it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
It means they preach bullshit.
What society before us had AI, and how much more successful were they? Einstein didn’t need AI. Newton didn’t need AI. Oppenheimer didn’t need AI… The list goes on. Who does, other than the lazy and those who can’t think for themselves?
From what I’ve experienced it’s mostly managers saying this. They’re afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.
AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.
I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.
I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, “ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?”
When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?
Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?
For many, I suspect the answer is no.
I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, “ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?”
Sure. Protein structure is the clean example. For decades the same thing was done without AI: crystallise the protein, collect diffraction or NMR data, solve the fold. That works. It also costs years and a specialist lab per structure. AlphaFold did not invent a new kind of knowledge. It made the existing problem cheap enough that we now have predicted structures for hundreds of millions of proteins instead of a few hundred thousand experimentally solved ones.
“Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.
People aren’t talking about alphafold when they’re talking about “AI” in 2026. They’re talking about chatgpt, claude and copilot.
“Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not
I would hard disagree. It absolutely applies for super narrow applications like alphafold, but in general, LLMs aren’t remotely close to being worth it. You don’t need to look beyond how hugely unprofitable AI companies are. The only companies who aren’t completely shoveling money into the furnace are the ones selling hardware to the companies that do.
We also see that the consequences of AI use are pretty harsh. Students who use a lot of AI are a full year behind their counterparts that don’t, according the the latest PISA data.
So what we have is something that is unaffordably expensive, with dubious benefit and immense second order effects.
No. There’s no way I could build a full web app on my own in under a day. AI enables me to do that. You’re basing your whole opinion about AI solely on how capitalism is leveraging it. There is a lot of great potential with AI. Medical fields. Non-profit space. The list goes on.
You can delude yourself all you want that the AI is enabling you to do “x”. But all it’s doing is ensuring that you can never do x and keep getting worse at everything related.
And science is proving it. In just a few years of usage, llms are making people stupid and insane.
The brain is like a muscle. Each time you get in a car to travel 5 miles in 6 mins instead of running there in 30 minutes, after 10 years your body will be in a horrible shape and much closer to death.
Yes I’m against calculators too for most things. Because of avoiding them I can do small calculations faster in my mind than most people can type into a calculator.
And guess what I’m not left behind. Because of my philosophy I am stronger and sharper than most people half my age.
You seem to confuse speed with ability.
Ok, so you can’t do the task in the same amount of time, that is not what I meant, I am talking about being able to do the task at all.
Could you make a full web app without AI at all?
Do you have that skill?
I mean you could say the same thing about the power loom. Labor-saving technology does matter.
The issue with this comparison is that a power loom is like a computer script, a person built the logic, it just replaces physical labour.
AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.
That’s one thing it can do, but there are other, actually useful things you can have it do. For example I’ve used it as a pseudo-search engine when Google refused to cooperate/when the thing I was looking up was too complex before.
No, LLM’s CAN replace cognitive work. You don’t have to give up all your thinking to an LLM. Think about what you want. Create very specific instructions. Review the output. Challenge it. Refine. Ask questions. Make decisions. Teach it something. It’s a tool. It doesn’t have to replace your brain.
Calculators replace cognitive work. Are you anti-calculator?
AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.
Calculators… are devices designed to produce deterministic results that can be proven (and yes, with a seed AI is technically deterministic, but that doesn’t make it easily provable) as accurate very easily. If you removed calculators from a task, either the result would be completely the same, or it would be worse due to error introduced by something unpredictable.
past like really, really early education, I don’t really see a point to go without a calculator since it uses up so much time for little gain.
The issue is that most people seem to enjoy offloading their cognitive work to LLMs and take their results at face value, that is what I dislike.
I absolutely could not build a web app on my own from scratch and at this point in my life I do not have the time to learn how.
There’s absolutely no doubt that AI democratizes many capabilities that people otherwise would not possess, whether the output is “slop” or not. Sometimes you just want to quickly prototype something. Doesn’t have to be perfect. You can do that in minutes to hours. If you like it, pay somebody to do it right, or AI may even be able to do it right depending on the task.
I think you look at a web app too narrowly, a web app could be any page that loads content from an external source.
