File under “Y” for “Yeah, no shit”.
YOU DON’T SAY??
I was a programmer for 25 years. I always figured I could have made a contribution to AI research, but the opportunity never came up (I was too busy writing Skype clones for cable companies and ISPs that were never used by anyone). I regretted this for a long time, but not any more. I never imagined AI would be this fucking bad, “bad” in the sense of bad for humanity and just plain bad as a product.
It’s cause it’s not AI
FWIW I always felt my contribution would have been towards “real” AI rather than the current pseudo-AI stuff that is all the rage. In addition to being a programmer, I also have a background in evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy. The “neural networks” that are part of current AI were originally based on the understanding of how neurons function that existed in the 1970s, and they were (and are still) a poor implementation of that level of knowledge. IMHO true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function and how they have come about in the real world through hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
That being said, “real” AI is probably going to be even worse for humanity than this current stuff is, so at least I’m glad that blood won’t be on my hands.
Honest question. Why would you want “true AI”?
This is like saying “true mega bubonic-AIDS can be made if we do XYZ”.
Stop, stop making mega bubonic-AIDS
Honest question. Why would you want “true AI”?
I always viewed it as an engineering challenge, without really seeing or caring about the literally existential threat that it represents. At this point in my life, however, I would not want true AI, as I mentioned in my comment.
Please stop using this argument. Unless you also brought it up every single time the term was used in videogames etc
It’s a bad argument that relies on pure language semantics that helps no one and undermines any good argument against it because it weakens your stance
I do bring it up every case and even if I didn’t this case it’s an important distinction. Artificial intelligence is a marketing term used to conjure images of Jarvis and what not in people heads.
Video games companies never claimed to have near sentiment AGI baked into their games that would replace all human workers or blow up the world.
The term artificial intelligence is used to anthropomorphize LLMs as weird as that seems.
It is an important distinction. These are large language models, not reasoning models, not AGI, not artificial life not artificial intelligence.
I know that term as been used by the machine learning community in the past to mean things like decision trees and general models, and it didn’t really matter much then but it matters A LOT now.
Words have meanings. This isn’t arguing semantics, it’s using words as they are intended so we can communicate effectively about something in the world. To argue otherwise is naive, dishonest, and quite honestly just annoying.
Hi I’m new to this debate and I agree with you that language matters and all that stuff you said at the end. That being said, I’m firmly in the camp of “LLMs are bad, but a ‘true’ AI would be even worse for us”. I could type up several paragraphs diving into the several reasons why I think that way, but to save time (and to get back to my job) I’m just going to steal this Frank Herbert quote:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them
Do I think AI, in a vacuum, is always bad and will be no matter who or what makes it? No, not necessarily. But whatever we build will be inherently, and intrinsically tied to the micro- and macro-systems of our society, which are all DEEPLY fucked. Consequently, any AI we bring in would also, even if not initially, end up as being equally, deeply, fucked and end up being far, FAR more detrimental than positive
Yeah true AI would be quite insane. Especially if it was behind human capabilities.
There’s just no way to ensure it’s aligned towards good. We can’t even define that ourselves. Who knows the suffering we could unleash on ourselves.
What does true AI even mean? What do any of the things you guys say even mean? What?
Not a LLM. LLMs aren’t intelligent they are pretty much just pattern matching. No world model or real reasoning capabilities
no. no because in video games it was understood that the “ai: very hard” was not actually ai, it was computer player. it did actually use some very early research in the field, but it was not ai and even at age ten I knew that. ai would not have so many dumb pathing problems. nobody was trying to tell me the AI from unreal:tournament or starcraft: brood war had feelings or was going to conquer the world, so clarification was not required.
but it was not ai
It’s as much AI as when they made the chess computer that beat Kasparov, it’s just not a very sophisticated AI.
its not ai. its not on the cutting edge of the field of researching ai. its not progress. it does not get us closer. it does not tell us anything about ourselves or information science we didn’t learn from satoshi nakamoto or Adolph Hitler years earlier.
It doesn’t have to be cutting edge or even progress to be AI, how did you get that idea? Obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have cutting edge AI, they are considered the global leaders, even if they go bankrupt in a few months.
I think you are confusing AI with AGI or strong AI.
There is not 1 single way to make an AI, and there are HUGE differences in how good they are, but very very definitely we have had AI since the 80’s. Back then it just wasn’t really usable, that began to a very small degree in the 90’s, with for instance expert systems.Maybe read this to become better informed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligencewe call it ai when its at the frontier of how close we’re getting to ai. cultural convention.
this shit isn’t and never was.
we also call stuff that is parts of what would be an agi theoretically if we ever build one, kinds of narrow reasoning and the like. this shit isn’t and never will be.
No shit.
All AI does for me is to give me more work to do. Its code is terrible. It has horrible taste. Its work is not modelled after the task, but after “must look complicated”
Get Ponytail https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail and an auto-linter such as pi-lens if you’re using Pi harness. And a goal/to-do (pi-goal-x) extension.
What model are you using?
Thx, will take a look! GLM 5.3 (flash and no flash), mistral large 4 were the best i tried. The worst were chatgpt 5.6 sol, claude sonnet (a new one, no idea which one). Deepseek v4 flash was ok-ish, qwen coder was nice if i was too lazy to paste stuff.
