I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.
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I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.
It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.
It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.
Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?
I think about that a lot.
LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.
When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.
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Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?
I think about that a lot.
LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.
When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.
What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?
Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.
And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.
I can be so fucking stupid, it turns out.
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What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?
Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.
And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.
I can be so fucking stupid, it turns out.
Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.
It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.
We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.
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Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.
It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.
We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.
I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.
The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.
So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.
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I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.
The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.
So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.
@Tattie I'm pretty sure I'd be *especially* vulnerable to all the kinds of psychological damage LLMs can cause. I have OCD. I spent the last decade painfully learning that an ML recommender system can't tell the difference between someone who's developed a cool new interest and someone who's in the grip of a terrible bout of compulsive behaviour. Using the internet *amplified* my illness.
I've seen LLM chatbot use do the same thing to apparently healthy people; I don't even want to think about what it could do to me.
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@Tattie I'm pretty sure I'd be *especially* vulnerable to all the kinds of psychological damage LLMs can cause. I have OCD. I spent the last decade painfully learning that an ML recommender system can't tell the difference between someone who's developed a cool new interest and someone who's in the grip of a terrible bout of compulsive behaviour. Using the internet *amplified* my illness.
I've seen LLM chatbot use do the same thing to apparently healthy people; I don't even want to think about what it could do to me.
@datarama oof, I feel you. I have a tendency towards that style of thinking myself, and even tho it never got bad enough to seek help or a diagnosis, the intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be exhausting at times.
I wish there was some oversight of the harms that internet algorithms can do to people. I'm sorry you were a victim of that.
🫂
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@datarama oof, I feel you. I have a tendency towards that style of thinking myself, and even tho it never got bad enough to seek help or a diagnosis, the intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be exhausting at times.
I wish there was some oversight of the harms that internet algorithms can do to people. I'm sorry you were a victim of that.
🫂️@Tattie It sucks. It's one of many things that has me considering getting out of the field I've otherwise spent most of my life on. I got into computers and programming as a tiny kid, but there's so little joy left in computing (and AI companies are doing everything they can to destroy what little is left) that at this point I find myself fantasizing about sending a message back in time, whispering into the ear of that little boy I once was: "Psst. Computers should just be toys. You'll probably be much happier if you focus on ancient history or reptile biology instead! See you in 40 years; hope you don't get as miserable as I became!".
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@Tattie It sucks. It's one of many things that has me considering getting out of the field I've otherwise spent most of my life on. I got into computers and programming as a tiny kid, but there's so little joy left in computing (and AI companies are doing everything they can to destroy what little is left) that at this point I find myself fantasizing about sending a message back in time, whispering into the ear of that little boy I once was: "Psst. Computers should just be toys. You'll probably be much happier if you focus on ancient history or reptile biology instead! See you in 40 years; hope you don't get as miserable as I became!".
@datarama
that's sad, that the little boy who was so excited about the (genuine!) potentials of technology was so let down by the capitalist realities of what it was turned to. I've suffered a similar disillusionment, and am lucky enough to have been able to take a career break and retrain in an entirely different field. But I know that's a privilege of circumstances few share.
Does your past self have any words for you in response?
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@datarama
that's sad, that the little boy who was so excited about the (genuine!) potentials of technology was so let down by the capitalist realities of what it was turned to. I've suffered a similar disillusionment, and am lucky enough to have been able to take a career break and retrain in an entirely different field. But I know that's a privilege of circumstances few share.
Does your past self have any words for you in response?
@Tattie "Don't tell me what to do, old man!"
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@Tattie "Don't tell me what to do, old man!"
@Tattie I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing - despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day - is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We'd make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We'd be making wonderful discoveries!
Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them - and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won't bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders - all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead.
I'm sure part of all this - from a purely personal perspective - is just that I've hit the point where I'm supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. "Did I waste my entire life?" sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I've thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I'm disabled, I'm getting old, and there's not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn't related to software development. (I'm currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)
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I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.
It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.
It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.
@Tattie Chef's kiss