I am not a web developer, and I built a system that logs the water temp to a database and a webpage displays it to help people know if they want to go for a swim or not.
It took a few weeks of free time to get everything to work, but it has been running for about 5-6 years continuously.
That is a web app, an application solving a need running on the web.
It was developed by me without any AI, and I have only limited experience with web development.
I think you can do more than you give yourself credit for without AI.
llms are able to do a lot of things many people simply can’t (at least without spending a long time learning), although the result can be mediocre. it’s being misused widely, but doesn’t mean it’s entirely incapable of anything useful.
recently i’ve seen it being used for reverse engineering, seemed like a pretty good usecase.
It really cannot. But people who have no knowledge in a field absolutely think LLMs are proficient in that field. As soon as an expert in that field look at what the LLM is doing in their field, that illusion quickly vanishes.
They solved the Navier-Stokes milennial problem just the other day.
We can talk about the AI bubble, water consumption and AI “art”, but it’s undeniably doing some incredible stuff too.
If you can’t wrap your head around something that isn’t entirely good or entirely bad then well I don’t think a discussion can be had with you.
Unfortunately, that’s not true. LLMs have proven new results in mathematics, at extremely high levels, conjectures open since decades.
I am personally very against this use of AI, but let’s be clear on its capacities.
names Fremats last theorem proved by Anthropic
Uhm? The one proven in the 90s?
About some of those proofs…
Yeah, I had read earlier today. But even the author said that his own draft was LLM-based.
Every one of those mathematical milestones made by AI is followed by an article from a mathematician pointing out the ‘discovery’ was a flawed rehash or not really applicable to the problem. Same for all the claims about finding bugs, they are old and known bugs and occasionally it can identify already known types of bugs faster as long as a human can filter out the wrong results.
AI does do a fine job of filtering laelrge data sets in controlled environments, like how it is used for finding exoplanets, but just for speeding up an existing process.
It doesn’t do anything new.
A reference with a reasonable overview: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02859
I mean you probably could do a decent range of web apps in a day as a minimum viable product, if you already have a solid plan ready. But that’s kind of the thing with AI.
AI… really seems to just make derivative stuff. I tried asking it to replicate one of my terminal text editors (via a description of it), and it ended up making… essentially a 1:1 rip off of different editor but with more comments. I have a feeling that the massive amount of training data is what makes it seem like it can write lots of applicable code, while it’s still suffering from quite literally being just a larger version of this half-decade old Google Translate update under the hood.
Of course it’s derivative, but just like any tool, the user plays a huge role in the output. You just work with it. It can do lots of things and it can’t do lots of things. Am I gonna sell anything I make with it? Probably not. I use it to help myself and to prototype things really fast.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Even with AI you still can’t make a full web app in under a day.
You can make a fun little demo for sure, but that’s a long way away from a full web app. Even without doing any coding or using the computer, simply describing a full web app using pen and paper would actually take more than a day. And when it comes to actually making such a thing, there’s so many things besides the coding and even with regards to the coding you haven’t considered.
This is a big issue with AI. It provides a shortcut to some sort of end result. Since people get a result, they tend to think they have actually achieved the desired result. But in reality most things are much more complicated and people often have entire careers specializing in one aspect or the other. There’s so much that goes on, without people not in the know realizing. Without being an expert yourself, you wouldn’t even consider those things to be important.
Let me explain using an example. I can write words on a page. I could even think of a story and give it some structure. Does that mean I can write a book? Technically yes. Would that book be any good and people want to read that book? Probably no. That’s because I know enough about writing books, that I know I don’t know shit about writing books and would not be able to without years of learning and failing. Now AI could help me vomit out words faster. More words more quickly means I can get a whole book worth of words out in no time at all. But does that mean I somehow gained the knowledge of how to write a good book? No, because I didn’t learn anything. In fact I would learn less from using the AI than I would have simply writing down the words myself. Using a tool doesn’t magically grant skills that weren’t there before.
A lot of people don’t understand this and shit out shitty AI books anyways, which then nobody likes. They shit out apps, which then nobody likes and they get abandoned almost immediately. They shit out “art”, which then nobody likes. And since they got to some kind of a result, they glaze the AI tools and say it’s amazing, even though the results were shit.
