Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses’ chosen narratives about their products’ destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts.
The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.
Doctorow really writes like a poet, doesn’t he?
I read “Down and out in the Magic Kingdom” and found it pretty lackluster, he has definitely grown as a writer since then.
What is novelty though? It can be used to shortcut your development time, your documentation time, your presentation preparing time, that’s a shit ton of stuff that developers/office workers do.
I think making false narratives is not how you fight AI, you fight for regulation on Data center water use, noise pollution, then let the cost bankrupt the companies that need to go bankrupt.
Although maybe this is just one of those communities that wants to endlessly circlejerk around an issue.
Maybe the title is clickbaity, but in the article this is addressed, AI has it uses but we shouldn’t repeat the lies the CEOs spew about their products, even the ones that paint AI in a dark picture as this serves as a marketing purpose. Instead we should call out those lies and address the real destructive potential that AI has, like the environmental ones or that is a Ponzi scheme.
No it doesn’t. Matching the quality of human produced output with it arguably takes just as long if not longer. Even the most die-hard advocate of Claude Code admits it’s only as good as a junior programmer. What it is good at is making it seem like it’s doing a lot to ignorant execs because it makes a large output of content quickly, which is the only metric they have ever evaluated (see: programmers being judged on lines of code or number of closed bugs).
Yes, but considering 90% of modern society is ALSO a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction, I’m horribly afraid it fits right in and we’re going to wind up stuck with it.
“Its kinda shitty” doesn’t stop a lot of products or services because they’re cheap to make or run.
AI is neither cheap to make or run.
What else in modern society is even remotely close go the level of having a trillion dollars annual subsidy? I can think of nothing.
It’s mostly an outlay for building out the expensive data centers quickly.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s still wasteful shit with no clear benefit - but once all the capacity is built the ongoing costs won’t be as high.
The video cards are expensive and are outdated in a few years. The energy costs and water costs are huge.
no, its being used for SURVEILLANCE mostly, since commercially no one is buying it so. they are peddling it for government use.
Chatgpt alone has 50 million paying users.
But it’s shitty distraction, people have fallen so far that this even rates attention. Thanks propaganda, advertising, social media (why is it always you three…)
I, for one, think AI has a very terrible potential to abuse people into suicide and to generate child porn.
LLM tech is more than a gimmick. I think Doctorow and Zitron frequently get this wrong because they’ve committed to their position, but it’s a dangerous underestimation of the situation.
It’s very capable of doing tasks where you’re fine with some failures and sub optimal results…like prosecuting, deporting, or killing people… /s
The question isn’t whether it works or not, the question is if we understand what we’re doing and are willing to act remotely rationally. As we’re approaching the problem right now, AI being perfect would actually be much worse for us as a society.
Zitron’s position is that AI doesn’t have a business model. Catching some failures and sub optimal results makes it as expensive and time consuming if not more as just asking employees to do the work.
I have NEVER heard Zitron claim AI or LLM is just a gimmick.
Sounds like you don’t understand his actual claim, which is all about circular financing and problems with data centers that basically only have 2 customers. And finally that those 2 customers will (probably) never be able to return a profit on the investments, as it requires exponential (doubling to be exact) growth for years in demand for AI services.
I get the sarcasm, but I think it’s a bit strange to make that claim.The question isn’t whether it works or not, the question is if we understand what we’re doing
This however is spot on.
Unrelated: Saw your username, briefly thought you were the Benny Lava guy!
No my real name is Ken Lee, I’m the guy this woman made a song about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUAaHkGpJy8
It’s very capable of doing tasks where you’re fine with some failures and sub optimal results
If you spend heaps of tokens (hey, new crypto) taking multiple runs on topics that can be easily verified as correct, preferably automatically, like security flaws and mathematical theorems. For everything else it’s technical debt, social decohesion, totalitarian auto-enforcement without mercy, billionaires wet dreams of worlds without workers and any number of other ‘hallucination’ driven misadventures.
Pretty sure, if we last long enough, they’ll end up requiring a license to use, they seem as destructive, and yet maybe nearby as useful as cars were in specific cases (and IMO cars turned out pretty bad). As they stand now, only useful in the hands of someone already competent in a given field. Everyone else is in the ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ zone playing with TNT.
