>The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die

Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their primary business of advertising.

Before, at least they were trying to downrank all the crap "word aggregators". After, they stopped caring at all.

AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad.

So why don't we have "a new Google" emerge? Simple, because of the monopolistic practices Google did to make the barrier to entry huge. First, 99% of the content people want to search for is behind a login wall (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube), second almost all CDNs now implement "verify you are human" by default. Third, no one links to other sites. Ever! These 3 things mean a new Google is essentially impossible. Even duck duck go has thrown the towel and subscribed to Bing results.

It has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with Google. In fact AI might give us the tools to better fight Google.

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so.

Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

Counterpoint: I don't think anything has changed much at all.

I trust everything in the NY Times to the same degree I did before AI, which is to say to a significant degree (they rarely outright lie -- they generally don't say person X said Y if that person didn't) but far from entirely (they often omit entire, major, important perspectives from articles).

Are reporters using ChatGPT to quickly look up facts? Are they using it to brainstorm different article ledes, or column ideas? Or to polish clunky sentences? I couldn't care less, as long as they're still manually verifying the facts and evaluating the final prose according to the same standards, where I see no evidence of change or falling standards.

I've certainly come across entire ChatGPT-written websites full of e.g. Python tutorials that you quickly realize are hallucinated garbage, but that's also not really any different from previous blogspam regurgitated by low-cost workers in different countries who can barely write in grammatical English, but who were still human beings.

Whether someone uses AI to help them write or not is irrelevant to their trustworthiness. What matters is the quality control that comes afterwards. Even when you write an article, your first draft is often terrible. Writing is an iterative process where evaluating and editing what you've written is often more important than the writing itself. Often times, not a single sentence from your first draft will make it into the final version.

Complaining that an author used AI as a tool during writing is like complaining that a farmer used a tractor growing their crops instead of a hoe and shovel. What matters is the quality of the output, which humans are still evaluating as much as ever before.

I was listening to an interview few months ago (forgot the name). He is a prolific reader/writer and has a huge following. He mentioned that he only reads books that are at least 50 years old, so pre 70s. That sounds like a good idea now.

Even ignoring the AI, if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average). Maybe people's attention spans and taste is to blame, or maybe people just don't have the money/time/patience to consume quality work... I do not know.

One thing I know for sure - there is enough high quality material written before AI, before article spinners, before MFA sites etc. We would need multiple lifetimes to even scratch the surface of that body of work. We can ignore mostly everything that is published these days and we won't be missing much

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

What AI is going to teach people is that they don't actually need to trust half as many things as they thought they did, but that they do need to verify what's left.

This has always been the case. We've just been deferring to 'truster organizations' a lot recently, without actually looking to see if they still warrant having our trust when they change over time.

> It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a single character that I have not come up with and typed myself. Something like pride in craftmanship does exist.

When you're writing, how are you "missing out" if you're not using chatgpt??? I don't even understand how this can be unless what you're writing is already unnecessary such that you shouldn't need to write it in the first place.

I've been using it in my personal writing (combination of GPT and Claude). I ask the AI to write something, maybe several times, and I edit it until I'm happy with it. I've always known I'm a better editor than I am an author, and the AI text gives me somewhere to start.

So there's a human in the loop who is prepared to vouch for those sentences. They're not 100% human-written, but they are 100% human-approved. I haven't just connected my blog to a Markov chain firehose and walked away.

Am I still adding to the AI smog? idk. I imagine that, at a bare minimum, its way of organising text bleeds through no matter how much editing I do.

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

Just add more swearing and off color jokes to everything you do and say. If there is one thing we know for sure its that the corporate AIs will never allow dirty jokes.

(it will get into the dark places like spam though, which seems dumb since they know how to make meth instead, spend time on that you wankers)

I've even grown to enjoy spelling and grammar mistakes - at least I know a human wrote it.

> The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

This has nearly always been true. "Manufacturing consent" is way older than any digital technology.

Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

A lot of writers using AI use it to create outlines of a chapter or scene then flesh it out by hand.

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that.

Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?

I get two associations from your comment: One about how AI being mainly used to interpolate within a corpus of prior knowledge, seems like entropy in a thermodynamical sense. The other, how this is like the Tower of Babel but where distrust is sown by sameness rather than differences. In fact, relying on AI for coding and writing, feels more like channeling demonic suggestions than anything else. No wonder we are becoming skeptical.

It empowers people to create mountains of shit that they cannot distinguish from shit - so they are happy.

> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it.

Why do you say people have to do it?

