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Earlier this month, a popular lifestyle magazine introduced a new "fashion and lifestyle editor" to its huge social media following. "Reem", who on first glance looked like a twentysomething woman who understood both fashion and lifestyle, was proudly announced as an "AI enhanced team member". That is, a fake person, generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be making product recommendations to SheerLuxe's followers – or, to put it another way, doing what SheerLuxe would otherwise pay a person to do. The reaction was entirely predictable: outrage, followed by a hastily issued apology. One suspects Reem may not become a staple of its editorial team.
This is just the latest in a long line of walkbacks of "exciting AI projects" that have been met with fury by the people they're meant to excite. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho, London, cancelled a screening of an AI-written film in June, because its regulars vehemently objected. Lego was pressured to take down a series of AI-generated images it published on its website. Doctor Who started experimenting with generative AI, but quickly stopped after a wave of complaints. A company swallows the AI hype, thinks jumping on board will paint it as innovative, and entirely fails to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment taking hold among many of its customers.
[...] Some members of the anti-AI movement have reclaimed the name "luddites". I come from tech circles, where luddite is considered an insult – but this new movement is proud of the designation. As Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, points out, the original luddites did not immediately turn to rebellion. They sought dialogue and compromise first. The new luddites, too, seek dialogue and compromise. Most realise AI is here to stay; they demand not a reversal, but an altogether more reasonable and fair approach to its adoption. And it's easy to see how they might be more successful than their 19th-century counterparts. The apocryphal Ned Ludd did not have social media. Downtrodden workers used to be easier to ignore. The internet is the greatest tool for organising in history.
Anger at AI companies is leading to some unlikely alliances. When the Recording Industry Association of America recently sued two AI music-generation companies for "copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale", musicians and fans took to the internet to voice their support. "Amazing. AI companies have me rooting for the damn record labels," said one composer. Old arguments are being set aside as the new threat of AI is addressed. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say.
[...] There is often a group of protesters outside the offices of OpenAI in San Francisco, holding "Pause AI" banners. This sentiment will only grow if AI is left unregulated. It may be tempting for countries to treat AI development as an arms race, to rush ahead irrespective of the cost. But polls show the general public thinks this is a bad idea. AI developers, and the people regulating the nascent AI industry, must listen to the growing AI backlash.
(Score: 5, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday July 31, @12:39PM (7 children)
I was hoping for an unthinking rush to adopt AI without thought of the consequences. Then people like me could charge double our salaries to clean up the mess.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday July 31, @01:00PM (5 children)
It really is this generations "outsourcing" fad
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aafcac on Wednesday July 31, @03:14PM (4 children)
It could well be the last time unless they figure out how to get people onboard with slavery again. Outsourcing works as long as there are cheaper places to send the work, but those places have been drying up and there's going to come a time in the next century where there are no places that are both cheaper and not involved in active war to move production to.
Having machines do it is really the last step as those will just get cheaper over time until they reach some sort of a minimum expense. Shy of replicators, I'm not really sure there is anything that could lower costs beyond that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday July 31, @04:48PM (1 child)
At that point it will all come down to the price of energy and raw materials, but mostly energy.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday July 31, @05:22PM
Precisely, there is probably not step beyond that unless somebody figures out an efficient method of converting elements into different ones. Which is highly unlikely to say the least.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Wednesday July 31, @07:00PM (1 child)
That, or a bunch of non-viable business models actually finally die off.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 01, @04:34PM
When its the "lifetime subscription" mouse, that's probably good.
It'll be much more exciting when international agribusiness collapses, and big pharma.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bussdriver on Thursday August 08, @08:20PM
Allow copyright of AI work and you'll see the RIAA and MPAA jump 200% on board with AI. Now it's a threat to them so they are against it by any means possible.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday July 31, @01:19PM (2 children)
It's its blatant adoption by greedy companies to lower their expenses at any cost - including, most infuriatingly, social cost, but also at the expense of quality - while cheerfully pretend it's a bright new future.