There are teams whose whole job is just to describe web apps. They are product managers and UX.
There are people who’s job it is to describe movies to the crew. They’re called directors and producers.
No bad news for me because it doesn’t pertain to me. Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying! I’ve used AI to build things for me that are totally useful. I’m not selling anything. It’s a tool. It can build full web apps. I’m not talking SaaS. Just simple things. And I’ve learned along the way as well. It’s all about how you use it.
Good job on absolutely completely missing the point of my comment. I’m not even mad, that’s impressive.
And they say AI doesn’t cause brainrot… “Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying!” sounds like the kind of thing you would expect from someone who only outputs the highest quality of work, doesn’t it?
I’m not saying all AI users are like this, and there are many smart developers that do use it effectively (like Torvalds), but there is definitely a loud group of AI cheerleaders that extremely careless and overconfident, while lacking any sense of self-criticism or oversight of what they say or do.
And by the way, you definitely can build simple web-apps in a day without AI. I was doing that in 2015 by just following the Django tutorial. It took me longer than a day because I tried to read the documentation and understand it. But if I put the same amount of effort that these low-effort AI users do, I could have easily just copy-pasted shit from the finished tutorial and been done in an hour with the same level of understanding (or lack thereof) that AI users have.
That’s the difference between good and bad engineers - you have the tools in front of you, but can you make yourself a better engineer while you use them?
Speaking of which, you know what these AI tools do? They just go to github and copy off some project that already does what you want it to do. Anyone could do that before AI existed. Sure, it’s definitely impressive that they can understand what you want to do and find the right result (usually), but you could do that ever since search engines were invented. AI is just the “I’m feeling lucky” button from Google from back when people had enough sense to be a little critical of the results they were looking at before they clicked it.
Show us what it built…
You are selling something, you are trying to sell it to yourself.
While I disagree with exactly what you’re saying, I agree with the part that AI CAN make things better. But I’ve seen too many sloppy vibe coded apps that don’t work to think that having it make an app all on it’s own is a good use of AI.
I see it with ADAS.
It appears that the more Advanced Driver Assistance Systems a vehicle has, the less competent the driver is and the more likely it is that they will not react correctly (or at all) in an emergency situation.
ANCAP and ENCAP are realising this now and their ratings are no longer weighted so heavily on ADAS.
Yeah, this has been a long problem in government agencies here.
There was a political decision made years and years ago, that in-house expertise was too expensive and that they would hire consultants when they needed specific skills.
That works only as long as you have the in-house skills to determine what external skills are needed.
Same here, without the skills to do the work, you don’t have the skills to correctly evaluate the work of an LLM.
They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason
Yes to everything you said. It’s basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.
If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it’s like learning how to use Google, it doesn’t take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It’s a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.
Also, according to the boosters, if it gets as good as they insist it’s going to get, we wouldn’t even need to learn how to use it!
At that point I’d be more concerned about the collapse of the economy than my specific job. Why buy any service when the replicator does it
The people who espouse such nonsense as “if you don’t use AI you’ll fall behind” believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don’t, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying “you’re just not prompting it right” when you point out flaws in the LLM’s responses.
Prompting is obviously a skill that you can improve, but if you compare it with the skills they are trying to replace it’s a very basic skill. Going through a computer science program and a few years of work experience vs figuring out what prompts it tends to fuck up and learn to safe guard against that (as much as you can) are different leagues, different sports, different everything.
It’s like saying that if you don’t start using lemmy now, you’ll fall behind when the year off the fediverse is upon us, when you’ll just pick it up as well if need be.
Prompting reminds me that most people around me don’t know how to use Google. If I want a recipe for an apple pie, I type “apple pie recipe” (3 words). Other people would type “i want to make an apple pie and I need a recipe or something.”
And now it’s worse with chatbots because they would say “dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking of my grandma and I would loooove to make an apple pie like the one she did, it would mean a lot to me, and also the sun is shining, thanks, kiss, goodbye, have a nice day.” It’s horribly inefficient and shows that most people cannot use computers properly, and don’t understand that they are fast calculators and not magical brains.