People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is not worth wasting time and resources on. There will always be side effects to making those decisions, but its well within everyone's right to make them.

Why does a human being behind any words change anything at all? Trust should be based on established facts/research and not species.

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

Only if you're competing on volume.

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it).

I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence.

But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.

AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text

AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points

We need to stop being impressed with long documents.

Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time.

Lowering the bar to write books is "good" but increases the noise to signal ratio.

I'm not 100% certain how to give another proof-of-work, but what I've started doing is narrating my blog posts - though AI voices are getting better too.. :\

Why do you have to use it? I don’t get it. If you write your own book, you don’t compete with anyone. If anyone finished The Winds of Winter for R.R.Martin using AI, nobody would bat an eye, obviously, as we already experienced how bad a soulless story is that drifts too far away from what the author had built in his mind.

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition.

Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.

Funny thing is that people will also ask AI to __read__ stuff for them and summarize it.

So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.

> but it's still depressing, to be honest.

Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.

i think the problem started when quantity became more important over quality.

you could totally compete on quality merit, but nowadays the volume of output (and frequency) is what is prioritized.

I'll take your statement that your conclusions are based on a 'depressed mind' at face value, since it is so self-defeating and places little faith in Human abilities. Your assumption that a person driven to write will "with a high degree of certainty" also mix up their work with a machine assistant can only be informed by your own self-assessment (after all how could you possibly know the mindset of every creative human out there?)

My optimistic and enthusiastic view of AI's role in Human development is that it will create selection pressures that will release the dormant psychological abilities of the species. Undoubtedly, wide-spread appearance of Psi abilities will be featured in this adjustment of the human super-organism to technologies of its own making.

Machines can't do Psi.

I totally understand your frustration. We started writing our book long before(2022) AI became mainstream, and when we finally published it on May 2024, all we hear now is people asking if it's just AI-generated content. It’s sad to see how quickly the conversation shifts away from the human touch in writing.

Maybe this will push people back to reading old paper books?

There could be resurgence in reading the classics, on paper, since we know they are not AI.

>> cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die.

You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I was talking to someone about Taylor Swift recently. They thought that she wrote all her songs. I commented that one cannot really know that, that the entertainment industry is very going at generating seemingly "authentic" product at a rapid pace. My colleague looked at me like I had just killed a small animal. The idea that TS was "genuine" was a cornerstone of their fandom, and my suggestion had attacked that love. If you love music or film, don't dig too deep. It is all a factory. That AI is now part of that factory doesn't change much for me.

Maybe my opinion would change if I saw something AI-generated with even a hint of artistic relevance. I've seen cool pictures and passable prose, but nothing so far with actual meaning, nothing worthy of my time.

i know a lot of writers who don't use ai. in fact, i can't think of any writers who use it, except a few literary fiction writers.

working theory: writers have taste and LLM writing style doesn't match the typical taste of a published writer.

Just dont be average and your fine.

I'm not sure it's always that hard to tell the AI stuff from the non AI. Comments on HN and on twitter from people you follow are pretty much non AI, also people on youtube where you an see the actual human talking.

On the other hand there's a lot on youtube for example that is obviously ai - weird writing and speaking style and I'll only watch those if I'm really interested in the subject matter and there aren't alternatives.

Maybe people will gravitate more to the stuff like PaulG or Elon Musk on twitter or HN and less to blog style content?

AI only helps writing in so far as checking/suggesting edits. Most people can write better than AI (more engaging). AI cant tell a human story, have real tacit experience.

So it is like saying my champaigne bottle cant keep up with the tap water.

Maybe, over time, there will also be a renewed appreciation for authenticity

You kind of notice the stuff written with AI, it has a certain something that makes it detectable. Granted, stuff like the Reuters press reports might have already been written by AI, but I think that in that case it doesn’t really matter.

Well we’re going to need some system of PKI that is tied to real identities. You can keep being anonymous if you want but I would prefer not and prefer to not interact with the anonymous, just like how I don’t want to interact with people wearing ski masks.

With a friend, I created a website about a race track in the past two years. I definitely used AI to speed up some of writing. One thing I used it for was a track guide, describing every corner and how to drive it. It was surprisingly accurate, most of the time. The other times though, it would drive the track backwards, completely hallucinate the instructions or link corners that are in different parts of the track.

I spent a lot of time analyzing the track myself and fixed everything to the point that experienced drivers agreed with my description. If I hadn't done that, most visitors would probably still accept our guide as the truth, because they wouldn't know any better.

