this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 27 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I really hope public opinion on AI starts to change. LLMs aren't going to make anyone's life easier, except in that they take jobs away once the corporate world determines that they are in a "good-enough" state -- desensitizing people to this kind of stupid output is just one step on that trail.

The whole point is just to save the corporate world money. There will never, ever be a content advantage over a human author.

[–] JDubbleu@programming.dev 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The thing is LLMs are extremely useful at aiding humans. I use one all the time at work and it has made me faster at my job, but left unchecked they do really stupid shit.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I agree they can be useful (I've found intelligent code snippet autocompletion to be great), but it's really important that the humans using the tool are very skilled and aware of the limitations of AI.

Eg, my usage generates only very, very small amounts of code (usually a few lines). I have to very carefully read those lines to make sure they are correct. It's never generating something innovative. It simply guesses what I was going to type anyways. So it only saved me time spent typing and the AI is by no means in charge of logic. It also is wrong a lot of the time. Anyone who lets AI generate a substantial amount of code or lets it generate code you don't understand thoroughly is both a fool and a danger.

It does save me time, especially on boilerplate and common constructs, but it's certainly not revolutionary and it's far too inaccurate to do the kinds of things non programmers tend to think AI can do.

[–] ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm going to fight the machines for the right to keep slaving away myself

And when I'm done, capitalism will give me an off day as a treat!

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You're missing the point. If you don't have a job to "slave away" at, you don't have the money to afford food and shelter. Any changes to that situation, if they ever come, are going to lag far behind whatever events cause a mass explosion of unemployment.

It's not about licking a boot, it's that we don't want to let the boot just use something that should be a net good as extra weight as they step on us.

[–] ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I am not going to purposefully waste human life on tasks that machines could perform or help us be faster at just because late capitalism doesn't let me, the worker, reap the value from them.

It removes human labor

On a bigger scale we had the loom, the printing press, the steam engine the computer. Imagine if we'd refused them

I can't see us get ensnared into some neu dark age propelled by some "i need to keep my job" status quo just because we found ourselves with a moronic economic system that makes innovations bad news for the workers it replaces

If it takes AI taking away our livelihoods to get a chance to rework this failing doctrine so be it

I'm not talking communism I'm barely hoping for an organic response to it, likely a UBI

[–] idkwhatimdoing@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

As someone who works in content marketing, this is already untrue at the current quality of LLMs. It still requires a LOT of human oversight, which obviously it was not given in this example, but a good writer paired with knowledgeable use of LLMs is already significantly better than a good content writer alone.

Some examples are writing outside of a person's subject expertise at a relatively basic level. This used to take hours or days of entirely self-directed research on a given topic, even if the ultimate article was going to be written for beginners and therefore in broad strokes. With diligent fact-checking and ChatGPT alone, the whole process, including final copy, takes maybe 4 hours.

It's also an enormously useful research tool. Rather than poring over research journals, you can ask LLMs with academic plug-ins to give a list of studies that fit very specific criteria and link to full texts. Sometimes it misfires, of course, hence the need for a good writer still, but on average this can cut hours from journalistic and review pieces without harming (often improving) quality.

All the time writers save by having AI do legwork is then time they can instead spend improving the actual prose and content of an article, post, whatever it is. The folks I know who were hired as writers because they love writing and have incredible commitment to quality are actually happier now using AI and being more "productive" because it deals mostly with the shittiest parts of writing to a deadline and leaves the rest to the human.

[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 years ago

It still requires a LOT of human oversight, which obviously it was not given in this example, but a good writer paired with knowledgeable use of LLMs is already significantly better than a good content writer alone.

I'm talking about future state. The goal clearly is to avoid the need of human oversight altogether. The purpose of that is saving some rich people more money. I also disagree that LLMs improve output of good writers, but even if they did, the cost to society is high.

I'd much rather just have the human author, and I just hope that saying "we don't use AI" becomes a plus for PR due to shifting public opinion.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean.... if they're dead, they probably really suck at basketball so it's not exactly untrue.

[–] lauha@lemmy.one 13 points 2 years ago

Dead people really are quite useless in basketball.

[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons

[–] roguetrick@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Dude really went wild during the steam summer sale.

[–] mPony@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

Don't we all.

[–] AndreTelevise@lemm.ee 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

This is just word replacement of an existing article (forward = ahead, games = video games, passed (away) = handed, points = factors) done to avoid DMCA claims, whether it was done by AI or an algorithm is irrelevant. The AI was used to reword the article, and it's good at doing that, but why those words in particular were replaced is beyond my comprehension.

[–] Ethanol@pawb.social 4 points 2 years ago

Oh yeah, you're right. Seems like the AI replaced dead with useless as in "dead batteries". That is really awful.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Link to the article (archived)

#Brandon Hunter useless at 42# Story by Editor • 9/12/2023, 11:21:42 PM21h

Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter, who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42, as introduced by Ohio males’s basketball coach Jeff Boals on Tuesday.

Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.

He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season. Hunter’s expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.

Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's some top notch obituary writing, AI.

[–] roguetrick@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I agree, it's extremely regarded.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I mean, MSN is just a portal and I doubt there's much behind it besides what domains are popular. MSN "published" this the same way Google News published articles. It sounds better to say Microsoft did it, but it's from some news site called Race Track and it was simply scraped by MSN.

[–] Brawndo@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Intelligence is not the same as Wisdom. People often conflate the two and "AI" as it exists today is equivalent to a 3 year olds level of wisdom and a 40 year olds level of intelligence. It has access to vast amounts of facts and data but is completely unable to actually "understand" context and meaning.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic.

The rest of the brief report is even more incomprehensible, informing readers that Hunter "handed away" after achieving "vital success as a ahead [sic] for the Bobcats" and "performed in 67 video games."

It made headlines last month, for instance, after publishing a similarly incoherent AI-generated travel guide for Ottawa, Canada that bizarrely recommended that tourists visit a local food bank.

As a result, as we reported last year, the platform ended up syndicating large numbers of sloppy articles about topics as dubious Bigfoot and mermaids, which it deleted after we pointed them out.

Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.

Accusing an NBA legend of being "useless" the week he died isn't just an offensive slip-up by a seemingly unsupervised algorithm, in other words.


The original article contains 882 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] uzay@infosec.pub 1 points 2 years ago

Imagine being an AI-generated summary of an article criticizing AI-written articles