more complex than an artificial neural network - but I don’t see a fundamentally and qualitative difference here unless you believe in something like a soul that somehow magically gives more value to a human advice. If you understand that an LLM is a mathematical tool and not a human, you can use it in very efficient and helpful ways. Some questions actually better answered by something that has gathered a wide range of information from thousands or even millions of sources. Some questions that require fast answers are also better answered by AI (just yesterday I asked ChatGPT for a python script for a certain task - it took about 20 seconds and provided a perfectly working ~500 lines python script that I could use; no human could ever do that). Lots of other questions - questions that require emotional connection, personal experience, specialized knowledge - should be left to humans, of course. The amount of shitty and wrong advice I’ve gotten from people, even doctors and other experts, is immense btw. The crucial thing is that you need to learn how to test and evaluate advice that you get - from people AND from LLMs. Many people would profit from learning that skill - maybe using LLMs might even teach them that, even if it will probably usually be the hard way.
Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient.
Yes, that’s exactly my point. We need to educate the recipients. That is actually one of the most important things imo. AI and LLMs aren’t going to go away, they’re here to stay. Just look at how it already penetrated all kinds of scientific disciplines. We urgently need to regulate what companies can do with it and we need to educate people on how they work and how to use them, and especially how NOT to use them. And by the way, I wish we had never made the jump from calling it deep learning to calling it AI - I think that might have prevented a lot of problems und misunderstandings.
Look, I think ultimately our views aren’t even that different. That’s why discourse is important. I just don’t think screaming “AI is bad” is going to get us anywhere (and that’s essentially what the original comment that I replied to was doing imo). We need to be specific about what the problem is: the problem is not AI, the problem is that some people are getting super rich on the expense of almost everyone else. THAT is what we need to stop. You can’t fight technological and scientific progress, what you need to fight is malicious use of technology and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few. I’d say we might actually in an “industrial revolution” kind of situation. Back then, workers rights and communism became a thing. We might need something as fundamental as that to deal with today’s problems. We’ll need all the social sciences now that we’ve cut funding for over the last decades because MINT was just more important to us (I say that as a MINT scientist btw).
Because your comment seemed to add an anecdotal “it also helped two people” to a long list of evils as if it were equivalent. “Sure, people are suffering because of this, but two friends of mine are better off for it” – is that really worth it?
Aside from the nebulous question of just how it’s supposedly making lives better, and whether that actually is an improvement, the question repeats: Is a fee people’s lives getting better really equivalent to the people losing their homes, water supply or job over it? It’s not that we’re unaware that it might have benefits, it’s that those benefits are massively dwarfed by the evils.
LLMs in particular, and dangerously so. People treat them as virtual humans, use terms such as singularity and trust them with cognitive work a linguistic model plainly isn’t capable of actually doing. They deliver a convincing imitation, but there have been too many instances of that imitation not holding up to any reasonable standard. For a more benign example, Ford had to hire back its fired engineers because it turned out that GenAI can’t actually do their job. Less benign are things like giving harmful “health advice” or reinforcing their users’ delusions and psychoses to the point where they commit violence against themselves or others.
They’re still being hailed as the future, despite evidence backing up what theorists have been warning for a while: A text generator cannot generate meaning and should not be used for any purpose where the content actually matters. That your friends’ word salad happened to resemble useful advice is nice, but it wasn’t actually advice, just the product of a high-tech advice imitator that got lucky.
This is where we need to specify just what we mean by AI.
Language models are useful for linguistic correlation tasks, but the actual utility of that is hard to gauge, because it heavily depends on the mode of the output and on the recipient. Specialised models may make decent assistants for certain types of specialists.
They certainly aren’t capable of the type of “nobody has to work any more” utopia that conmen like Musk and Altmann are selling to the gullible. They’re fundamentally unreliable and their consumption of resources dwarfs their sloppy utility.
So while some form of AI might hold a key to a radically better world, LLMs and generative AI aren’t it.
Probably? Have you taken a look around or read the whole list you replied to? The hype already is destroying lives, and there’s a slew of experts calling out the fraudulent scheme they’re pulling on the stock market.
The one point I’ll concede to the scammers is that it has fundamentally altered our world.
Just not for the better.
It starts with being honest and clear about what “this” actually is, understanding what it isn’t and not making excuses for a deeply destructive technological complex just because the mathematical parrot emits some useful responses now and then.
First of all, thank you for your extensive response. I think discussions like this are important. Here’s my 2 cents, sorry if I’m not that eloquent - I’m not a native English speaker so some of this is a bit hard to put into words for me.
Well, surely my two friends can’t be the only people AI has helped, that would be highly unlikely. So I do think it is a valid point along the other ones - AI does create value. Otherwise there would be no hype. I just think it’s dishonest to claim that AI is completely useless. If we want to turn this into something positive, we have to be honest about all the aspects.
Of course it’s not. We’re totally on the same page here. I just think it’s not a matter of the technology itself, it’s how those companies (are allowed to) act. That doesn’t seem like an AI problem to me, it’s a capitalism problem. We might have different perspectives on this btw because I live in the EU. People don’t lose their home or water supply here because of AI companies.
Yes. And I do think AI companies are at fault here for marketing their products dishonestly to people who don’t understand how the technology works. They exploit stupid people, and mostly stupid people in positions with too much power.
I think we might fundamentally disagree on this. Advice from a human is nothing but a multivariate combination of things that person has learned in the past. It’s way more complex - brains are orders of magnitude more complex than an artificial neural network - but I don’t see a fundamentally and qualitative difference here unless you believe in something like a soul that somehow magically gives more value to a human advice. If you understand that an LLM is a mathematical tool and not a human, you can use it in very efficient and helpful ways. Some questions actually better answered by something that has gathered a wide range of information from thousands or even millions of sources. Some questions that require fast answers are also better answered by AI (just yesterday I asked ChatGPT for a python script for a certain task - it took about 20 seconds and provided a perfectly working ~500 lines python script that I could use; no human could ever do that). Lots of other questions - questions that require emotional connection, personal experience, specialized knowledge - should be left to humans, of course. The amount of shitty and wrong advice I’ve gotten from people, even doctors and other experts, is immense btw. The crucial thing is that you need to learn how to test and evaluate advice that you get - from people AND from LLMs. Many people would profit from learning that skill - maybe using LLMs might even teach them that, even if it will probably usually be the hard way.
Yes, that’s exactly my point. We need to educate the recipients. That is actually one of the most important things imo. AI and LLMs aren’t going to go away, they’re here to stay. Just look at how it already penetrated all kinds of scientific disciplines. We urgently need to regulate what companies can do with it and we need to educate people on how they work and how to use them, and especially how NOT to use them. And by the way, I wish we had never made the jump from calling it deep learning to calling it AI - I think that might have prevented a lot of problems und misunderstandings.
Look, I think ultimately our views aren’t even that different. That’s why discourse is important. I just don’t think screaming “AI is bad” is going to get us anywhere (and that’s essentially what the original comment that I replied to was doing imo). We need to be specific about what the problem is: the problem is not AI, the problem is that some people are getting super rich on the expense of almost everyone else. THAT is what we need to stop. You can’t fight technological and scientific progress, what you need to fight is malicious use of technology and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few. I’d say we might actually in an “industrial revolution” kind of situation. Back then, workers rights and communism became a thing. We might need something as fundamental as that to deal with today’s problems. We’ll need all the social sciences now that we’ve cut funding for over the last decades because MINT was just more important to us (I say that as a MINT scientist btw).