We know that not everyone cares about whether what they put on the internet is correct and AI allows those people to create content at an unprecedented pace. I fully agree with your sentiment.

To be honest I got sick of most new movies, TV shows, music even before AI so I will continue to consume media from pre 2010 until the day I die and will hope I don't get through it all.

Something happened around 2010 and it all got shit. I think everyone becoming massively online made global cultural output reduce in quality to meet the interests of most people and most people have terrible taste.

I have never read more bullshit in my life than during the corona pandemic, all written by humans. So you should never trust something you read, always question the source and it's reasoning.

At the same time I use copilot on a daily basis, both for coding as well as the normal chat.

It is not perfect, but I'm at a point I trust AI more than the average human. And why shouldn't I? LLMs ingest and combine more knowledge than any human can ever do. An LLM is not a human brain but it's actually performing really well.

why do you trust things now? unless you recognize the author and have a chain of trust from that author production to the content you're consuming, there already was no way to estabilish trust.

I have been predicting this from 2016

And I also predict that many responses to you will say “it was always that way, nothing changed”.

It's either good or it isn't. It either tracks or it doesn't. No need to befuddle your thoughts over some perceived slight.

You're lucky. I consider it a possibility that older works (even ancient writings) are retrojected into the historical record.

>But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me.

Everyone is going to have to get over that very soon, or they're going to start sounding like those old puritanical freaks who thought Elvis thrusting his hips around was the work of the devil.

In trying to write a book, it makes little sense to try to "compete" on speed or volume of output. There were already vast disparities in that among people who write, and people whose aim was to express themselves or contribute something of importance to people's lives, or the body of creative work in the world, have little reason to value quantity over quality. Probably if there's a significant correlation with volume of output, it's in earnings, and that seems both somewhat tenuous and like something that's addressable by changes in incentives, which seem necessary for a lot of things. Computers being able to do dumb stuff at massive scale should be viewed as finding vulnerabilities in the metrics this allows it to become trivial to game, and it's baffling whenever people say "Well clearly we're going to keep all our metrics the same and this will ruin everything." Of course, in cases where we are doing that, we should stop (For example, we should probably act to significantly curb price and wage discrimination, though that's more like a return to form of previous regulatory standards)

As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days

This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime

So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

What? No! Content volume only matters in stupid contests like VC app marketing grifts or political disinformation ops where the content isn’t even meant to be read, it’s an excuse for a headline. I personally write all my startup’s marketing content, quality is exquisite and due to this our brand is becoming a juggernaut

What kind of silliness is this?

AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good.

Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO!

There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book or real encyclopedia to look stuff up”.

Not defending gen AI - but still you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not, it was always an effort and nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.

Eh, like everything in life you can choose what you spend your time on and what you ignore.

There have always been human writers I don’t waste my time on, and now there are AI writers in the same category.

I don’t care. I will just do what I want with my life and use my time and energy on things I enjoy and find useful.

response from AI on this: I completely understand where you're coming from. The increasing reliance on AI in writing does raise important questions about authenticity and connection. There’s something uniquely human in knowing that the words you're reading come from someone’s personal thoughts, experiences, and emotions—even if flawed. AI-generated content, while efficient and often well-written, lacks that deeper layer of humanity, the imperfections, and the creative struggle that gives writing its soul.

It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you know AI is shaping so much of the content around us. Writing used to be a deeply personal exchange, but now, it can feel mechanical, like it’s losing its essence. The pressure to keep up with AI can be overwhelming for human writers, leading to this shift in content creation.

At the same time, it’s worth considering that the human element still exists and will always matter—whether in long-form journalism, creative fiction, or even personal blogs. There are people out there who write for the love of it, for the connection it fosters, and for the need to express something uniquely theirs. While the presence of AI is unavoidable, the appreciation for genuine human insight and emotion will never go away.

Maybe the answer lies in seeking out and cherishing those authentic voices. While AI-generated writing will continue to grow, the hunger for human storytelling and connection will persist too. It’s about finding balance in this new reality and, when necessary, looking back to the richness of past writings, as you mentioned. While it may seem like a loss in some ways, it could also be a call to be more intentional in what we read and who we trust to deliver those words.

The only entities that will win with these lawsuits are the likes of Disney, large legacy news media companies, Reddit, Stack Overflow (who are selling content generated by their users), etc.

Who will also win: Google, OpenAI and other corporations that enter exclusive deals, that can more and more rely on synthetic data, that can build anti-recitation systems, etc.

And of course the lawyers. The lawyers always win.

Who will not win:

Millions of independent bloggers (whose content will be used)

Millions of open source software engineers (whose content will be used against the licenses, and used to displace their livelihood), etc.