I’m not sure Zitron’s stance is about AI’s capabilities as much as what the financial situation is, and the capabilities question is more the investors playing roulette that AI will somehow become AGI and change labor forever.
However from what I’ve heard of his views, it’s usually “hey maybe we shouldn’t be investing another trillion into an industry that took a trillion and isn’t profitable”, and how that the bulk of the US economy is between two non profitable AI companies and cloud providers, with cloud providers using most of their cloud on AI and AI getting most of their money from cloud providers. And that inherently is fucked from a financial perspective, and will end when they run out of money to invest. Pop.
We need to separate two concepts with the AI conversation. Is it a real technology? Yes, it is. And it works, often. It isn’t the scifi world ending technology they want you to believe in, but damn can it make an android app quickly. And get most of the buttons right, if you test it enough and ask nicely.
And there’s the other concept: a financial bubble. A financial bubble can exist regardless of whether a technology is real. The dot com bust happened and destroyed forward thinking companies like pets.com and WebVan, because at that time no one wanted to buy groceries or pet food online… And those companies at least didn’t know how to profit doing so.
Consumer trust in internet purchases took roughly 20 years to catch up to the real internet technology, and here we are. Pets.com or WebVan are basically just replaced by Amazon, another dotcom company that was actually run profitable like a business. And if you won that roulette guess on an online book seller, you would’ve made a fuck ton of money.
AI is causing a financial bubble because, regardless of what it is, the investors are stupid gamblers who are drunk in the casino and want to win everything they lost in this fucked inflation economy.
A bubble has very little to do with a technology and its utility and much more to do with investor behavior, and right now we have the makings for an economic disaster.
“Works” by whose definition? I am a software engineer woth over 10 years of professional, continuous employment and experience. How does Claude work for me, exactly? My company paid for every employee to have a subscription and all it has ever helped me legitimately with is debugging cryptic python errors since they fired all the python devs
Bubbles have always been about the idiocy of investors. Yes.
The public furor over it does have to do with technology. The consumers don’t know that they already trust and have been using AI so much everywhere. Autocomplete was once considered AI. Same goes for image search, voice recognition/dictation, spam filtering, search results, map navigation, etc. Do they even know their daily doom scroll feeds are based on the field of AI. Where’s the anger about all that stuff?? AI is and has been everywhere. I don’t see people trying to burn down Google image search or their Netflix feed. People just don’t know they’ve been immersed in it on a daily basis for far longer than LLMs.
It’s a matter of relative perspective but if you showed someone from about pre-2000 the kind of AI/ML stuff we have now, they’d be mind blown. It wasn’t even that long ago that object recognition was considered one of the major hurdles in the field. Right now that is unimpressive technology such that nobody even considers it AI anymore.
Right now the goal post is at, why can’t I command it produce an end product like a Star Trek computer. Has anyone stopped to think at how far the field has come. It’s not about what it can’t do, nobody thinks about what it can in any other way than unimpressive.
There’s not only a disconnect in economic, but also technological perspective. Both need a correction.
We need to separate two concepts with the AI conversation. Is it a real technology? Yes, it is. And it works, often. It isn’t the scifi world ending technology they want you to believe in, but damn can it make an android app quickly. And get most of the buttons right, if you test it enough and ask nicely.
False, it’s able to fool c-suite execs and gullible rubes into thinking they can build an app. In reality, these vibe coding projects all fall apart. Zitron relies on Nik Suresh’s arguments, which I agree with, that software development: shipping, running, and supporting software, is a hell of a lot more than just code.
The bad quality of the code and resulting app is really a secondary discussion to whether this can really count as software development. One of my favorite software development tools of the last decade is actually a Microsoft standard called LSP, which allows text editors to talk to compilers to get code suggestions and linting as you type. You used to have to use an ‘integrated’ text editor, or IDE, that usually only worked with one or a handful of languages. Now, everyone can use their editor of choice.
The ai craze, to me, is much lower in productivity gains than LSP for software development, it might be negative because you are handing off the one part of software development that ties all of its subdisciplines together. It’s crazy how fast the industry standard went from ‘clean code’ and concerns about whitespace, furiously tracking issue lifetimes, to just throwing up their hands, actively telling people not to care. I hate both paradigms, to be clear, but at least they were trying to measuring things in the former.