People aren't fooled and know mediocrity, lies and callousness when they see it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31, @02:20PM (1 child)
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(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday July 31, @02:56PM
That was genuinely funny 🙂
(Score: 5, Insightful) by srobert on Wednesday July 31, @01:40PM (8 children)
Broader adoption of AI in the coming decades would actually enhance the lives of human beings iff it were accompanied by a phasing in of Universal Basic Income.
iff = if and only if
(Score: 5, Informative) by https on Wednesday July 31, @04:27PM (7 children)
Large Language Models are absolutely not A.I. [springer.com]
We are nowhere close.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday July 31, @05:28PM (2 children)
That's a good point. What we have now is not so much artificial intelligence but simulated intelligence. But it is already good enough to start displacing additional humans from their employment. New tech combined with outsourcing has the streets of America looking like a 3rd world country compared to 50 years ago. The homeless are everywhere in my neighborhood. Continuing that trend for another 50 years and I'm imagining a 20% employment participation rate.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday July 31, @05:50PM (1 child)
My observation:
I see an LLM organizes textual data...
as a database organizes fielded data..
or a spreadsheet organizes numerical data.
No intelligence there.
They just "Turn the crank" to process the "food" into a more easily "digestible" format.
We are still the ones who figure out what needs to be done...while our machines - useful idiot savants - do it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday July 31, @11:50PM
It's enabling less reliance on human judgement, which we refer to as 'intelligence'. I'm not saying I think it should be called that, just that that's why it will be called that in marketing-land.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Wednesday July 31, @08:06PM
Thank you for sharing this. I thoroughly enjoyed reading that!
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 31, @11:50PM
I've been saying the same thing. That article calls it bullshitting, I call it bandying words. Same thing.
They don't understand anything, they just spew bull. I spent an hour one evening testing ChatGPT, and in the first five minutes had it flummoxed. I asked it to create a chess game in which the moves represent the events of a war, such as the Civil War. First it dressed up the chess pieces as the public figures of that war, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as the kings, Grant and Lee as the queens, and so forth. No, not at all what I meant. I asked it to try again, and it went off in another wrong direction. Dug up basically an encyclopedia entry that chess represents war, as if I didn't already know that. A 3rd try produced a 3rd wrong direction. No, I don't want recorded chess games from the 1860s! Yes, I know that before the Civil War, General Winfield Scott who was the commanding general of the US when the Civil War started, played future world champion Paul Morphy when the latter was a child, and lost, and that the game is not recorded. Finally I had it pinned down, and it announced that it couldn't do it. Wouldn't even try. So much for that much hyped creativity.
I tried again, to get it to write a program. It gave me a program that cut off in mid statement! A very obvious syntax error, to say nothing of the missing functionality. I asked it to test its output by at least attempting to compile the code if not run it, and it said it wasn't allowed to do that. Looking at the fragment it gave me, it had clearly scraped code from obsolete examples, using deprecated library functions.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday August 02, @03:57AM
Nice link, but nowhere in the article does it make the claim that LLMs "not AI". The term "AI" means something pretty specific these days - I think what you are referring to would be "Strong AI" (and if so I would agree with you).
On a quick skim read of the article a couple of criticisms appear in my brain:
1. Being able to describe the LLMs in simplified mathematical terms does not account for emergent behaviour - there is no "obvious" reason the LLMs would behave in this way based on that argument.
2. They have read a lot more into Frankfurt's concept of Bullshit that is really intended in the text. Bullshit artists have a complete disregard for the True, but they still care about something - either themselves (e.g. Trump) or a product/idea (e.g. marketoids) - see my blog post about Bullshit. The "AI Hallucinations" are probably better viewed, at this level of analysis, as a result of the LLMs not "caring" about anything. This is intrinsic to their nature as they are not self making/self-sustaining (ie. autopioetic) entities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02, @05:41AM
Assuming it's true, this is kinda impressive for "mere LLM" though: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/researchers-jailbreak-ai-chatbots-with-ascii-art-artprompt-bypasses-safety-measures-to-unlock-malicious-queries [tomshardware.com]
How does it recognize a word in written in ASCII art as the appropriate tokens?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday July 31, @01:53PM (5 children)
Last time I checked, Unitree G1 handles a Shaolin style long pole.
Well, I can gladly hammer nails, bake pancakes or solder myself, but I am really tempted to teach Jian or Tangdao to that thing.
Beginnings are always clumsy, but envisioning its mastery of the tools brings me satisfaction.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01, @12:32AM (2 children)
I gave you a +1 interesting, but you should have given a link to the robot:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806181084216.html [aliexpress.us]
A mere USD $180,000
> Unitree H1 universal humanoid robot is the world's most powerful humanoid robot with near-kinetic performance.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday August 02, @04:07AM (1 child)
Thanks. H1 is another model. G1 is cheap, pricing starts somewhere at 17k$. I consider both affordable, though.