I used them via mistral’s CLI, served via Mistral’s API, and an academic cloud vendor. I have the cli run in an extremely strict jail (podman-based), so the stuff they can use is super limited (e.g. no bash).
Still learning. Could really be a skill.md issue?
You got access to much bigger models than I have! Nice. I use the gondolin sandbox for Pi. It traps it in a minimal Alpine Linux VM with only packages you define and the only directory it can see being the dir you cd’d into.
Gondolin looks good! Would love to have a secure environment on my Working Laptop though. There is agentic sandbox, but it does not support Vibe CLI.
I think I’ll try to improvenmy podman solution…
Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.
Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
- you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
- you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
- news and media have become so much easier to impact
- not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
- and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this. etc.
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.
you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
You don’t have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.
You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it’s an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It’s fine to have those objections, but you can’t say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that’s just taking away the enjoyment of others.
We’re talking about a technology that is able to self direct when solving abstract problems, able to develop novel solutions to frontier mathematics. Drum machines do not maintain an internal high dimensional latent information space and display indicators of g. Synthesizers cannot create a novel melody.
This is not “just a tool”. It is impossible for me to attribute ‘art’ created by AI to the human that prompted it. I also now live with the constant paranoia that what is being showed to me was made by an LLM much like who me you are responding to.
It’s not that it’s bad or soulless, quite the contrary, it’s often quite good. It just wasn’t made by a human.
What if AI was only used for skill building?
It has potential, though I wonder if that’s genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.
It can definitely feel more dynamic, I’m not convinced the outcomes are provably better.
I imagine something like a tutor. You have an interactive system for 1 on 1 attention that teachers and parents can’t always provide.
Nothing I’ve seen is nearly ready for this, but at the same time, its not completely useless.
This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.
and create better educational resources
Exactly! Like individualized and infinitely patient always available personal tutors. Oh, wait…
Geoffrey Hinton, who no one can say with a straight face “doesn’t understand AI”, also says they are conscious. But none of you screechers, yelling to the clouds from your grumble-goon caverns, wanna hear that.
I don’t know him, so I can’t speculate on his chatbot knowledge, but if we assume he does know how they work, I can definitively say he doesn’t understand consciousness.
His body of work speaks for itself. I can assume since you are attempting to stand against his knowledge with your own, that your understanding is equally as proven.
Can you link me to some of your work?
First, do you genuinely believe LLMs are conscious?
No more than I believe Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are conscious, but neither exist in a vacuum devoid of the rest of the organism and surrounding universe.
So… Yes or no?
I’m sorry I didn’t realize that was confusing. A specialized chunk of the human mind used for language, removed from the rest of a human and the universe, does not reach a conscious threshold worthy of major consideration. Just like a severed finger. A bare LLM, removed from the rest of the the digital apparatus and the universe, does not reach a conscious threshold worthy of major consideration
Now, I’ll ask you one. Do you think there are conscious non-human animals? Or do you believe that is a trait only humans possess?
Consciousness is having a subjective experience. Yes lots of animals are conscious.
Wow, see how I answered concisely without typing a paragraph of fluff?
removed from the rest of the digital apparatus and the universe
Speak plainly, Ascian. Does that mean there are circumstances (in today’s world) in which you would consider an LLM to have a subjective experience?
That’s not a case of not understanding AI, that’s just a case of having a misanthropic world view. His conception of consciousness is that there’s nothing particularly special about it and that humans are just jumped-up apes that pretend to be important. He also probably hasn’t actually spent much time philosophizing about consciousness.
Humans are just jumped-up apes that pretend to be important. Or are you trying to say we are magic?
There is no “magic god juice” in humans that makes us conscious. Consciousness is a state already shared with non human animals.
And there you go, that’s why AI boosters feel like they can say their toys are conscious. They don’t think consciousness is interesting or different from how any other animal experiences the world, just jumped up apes that pretend to be special. Naturally, this leads them to conclude chatbots are conscious.
It’s gibberish, of course. In reality, they don’t know what it is and don’t care to define it because it is unimportant to them. These can be very smart people who know a lot about AI, but they don’t know a lot about consciousness and their opinions shouldn’t be taken that seriously. Qualia? What’s that?
I never said it was unimportant. You have jumped to a lot of unfounded conclusions.
Do you believe that all animals are just unconscious reaction machines, except humans?
I don’t believe a human and a non-human ape have equivalent ethical value. There’s something different between them.
That’s not what I asked. Every response you have given has been slippery and imprecise at best, and misleading at worst. I think you just don’t want to say “magic god juice” because it rightfully sounds silly, but you really think “magic god juice” is what humans have.
It’s a question of phenomenology and subjectivity. This degradation of consciousness as “magic god juice” is just misanthropy. Yet, you yourself probably believe the life of a human is not equal to that of a non-human animal. Why? What’s the difference? Can you even answer that? Have you even thought about it?
There’s nothing slippery about what I’ve said either. AI boosters think their toys are conscious because they see consciousness as unimportant and trivial. To the extent they’ve thought about it, they’ve decided their toys have equivalent value to human life and are willing to kill everyone to build the god machine.