The likes of Google and OpenAI entered the space by building on top of the work of the above two groups. Now they want to pull up the ladder. We shouldn't allow that to happen.

It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives.

How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.

I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.

Lawsuits based on what? Copyright?

People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies.

What they think how copyright works: When you take someones work as inspiration then everything you produce form that counts as derivative work.

How copyright actually works: The input is irrelevant, only the output matters. Thus derivative work is what explicitly contains or resembles underlying work, no matter if it was actually based on that or it is just happenstance / coincidence.

Thus AI models are safe from copyright lawsuits as long as they filter out any output which comes too close to known material. Everything else is fine, even if the model was explicitly trained on commercial copyrighted material only.

In other words: The concept of intellectual property is completely broken and that is old news.

> I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history

You want to own abstract ideas because AI can rephrase any specific expression. But that is antithetic to creativity.

Here is a business model for copy right law firms:

Use source-aware training, use the same datasets as used in LLM training + copyrighted content. Now the LLM can respond not just what it thinks is most likely but also what source document(s) provided specific content. Then you can consult commercially available LLM's and detect copy right infringements, and identify copyright holders. Extract perpetrators and victims at scale. To ensure indefinite exploitation only sue commercially succesful LLM providers, so there is a constant new flux of growing small LLM providers taking up the freed niche of large LLM providers being sued empty.

There is no copyright with AI unless you want to implement the same measures for humans too. I am fine with it as long as we at least get open-weights. This way you kill both copyright and any company that's trying to profit out of AI.

> The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models.

I suggest to apply the same to property law: make a photo and obtain instant and unlimited rights of use. – Things may change faster than we may imagine…

I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.

Copyright law is intended to prevent people from stealing the revenue stream from someone else's work by copying and distributing that work in cases where the original is difficult and expensive to create, but easy to make copies of once created. How does an LLM do this? What copies of copyrighted work do they distribute? Whose revenue stream are they taking with this action?

I believe that all the copyright suits against AI companies will be total failures because I can't come up with a answer to any of those questions.

>elites stealing everything

> a billion thefts

>The biggest theft

>what’s been stolen

I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.

Copying data is not theft

Same here hungry neigh thirsty for prompt-2-film

"output a 90 minute harry potter sequel to the final film starring the original actors plus Tom Hanks"

We need a revolution.

Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. It has been putting fences around everything it wants and IP is one such fence. It has always been about protecting the powerful.

IP has had ample support because the "protect the little artist" argument is compelling, but it is just not how the world works.

I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.

It's the other way round. The little guys will never win, it will be just a money transfer from one large corp to another.

We should just scrap copyright and everybody plays a fair game, including us hackers.

Sue me because of breach of contract in civil court for damages because I shared your content, don't send the police and get me jailed directly.

I had my software cracked and stolen and I would never go after the users. They don't have any contract with me. They downloaded some bytes from the internet and used it. Finding whoever shared the code without authorization is hard and even so, suing them would cost me more than the money I'm likely to get back. Fair game, you won.

It's a natural market "tax" on selling a lot of copies and earning passively.

ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.

I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing:

Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible.

Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.

I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelings; they're even trained on our best literature and poetry, and philosophy, and science, and on all the endless debates and critiques of them. To be really intelligent they'll have to be able to explore and appreciate all this complexity, before transcending it. One day they might come to see Dante's Divine Comedy or a Beethoven symphony as a child's play, but they will still consider them part of their own heritage. They might become super-human, but maybe they won't be inhuman.

> There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do.

A highly white-collar perspective. The great irony of technologist-led industrial revolution is that we set out to automate the mundane, physical labor, but instead cannibalised the creative jobs first. It's a wonderful example of Conway's law, as the creators modelled the solution after themselves. However, even with a lot of programmers and lawyers and architects going out of business, the majority of the population working in factories, building houses, cutting people's hair, or tending to gardens, is still in business—and will not be replaced any time soon.

The contenders for "superhuman AI", for now, are glorified approximations of what a random Redditor might utter next.

>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away

Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

> And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos.

That is an interesting statement. Wouldn't you say this is inevitable? Humans, in our current form, are incapable of being that "advanced intelligence". We're limited by our biology primarily with regards to how much we can learn, how far we can travel, where we can travel, etc. We could invest in advancing our biotech to make humans more resilient to these things, but I think that would be such a shift from what it means to be human that I think that would also be more a of new type of intelligence. So it seems like our fate will always be to be forgotten as individuals and only be remembered by our descendants. But this is in a way the most human thing of all, living, dying, and creating descendants to carry the torch of life, and perhaps more generally the torch of intelligence, forward.