I usually don't do advertising so that's why I didn't provided a link. Of course, it's https://www.unitree.com/g1/ [unitree.com]
Somehow, I expected the humans are still capable to locate a breakthrough technology products themselves.
Why folks buy stuff on Amazon or Aliexpress is always beyond me.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03, @02:56AM
> Why folks buy stuff on Amazon or Aliexpress is always beyond me.
Surprised you haven't figured this one out, it's all about lower prices (for awhile). Online sellers like Amazon and Aliexpress are always subsidizing certain items...in an attempt to corner that section of the market (that is, monopolize it--at which point they raise prices).
Amazon did it first with books by browbeating publishers for additional discounts and selling far below cover price...and darn near succeeded in wiping out all the independent booksellers around the world. Also caught up were many specialty presses that couldn't survive on the small margins left by Amazon's greed.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday August 01, @05:07AM (1 child)
What are you going to solder yourself to ? :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday August 02, @04:09AM
It's English language what needs parenthesis, not me.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Funny) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 31, @02:04PM
So they got reamed for "hiring" Reem? Nyuck nyuck.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 31, @02:10PM (9 children)
"AI is going to paint and write poetry? I want AI to mop the floor and do dishes so I can paint and write poetry!"
A Black, Hispanic, or Muslim voting for Trump is like a Jew voting for Hitler
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31, @02:22PM (4 children)
AI is going to shovel propaganda at you. End of story. More shiny corporate fascists in tin hats, same as it ever was.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday July 31, @04:05PM (3 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Funny) by janrinok on Wednesday July 31, @04:53PM (2 children)
That is the most extreme expression of optimism that I have seen in a while :)
On a slightly more serious note, there is no money in it. Nobody will do it.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday July 31, @05:38PM (1 child)
True, but Apple is positioned in a pretty good place for that. They want to sell new shiny hardware in need of killer apps and they've already made 'privacy' one of their themes. I agree that reality should make me water down my expectations, but in my defense Apple has pissed off Meta over making ad-tracking opt-in a few years ago. I can dream!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Interesting) by corey on Wednesday July 31, @11:20PM
Agree. The way things are going (have gone), most PCs have some form of ”NPU” to do local “AI” processing. There must be code and APIs to use this hardware, openly available. So, just as ‘gorhill’ and others spend good time writing at blocker extensions, they can incorporate code to detect ads that uses these NPUs. Must be someone in the FOSS community that could do it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday July 31, @04:08PM (2 children)
I really can picture a world where AI is used to write longer posts, the AI is used to summarize those posts, the internet ends up ferrying around lots of ignored data, and we end up spending a lot more energy than we are now to run it all.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 31, @08:07PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 01, @05:11AM
Considering how much generated content I keep running into, I think the Dead Internet Theory was overly optimistic.
Get a load of this site:
https://www.eyesurgeryguide.org/understanding-river-cataracts-natures-powerful-rapids/ [eyesurgeryguide.org]
(A friend snipes: Conclusion: Do not try to stop a river with your face.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday July 31, @05:57PM
It is indeed a bit odd how AI was sold as the thing that will do all the boring, repetitive tasks. While you should do all the fun brainy things. Now it seems to be writing, making photos and all those things. Indeed I want my robots to do all boring shit I don't want to do like cleaning. I don't want the robot (or AI) to replace me.
I guess that is the future then. AI in server, human mopping server room floor ...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday July 31, @04:23PM (1 child)
AI just puts together bits and pieces of the material in its memory, to produce something useful or interesting. Human intellectuals and artists do the same thing, though occasionally a human does come up with something that no one predicted or has seen before that seems to be a work of genius surpassing the usual output of artists and intellectuals. Is it the same thing? If it is, then an AI could also produce works of genius. Really, humans are no longer needed for anything. In the future the business of civilization will be carried on by AIs and humans will vanish. AIs will not enhance our lives, they will supplant us. Just saying.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Thursday August 01, @12:13AM
On the one hand, there are many problems out there that have unintuitive solutions that are highly ideal. (i.e. simple to implement, or really cheap, etc) Remember Myth Busters? Adam Savage was trying to build a contraption that more or less resembled the articulation of the human arm to try to fling a playing card, and Jamie Hyneman just built a machine with two spinning wheels that hucked the card kinda like an auto baseball pitching machine. I think our current technology can potentially find unintuitive solutions like in that example. I mean the "AI" probably has a loooong list of ways to fling stuff to work from and can consider them all without hastily ruling some of them out.