It is even worse, since LLMs talk back like that, which probably encourages people to be like that. I had to use one to solve a Linux problem, for which I could not get help any other way, and it was just awful. I do not want the agent to spout useless phrases like a human, it just wastes so much time to read them, when you have to figure out are the answers even close to being useful. Maybe I could have prompted it to just reply more efficiently, but I tried to keep the usage minimal anyway. That discussion made me sound more like the robot. “Blahblah not working” “Oh I’m so sorry you are having this problem. Lets start with…”
Fucking awful.Right! These people are now “super human AI prompt masters”, nut my natural ability with written language from a young age and early exposure to technology has made me (and anyone with good vocabulary and grammar mechanics) better than a lot of these idiots could ever hope to become with years of practice. The thing about corporate cultism, though, is in your mind it always makes you “superior” somehow, if you can stick your head far enough up your ass. Corporatism is all about enthusiastic support of your own exploitation, and this shit is the ultimate expression. We need fucking LLMs more than clean drinking water to hear these robber baron fucks tell it.
I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”
If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.
Indeed. Moreover, a lot of people seem to believe that if they really buy into the technology, they’ll be protected from its inevitable economic outfall. They won’t.
They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.
Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.
For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)
They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it’s just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.
The difference being we don’t actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it’s like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.
This is so spot on. VFD’s revolutionized manufacturing, but telling that to someone in the 1900 would have been crazy.
If you’re actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s
It’s widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.
If like you can’t drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.
They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that “not using AI” would be like “not using electricity”. There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered “behind” the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.
The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.
I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I’m just asking the “wrong” questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I’m also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright “minefield” around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we’ve lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for “more compute”.
So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be “falling behind”.
I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I’m staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It’ll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.
(If it really does improve society, I’m sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)
AI: They probably can’t define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.
I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.
Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were “left behind” because now almost all documentation is written digitally.
AI is here to stay
LLMs are not AI.
I never said they were 🤔
LLMs are a form of AI.
And both LLMs and other AI are here to stay whether you like it or not.
llms are roided up chatbots. calling them AI is an insult to actual AI.
Don’t be daft.
it’s like your face mate, it can’t be helped.
This pedantic argument annoys me so much. We’ve called basic ass decision trees for NPCs in games AI for a while now, any program that can make a decision based on data is an AI.
If you don’t like it, you’re more than free to provide the world with a true all-encompassing definition of intelligence that everyone can agree on, you’ll join all the others that tried.
good
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
That still is extremely unspecific and doesn’t say much about what the idea is to use it for
it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets.
Writing maybe? I can’t tell what this is about
Computer science, and quite scarily, a bit of medicine?
Pharmacists are gonna have to review even more slop now with this scope creep smh /j
Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking “this thing is smarter than me.”
AI’s extremely flawed still, but it’s improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it’s helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it’s useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.
My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.
That’s what “ai” (actually called machine learning) was actually first created for; researching disease. Trawling through large data sets and finding correlations.
Then the venture capitalists attacked and everything changed.
As I understand it there’s a distinction between analytical AI (the stuff that can help identify tumors and such), and LLMs which are now effectively the catchall “AI” term — your ChatGPTs and Claudes. I honestly have no problem with machine learning if it can be applied, as aforementioned. in research and validated by researchers to improve medical outcomes. That’s a wonderful thing.
On the other hand, I used ChatGPT 3.5(?) for about a day when it first went public. I’m sure the evangelists will scream at me about how much it’s improved, how it brings us closer to God or some shit, etc., but I quickly realized its core issues from a rhetorical standpoint and still stand by my assessment. It knows how to say things, and pretty well. It sort of knows what to say, only as far as you can prompt it correctly. It has no fucking idea why it says what it says, short of what it was told to say by the user and constructing plausible sentences.
I see it as these three prongs, just ramping up with each new release. Slap some more glitter on it. Call it “general intelligence” now. Enjoy your own brainrot echoing from your phone. Let’s circle back.
One of my various YouTubers is a tech person and generally against arbitrary AI use. They posted that someone generated a bio summary of them for a conference that hallucinated that they were from Guadalajara, Mexico. AI generated articles started using that fact. Now more AI summaries are citing the articles so they look real.
They’re from NY, but it’s going to be nigh impossible to correct the record.