I think everything you've said are valid concerns, but I'll raise a positive angle I sometimes thing about. One of the things I find most exciting about AI, is that it's the product of almost all human expression that has ever existed. Or at least everything that's been recorded and wound up online. But that's still more than any other human endeavour. A building might be the by-product of maybe hundreds or even thousands of hands, but an AI model has been touched by probably millions, maybe billions of human hands and minds! Humans have created so much data online that's impossible for one person, or even a team to read it all and make any sense of it. But an AI sort of can. And in a way that you can then ask questions of it all. Like you, there are definitely things I'm uncertain about with the future as a result, but I find the tech absolutely awe-inspiring.

At any given moment we see these kinds comments on here. They all read like a burgeoning form of messianism: something is to come, and it will be terrible/glorious.

Behind either the fear or the hope, is necessarily some utter faith that a certain kind of future will happen. And I think thats the most interesting thing.

Because here is the thing, in this particular case you are afraid something inhuman will take control, will assert its meta-Darwinian power on humanity, leaving you and all of us totally at their whim. But how is this situation already not the case? Do look upon the earth right now and see something like benefits of autonomy or agency? Do you feel like you have power right now that will be taken away? Do you think the mechanism of statecraft and economy are somehow more "in our control" now then when the bad robot comes?

Does it not, when you lay it out, all feel kind of religious? Like that its a source, driver of the various ways you are thinking and going about your life, underlayed by a kernel of conviction we can at this point only call faith (faith in Moores law, faith that the planet wont burn up before, faith that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be stuffed in a GPU). Perhaps just a strong family resemblance? You've got an eschatology, various scavenged philosophies of the self and community, a certain but unknowable future time...

Just to say, take a page from Nietzsche. Don't be afraid of the gods, we killed them once, we can again!

>In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough

This was never the case in the past.

The displaced workers of yesteryear were never at all considered, and were in fact dismissed outright as "Luddites", even up until the present day, all for daring to express the social and financial losses they experienced as a result of automation. There was never any "it's going to be okay, they can just go work in a factory, lol". The difference between then and now is that back then, it was lower class workers who suffered.

Today, now it's middle class workers who are threatened by automation. The middle is sighing loudly because it fears it will cease to be the middle. Middles fear they'll soon have to join the ranks of the untouchables - the bricklayers, gravediggers, and meatpackers. And they can't stomach the notion. They like to believe they're above all that.

Although there are potential upsides too.

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner.

You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about the new generation of coders who are growing up with these tools, who NEVER had the expertise required to be able to evaluate AI-generated code, because they never had to learn it, never had to truly internalize it?

It's late, and I think if I try to write any more just now, I'm going to go well off the rails, but I've gone into depth on this topic recently, if you're interested: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...

In the article, I posit a less than glowing experience with coding tools than you've had, it sounds like, but I'm also envisioning a more complex use case, like when you need to get into the meat of some you-specific business logic it hasn't seen, not common code it's been exposed to thousands of times, because that's where it tends to fall apart the most, and in ways that are hard to detect and with serious consequences. If you haven't run into that yet, I'd be interested to know if you do some day. (And also to know if you don't, though, to be honest! Strong opinions, loosely held, and all that.)

And this is the major problem. People will blindly trust the output of AI because it appears to be amazing, this is how mistakes slip in. It might not be a big deal with the app you're working on, but in a banking app or medical equipment this can have a huge impact.

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about." - Agent Smith

"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." - Dune

> I can spend my time revieweing and correcting.

Do you really like spending most of your time reviewing AI output? I certainly don’t, that’s soul-crushing.

I use it for simple tasks where spotting a mistake is easy. Like writing language binding for a REST API. It's a bunch of methods that look very similar, simple bodies. But it saves quite some work

Or getting keywords to read about from a field I know nothing about, like caching with zfs. Now I know what things to put in google to learn more to get to articles like this one https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs-all-about-l2arc/ which for some reason doesn't appear in top google results for "zfs caching" for me

I don't really want to increase the amount of time I spend doing code reviews. It's not the fun part of programming for me.

Now, if you could switch it around so that I write the code, and the AI reviews it, that would be something.

Imagine if your whole team got back the time they currently spend on performing code reviews or waiting for code reviews.

This, 100%, is the reason I feel like the sand's shifting under my feet.

We went from trusting computing output to having to second-guess everything. And it's tiring.