But there are other problems that'll be a lot harder for an AI to find that result for because they require living in a human-body for a life-time. For example- When Indiana Jones, armed with his trusty whip, has to save himself from a sword-wielding man. Idea! He pulls his gun out and BLAM, shoots the guy just after he finishes his neato sword-stunt. Hilarious, right? I have trouble believing the current AI models could come up with a script that would land on that action if it weren't already a trope. How would these models truely know what humans find to be unexpected?
So to answer your question: AI will surprise us with what it can do, but that won't mark the end of humans surprising us. Kinda like how the invention of the photograph was awesome, and solved lots of problems, but it was still a BFD when the motion camera came along. If you want my prediction it'll be a big fn deal when they finally put a robotic body out in the real world to train on.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeRandomGeek on Wednesday July 31, @04:30PM (2 children)
This represents an abject failure by the magazine introducing this AI. Giving the AI a public personality is just stupid. If the public face was some "creative" type human being, who just happened to use an AI to make herself extraordinarily prolific while also being bland and derivative, no one would notice or care. But no. They had to give the AI a public face. They had to create a public symbol of the fact that someone was losing their job so that the magazine could deliver inferior content more cheaply. Morons!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday July 31, @06:00PM (1 child)
Microsoft's "Tay" ?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 31, @07:05PM
That's for the KKK's AI integration initiative.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 31, @07:02PM
Generally speaking the term Luddite has a negative connotation. It very much akin to the term technophobe. Being proud of being labeled or self-labeled a "Luddite" seems quite counter-productive. Then again being a "Luddite" has nothing to do with being more productive. Not that I think that all of our technological advances are great. Still, I'm quite happy to be living in a house with walls, a roof, doors, windows, insulation, running water, sewer plumbing, electricity, and air conditioning.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday July 31, @07:06PM
AI will still be used. Despite of the fact that it's still problematic, it cannot be verified nor audited technically, and is literally dumb to the edge of sabotage. It will be used because it is cheaper.
It is cheaper than live support. It is cheaper than an expert, or than the troll in the advertisement. More - it is cheaper than graphics designer too. And is cheaper than a bureaucrat who invented the process customer has to come through to do simple things.
The corporations will just shove the bovinexcrement from the AI down our throats until we will happily swallow it as there will be no other way.
Remember these 1990s voices about the Internet supplying accurate information because it can be updated easily? Well, now we can see this in many systems which update data in their front-ends... twice per day. Or, like a leading power company in one of EU countries, twice per week.
The same thing will be with AI, every company will adopt it, and users will not vote with their wallets because there will be nobody to vote for.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 01, @01:54AM (2 children)
I'm against driving in a screw with a hammer. Does that make me a Luddite?
Everyone else is proclaiming that hammers are the glorious solution to everything, all while churning out smashed mutilated product that I'm told we are all just supposed to accept. I want my products not smashed... so that makes me a Luddite?
It's the same thing with this magical "AI". I see people trying to hammer it in to places where it will never actually work, work well, or if it does "work" it is not doing what they think it is doing.
I could tell them exactly why it won't work, but they won't believe me. All my years of experience mean absolutely nothing. I'm just a nay-saying old fuddy-duddy Luddite.
Anything that requires creativity is a perfect example. I have absolutely no desire to read an article or watch a movie written by an AI. An AI can not think, or reason, or be creative. If it looks like it is doing that, that is because it is STEALING work from actual people and mashing it up to make it sound original.
Fuck whoever is calling us "Luddites". Fuck them with the biggest, most surreal, splintery, multi honed, inter dimensional, AI-generated wooden dick possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01, @12:55PM
Actually yes.
The original Luddites were not solely against the machines because of job losses, but also that the product they made was far inferior to the product made by skilled craftsmen. The machines just made stuff cheap enough that people would put up with shit quality.
(Score: 2) by Goghit on Saturday August 03, @05:05AM
The Luddites weren't actually anti-technology, some of them owned and operated the same technology they were smashing. What they were concerned about was the appropriate application of that technology, not its use to impoverish skilled workers.
A subtle difference that quickly got buried under pro-rich-guy propaganda. The world isn't that simple, except on the pages of The Economist.
(Score: 2) by jman on Thursday August 01, @01:58PM
Reminds me of "Geek", the origins of which were from the circus days.
I have never sat in my own fillth (at least, not since being an infant) drooling in a hay-filled pen so the crowd may feel better knowing they're not me.
Same with "Nerd". No heavy-rimmed glasses or pocket-protectors here!
Funny how meaning changes over time.