[HN Gopher] The Stupidity of AI
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       The Stupidity of AI
        
       Author : jrepinc
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2023-03-16 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | chemmail wrote:
       | It's like no one realizes AI is just another tool. It is only as
       | powerful as the wielder. Guns can cause mash shootings, but they
       | can also bring freedom. Who's side will you help?
        
         | knodi123 wrote:
         | > It's like no one realizes AI is just another tool. It is only
         | as powerful as the wielder.
         | 
         | For now! But even if it never wields itself, what it is is a
         | swiss army knife with a bunch of uses, including "writer",
         | "painter", "dystopia manufacturer", and "weapon of mass
         | destruction". Writer and artist associations are busy debating
         | how best to use it ethically, while the military industrial
         | complex pants lustfully in the corner.
        
       | macrolocal wrote:
       | Today's AI threatens the livelihoods of talented rhetoricians, so
       | expect many more articles like this one.
        
       | eutectic wrote:
       | What a shallow and ignorant article.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | DethNinja wrote:
       | This is more of an issue with marketing requirements than AI
       | being stupid. ChatGPT might be more aptly called as compressed
       | knowledge storage than AI but then who will pour the billions in
       | it?
       | 
       | That being said, knowledge storage was a major issue to create a
       | true AGI and it seems deep learning and related ML methods have
       | actually solved this problem.
       | 
       | Next task is implementing the actual reasoning abilities and
       | ability to take unguided actions.
        
       | skeaker wrote:
       | This was flimsy all the way through, but loses all credibility
       | when this part rolls around:
       | 
       | > It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our
       | ability to think at all. ... To place all of our trust in the
       | dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such
       | critical thinking altogether.
       | 
       | The author seemingly couldn't resist leaning all the way into
       | hyperbole and made the ridiculous claim that human beings will no
       | longer be able to think once AI really takes off. The unnecessary
       | name calling in saying that LLMs are "badly programmed" is the
       | cherry on top.
        
       | 1attice wrote:
       | This article left me with a profound sadness.
       | 
       | Not only was it paint-by-numbers, it managed to downplay its own
       | alarm, undercutting the point of reading the article in the first
       | place: for if AI is so 'dreary', then why are we dancing like
       | water drops on a hot skillet?
       | 
       | The overall point of this piece seemed to be an attempt by a
       | 'harrumph' (a term a friend of mine coined for out-of-touch
       | English department creatures) to steer the conversation about AI
       | back towards something the author actually knows something about.
       | 
       | It reminded me of WWI generals, sending wave after wave of
       | calvary towards death, unable to ken that _horses now had nothing
       | to do with warfare._
       | 
       | Harrumphs gotta harrumph. In doing so, they will miss out on the
       | now-vanishing window to actually say something meaningful and
       | novel about this terrifying new world into which we have awoken.
       | 
       | It's a shame, because much vital conversation must occur.
       | Immediately. Instanter. Now.
       | 
       | The material analysis (that AI represents wealth concentration)
       | is surely correct, but also well beside the point. We need to
       | move the conversation along to UBI, social housing, and
       | counselling for the hundreds of millions of white-collar workers
       | who no longer have marketable skills.
        
       | brucethemoose2 wrote:
       | Yeah, well, tell that to marketing departments.
       | 
       | (Until they get replaced by AI, of course).
        
       | ladon86 wrote:
       | The author is concerned that LLMs confidently hallucinate false
       | information, and also shares his confident hallucinations about
       | how LLMs work.
        
       | brotchie wrote:
       | "There have been no major breakthroughs in the academic
       | discipline of artificial intelligence for a couple of decades."
       | umm... ok...
        
         | siva7 wrote:
         | You can tell even as a non-expert that the author has no clue
         | about the academic landscape of AI.
         | 
         | Source: GPT-4
        
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