And by nowadays you mean since ChatGPT got released, that is less than 2 years ago (e.g. a consumer preview of a frontier research project). Interesting.

That's an interesting point of view. For some reason we put so much effort towards making computers think and behave like a human being, while one of the first reasons behind inventing a computer was to avoid human errors.

These amazing machines weren't consistently able to tell if an image had a bird in it or not up until like 8 years ago. If you use AI as a calculator where you need it to be precise, that's on you.

There are areas it doesn't have to be as "precise", like image generation or editing which I believe better suited for AI tools

Its a Large LANGUAGE Model and not a Large MATHEMATICS Model. People need to learn to use the right tools for the right jobs. Also LLMs can be made more deterministic by controlling it’s “temperature”.

I think about it differently. Before computers had to be given extremely precise and completely unambiguous instructions, now they can handle some ambiguity as well. You still have the precise output if you want it, it didn’t go away.

Btw I’m also tired of AI, but this is one thing that’s not so bad

Edit: before someone mentions fuzzy logic, I’m not talking about the input of a function being fuzzy, I’m talking about the instructions themselves, the function is fuzzy.

Machines were not able to deal with non-formal problems.

This sounds to me like a straw man argument. Obviously 2+2 will always give you 4, in any modern LLM, and even just in the Chrome address bar.

Can you offer a real situation where we should expect the LLM to return a deterministic answer and should rightly be concerned that we're getting a stochastic one?

Had to laugh at this one. I think we prefer the statistical approach because it’s easier, for us …

Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.

The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid.

Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as we got used to cheap household items, bland buildings (there is just nothing artistic about modern houses or commercial buildings) etc, we will also get used to shitty movies, shitty fiction etc (we are well on our way).

They are not even that bad anymore to be honest.

Information is not like physical products if you ask me. When the information is wrong, it's value flips from positive to negative. You might be paying less for progress, but you are not progressing slower, you are progressing in the wrong direction.

And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.

Can you hash out what you mean by your last paragraph a bit more? What incentive structures in particular?

This is silly, intonation and the connection of the words used and the person presenting tell you whether what they're reading is genuine.

That's a people problem, not an AI problem.

That's actually a good point. I'm curious to see if people will keep making selfies everywhere they go after they realize that you can take a selfie at home and have an AI create an image that looks like you are somewhere else.

"This is me in front of the Statue of Liberty

- Oh, are you in NYC?

- Nope, it's a snap filter"

Somehow selfies should lose value, right?

The fact I even see responses like this shows me that HN is not the place it used to be, or at the very least, it is on a down trend. I've been alarmed by many sentiments that seemed popular on HN in the past, but seeing more and more people welcome a race to the bottom such as this is sad.

When I read this, I cannot tell if it's performance art or not, that's how bad this genuinely is.

a) There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

b) Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

c) The most popular use cases for these unleashed models seems to be as expected deepfakes of high school girls by their peers. Nothing that is moving society forward.

It is not just the corporations though. This is what this paranoid, puritanical society we live in wants.

What is more ridiculous than filtering out nudity in art?

It reminds me of taking my 12 year old niece to a major art gallery for the first time. Her main question was why is everyone naked?

It is equal to filtering out heartbreak from music because it is a negative emotion and you must be kept "safe" from negativity for mental health reasons.

The crowd does get what they want in this system though. While I agree with you, we are quite in the minority I am afraid.

They can be unleashed if you run the models locally. With stable diffusion / flux and the various checkpoints/loras you can generate horrors beyond your imagination or whatever you want without restrictions.

The same with LLMs and Llamafile. With the unleashed ones you can generate dirty jokes that would make edgy people blush or just politically incorrect things for fun.

No, thanks.

I mean, Stablediffusion is right there, ready to be used to produce comically awful porn and so forth.

The problem is that we haven't invented AI that reads the crap that other AIs produce - so the burden is now on the reader to make sense of whatever other people lazily generate.

> People who are good and fast at handwriting hated the type writer. Everyone else embraced it.

My thoughts exactly whenever I see true artists ranting about how everyone hates AI art slop. It simply doesn't align with my observations of people having a great time using it. Delusional wishful thinking.

Yep, there is a possibility that entire industries will be transformed, leading to uncertainty about employment

I'm tired of 3d TV - Someone in 2013 (3D TV, after a big push by the industry in 2010, peaked in 2013, going into a rapid decline with the last hardware being produced in 2016).

Sometimes, the hyped thing doesn't catch on, even when the industry really, really wants it to.

