Anyone surprised by this wasn’t paying attention. This is the “AI” apocalypse everyone has been wringing their hands over and dumbass executives have been salivating over. This is exactly the problem with LLMs, they produce very convincing looking content, but it’s not actually factual content. You need teams of fact checkers and editors to review all their output if you care at all about accuracy.
As is with software developing, actually writing the stuff down is the easiest part of the work. If you already have someone fact checking and editing… why do you need AI to shit out crap just for the writing? It would be easier to gather the facts first, fact check them, then wrangle them through the AI if you don’t want to hire a writer (+ another pass for editing).
LLMs look like magic on a glance, but people thinking they are going to produce high quality content (or code for god’s sake) are delusional.
The danger about current AI is people giving them important tasks to do when they aren’t up to it. To put it in War Games terms, the problem is not Joshua, not even Professor Falken, but the McKittricks of the world.
I mean… if they’re dead, they probably really suck at basketball so it’s not exactly untrue.
Dead people really are quite useless in basketball.
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.
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.
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.
It’s already made my life much easier.
The technology is amazing.
It’s just there’s a lot of stupid people using it stupidly, and people whose job it is to write happen to really like writing articles about its failures.
There’s a lot more going on in how it is being used and improving than what you are going to see unless you are actually using it yourself daily and following research papers on it.
Don’t buy into the anti-hype, as it’s misleading to the point of bordering on misinformation.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
No, it’s not the ‘goal’.
Somehow when it comes to AI it’s humans who have the binary thinking.
It’s not going to be “either/or” anytime soon.
Collaboration between humans and ML is going to be the paradigm for the foreseeable future.
The hundreds of clearly AI written help articles with bad or useless info every time I try to look something up in the last few months says otherwise…
Because the internet was so clear of junk and spam before LLMs were released?
There once was a time, long long ago, where the interwebs had good information on it. It was even easier to find then, before the googles went hard.
But really I have noticed a massive increase in AI junk writing popping up first in any thing I try to look up.
if you want to go back to the 90s or early 2000s sure. But 4 years ago the internet was full of blogspam clickbait articles and fake news. LLMs have not increased that percetptably to me, the first 10 results on google were often crap 4 years ago and theyre often crap now
Hey!
“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.”
He wasn’t useless, you wish version Skynet!!
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons
Dude really went wild during the steam summer sale.
Don’t we all.
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.
That’s some top notch obituary writing, AI.
I agree, it’s extremely regarded.
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.
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.
Oh yeah, you’re right. Seems like the AI replaced dead with useless as in “dead batteries”. That is really awful.
Microsoft Tay could be looking for a new job as a writer at MSN.
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!
Imagine being an AI-generated summary of an article criticizing AI-written articles
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.
deleted by creator
It’s clear you’re both using different meanings of “intelligence.” Granted I don’t think there is consensus on its meaning, but from context they clearly regard “intelligence” as just memorized facts and wisdom as the application of it, which they aren’t honestly far off. The amount of data is there, it’s the understanding of the data that isn’t there.
