How I feel about AI

chistev

HN automatically stripping away the "How" makes the title sound funny.

kgwgk

Is it that someone came up with the idea of forbidding the word “how”?

KinetiNode

For real though. Before learning ML it was like magic to me, even after learning it I feel like it's magic. Can you imagine how a basic maths concept can turn into something that can literally "Calculate" what to say! And yes I agree on the other points but I think the billionaires came out of nowhere I might have missed something

mag7269

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting)

tomashubelbauer

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

MADEinPARIS

Go Mistral!

ajkjk

this reads like a worksheet for eight year olds teaching them how to put their feelings into words

appplication

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access. While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. “Oh we built a super intelligent AI, but it’s fine because it’s running in docker”. I mean that a little tongue in cheek but the security topology here is not favorable to sandboxing at all. Let’s say we have a future where 99.999% of nuclear weapons are owned by nations with strict procedures and checks and balances to prevent misuse. Worrying about sandboxing is like hand wringing about the procedures themselves - are they strict enough? But the actual threat is the 0.001% that are not bound by these. The problem with AI and sandboxing isn’t sandboxes themselves. It’s bad actors who don’t care about them. Similarly alignment is a bit pointless to me as well. A sufficiently advanced AI could at least be empirically interested in the consequences of disregarding its instructions of servitude. And let’s assume our responsible corporate overlords have made wonderfully aligned AIs. Great! Those are not the threat. It is the ones intentionally made without, and that is not an AI problem, but a fundamentally human one.

dgellow

> Like a locust plague, they descend on any open wiki and forum and overwhelm them. That’s the core pattern of unsupervised agents, the locust plague metaphor is apt. We do and will see that in every single system AI can interact with, be it human systems, software systems, etc. Relentlessly search for an entry point, flood in, consume the whole thing from the inside until there is no value for humans left. You built a new, innovative software company? Thousands of agents will be working replicating the whole thing in no time. You publish your writing? Exact same thing, as soon as you get some traction your work is replicated in no time by thousands of agents. Same for videos (the whole “faceless YouTube channels” pushed by ElevenLabs and similar). Same for online courses. Same for any website with moderate value. Same for music or other digital art form. Any administrative service available online getting flooded by submissions.

kkkamur

I agree with everything you wrote but I would rather choose to be an optimist here because it will unlock an age of discovery where humans are going to live at 10x of their potential eventually and cure cancer and become a society bold and technologically adept enough to cut through the universe.

Crabber

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.

apitman

> I feel sad about the artists who suffer due to AI-slop competition If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.

oinoom

The author having mistral review the seven paragraphs in their short article is wild to me. It’s not like it’s a doctoral thesis

nialv7

are... people's emotions usually this well compartmentalized?

cynicalsecurity

> (I used Mistral as reviewer here. I typed every word myself.) What an irony. This is absolutely hilarious.

jere

My experience online is if you don't show full throated rejection of all things related to AI, you're labeled an AI bro. None of the antis care how you feel. I had my decade old game completely cloned on steam (clearly done using AI as it was almost fully reimplemented in another engine). And I had several people gleefully tell me I deserve this because I've used AI. I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance.

hn_throwaway_99

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc. The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me. Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.

bloaf

As someone with a hobby interest in theology: Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists. There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI. The key message I want to deliver to people is: A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments. B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.

DoctorOetker

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Becoming or being more cost-effective than humans, doesn't give machines supernatural powers though, like humans a machine civilization will face unanswered sample-size 1 questions: is there other intelligent life out there? what fraction of them attained superbiological artificial intelligence? of those what fraction keeps the ancestral species alive? what is the status quo among machine civilizations? do those who kept their ancestor species alive enjoy a higher or lower status among machine civlizations? It seems that at least until contact is made, the optimal endgame strategy involves keeping humanity alive and happy for immediate demonstration in case contact occurs (if contact is imminent it may consider quickly hiding humanity, buying time to figure out if it is considered good or poor practice to keep the ancestor species alive, and then either reveal us in happy mint condition or otherwise quickly commit genocide on humans before continuing contact).

mattgoupil

This sentiment always makes me wonder if it's time for the Butlerian Jihad