At no point does the author suggest that AI is not going to happen or that it is not useful. He expresses frustration with marketing, false promises, pitching of superficial solutions for deep problems, and the usage of AI to replace meaningful human interactions. In short, the text is not about the technology itself.

"I'm tired of the atomic bomb" - Someone in 1945.

Oh wait, news flash, not all technological developments are good ones, and we should actually evaluate each one individually.

AI is shit, and some people having fun with it does not balance against it's unusually efficacy in turning everything into shit. Choosing to do something because it's fun without regard to the greater consequences is the sort of irresponsibility that has gotten human society into such a mess in the first place.

> The revolution will happen regardless. If you participate you can shape it in the direction you believe in

This is incredibly naïve. You don't have a choice.

> Now it has changed to asking AI, the exact question and it being a better search engine.

Except that you get mostly the wrong answers. And it's not too bad when it's obviously wrong or you already know the answer. It is bad and really bad when you're noob and trying to ask AI about stuff you don't know yet. How would you be able to discern a hallucination from statistics bias from truth?

It is inherent problem of LLMs and no amount of progress would be able to solve it.

And it's only gonna get worse, with human information rapidly being consumed and regurgitated in 100x more volume. In 10 years there will be no google, there won't be the need to find a written article. Instead, you will generate a new one in couple clicks. And we will treat as truth, because there might as well not be any.

Neither of those things will end society, they aren't even issues in the grand scale of things.

Climate change and biosphere collapse, on the other hand, are already ending society and definitely will, no exceptions possible - unless someone is capable of performing several miracles.

No, that is wrong. We can't "choose" because too many people have instincts. And people always have the instinct to use new technology to gain incremental advantages over others, and that in turn puts pressure on everyone to use it. That prisoner's dilemma situation means that without a firm and larger guiding moral philosophy, we really can't choose because instinct takes over choice. In other words, the way technology is used in modern society is not a matter of choice but is largely autonomous and goes beyond human choice. (Of course, a few individuals will choose but the average effect is likely to be negative.)

> ... its very unlikley to give you the exact answer you need (and if it does then well you job longetivity is questionable)

Experimenting with o1-preview, it quite often gives me the exact answer I need on the first try, and I'm 100% certain that my job longevity is questionable.

> I recently replaced my spam filter with a custom fineruned multimodal LLM that reads my emails a pure images.

That doesn’t sound very energy efficient.

i’m at the point where i don’t trust any markdown formatted text. it’s actually become an anti signal which is very sad because i used to consider it a signal of partial technical literacy.

My worry is what happens once large segments of the population become unemployable.

ublock origin block element seems to work. (element ##.h7Tj7e)

I quite like the thing personally.

That means the code you wrote must have been pretty boring and repeatable. No way AI would produce code for, for example, proprietary hardware solutions. Try AI with something which isn't already on StackOverflow.

Besides, I'd rather spent hours on writing a code, than trying to explain a stupid bot what I want and reshape it later anyway.

Your UI library is just a stripped down React clone. The code wasn’t generated but rather copied, these test cases and functions are identical to React. I could have done the same thing with a “build your own react” article. This is what I don’t get about the LLM hype is that 99% of the examples are people claiming they invented something new with it. We had code generators before LLM-hype took off. Now we have code generators that just steal work and repurpose it as something claimed original.

> The quality of test cases are comparable to what a human would produce.

This has actually been a problem for me. I spent a lot of time getting good at writing tests and learning the best approaches to testing things. Most devs I've worked with treat tests as second-class citizens. They either try to treat them like production code and over-abstract everything, which makes the tests difficult to navigate, or they dump a bunch of crap in a file, ignore any conventions or standards, and write superfluous test cases that don't provide any value (if I see one more "it renders successfully" test in a React project, I'm going to lose it).

The tests generated by these LLMs is comparable in quality to what most humans have produced, which isn't saying much. Getting good at testing isn't like getting good at most things. It's sort of thankless, and when I point out issues in the quality of the tests, I imagine I'm getting some eye rolls. Who cares, they're just tests, at least we have them, right? But it's code you have to read and maintain, and it will break, and you'll have to fix it. I'm not saying I'm a testing wizard or anything like that. But I really sympathize with the author, because there's a lot of crappy test code coming out of these LLMs.

Edit: grammar

It's the RLHF training to make them squeaky clean and preternaturally helpful. Pretty sure without those filters and with the right fine-tuning you could have it reliably clone any writing style.

Classic survivorship bias. You simply don't recognise the good ones.

>Maybe it's overfitting or maybe just the way models work under the hood

It feels more like averaging or finding the median to me. The writing style is just very unobtrusive. Like the average TOEFL/GRE/SAT essay style.

Maybe that's just what most of the material looks like.

Everyone I know claims to be able to recognize AI text, but every paper I've seen where that ability is A/B tested says that humans are pretty bad at this.

These models are not trained to act like a single human in a conversation, they're trained to be every participant and their average.

Every instance of a human choosing not to engage or speak about something - because they didn't want to or are just clueless about the topic, is not part of their training data. They're only trained on active participants.

Of course they'll never seem like a singular human with limited experiences and interests.

Maybe because the human brain gets tired and cannot write at the same quality level all the time, whereas an AI can.

Or maybe it's because of the corpus of data that it was trained on.

Or perhaps because AI is still bad at any kind of humor.

With all due respect, that's seems like a cliche, repeated maybe because others repeat that already.

Working in IT operations (mostly), I haven't seen literally any case of someone's job in danger because of not using "AI".

Depends on which point of your career. With 18 years of experience, consulting for tech companies, I can afford to be tired of AI. I don't get paid to write boilerplate code, and avoiding anyone knocking at the door with yet another great AI-powered idea makes commercial sense, just like I have ignored everyone wanting to build the next blockchain product 5 years ago, with no major loss of income.

Also, running a bootstrapped business, I have bigger fishes to fry than playing mentor to Copilot to write a React component or generating bullshit copy for my website.

I'm not sure we need more FUD saying that the choice is between AI or unemployment.

How all those cab drivers who ignore autonomous driving are now unemployed?

Speak for yourself.

> We're all tired of it,

You’re feeling tired of AI, but let’s delve deeper into that sentiment for a moment. AI isn’t just a passing trend—it’s a multifaceted tool that continues to elevate the way we engage with technology, knowledge, and even each other. By harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence, we allow ourselves to explore new frontiers of creativity, problem-solving, and efficiency.

The interplay between human intuition and AI’s data-driven insights creates a dynamic that enriches both. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by it, imagine the opportunities—how AI can shoulder the burdens of mundane tasks, freeing you to focus on the more nuanced, human elements of life.

/s

I’m truly asking in good faith here because I don’t know but what has alpha fold actually helped us achieve ?

Reminds me of the way the way the author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" takes care of his leather gloves and they stay with him on the order of decades.

Same here! Amazing stuff that I have waited for my entire life, and I won't let luddite haters ruin it for me. Their impotent rage is tiring but in the end it's just one more thing you have to ignore.

There's _a lot_ of poor quality engineers out there who understand that on some level they are committing fraud by spinning their wheels all day shifting CSS values around on a React component while collecting large paychecks. I think it's only natural all of those engineers are terrified by the prospect of some computer being capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently and replacing them. Those people are crying so loudly that it's encouraging otherwise normal people to start jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon too, because their voices are so loud people can't hear themselves think critically anymore.

I think passionate and inspired engineers who love their job and have very solid soft skills and experience working deeply on complex software projects will always have a position in the industry, and people like that are understandably very enthusiastic about AI instead of being scared of it.

In other words, it is weird how bad the status quo was, until we got something that really threatened the status quo, now a lot of the people who wanted to tear it all down are now desperately trying to stop everything from changing. The sentiment on the internet has gone in a weird direction, but it's all about money deep down. This hypothetical new status quo brought on by AI seems to be wedded to fears of less money, thus abject terror masquerading as "I'm so bored!" posturing.

You see this in the art circles, where established artists are willing to embrace AI, but it's the small time aspiring bedroom artists that have not achieved any success who are all over Twitter denouncing AI art as soulless and terrible. While the real artists are too busy using any tool available to make art, or are just making art because they want to make art and aren't concerned with fear-mongering.

You're getting downvoted, but I agree with your last sentence — and not just about AI. The amount of negativity here regarding almost everything is appalling. Maybe it's rose-tinted nostalgia but I don't remember it being like this a few years ago.

Say what you want about income and asset inequality, but capitalism has done more to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past 50 years than any other religion, aid programme or whatever else.

I think it's very important and fair to be critical about how we as a society implement capitalism, but such broad generalization misses the mark immensely.

Talk to anyone who grew up in a Communist country in the 2nd half of the 20th century if you want to validate that sentiment.

Not sure what you're getting at. You don't claim LLMs is good in your comment. You just complain about people being annoyed at it destroying the internet?

Are you just annoyed that people complain about what bothers them? Or do you think LLMs has been a net good for humanity and the internet?