Didn’t expect an onion article here.
Well… I thought it was relevant and humorous, and the rules don’t say the submissions have to be news. I might be stretching the definition of “discussions” but, figured it was worth a try :-)
This article is clearly about beans, not onions.
Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.
Regardless of how much of a bubble we’re in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It’s proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it “magic beans” is just wishful thinking at best.
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
Can’t say I’ve seen B anywhere. All I’ve seen is “tech billionaire CEOs want LLMs to take all our jobs and turn us into slaves,” not so much belief that they can. Perhaps you’re misinterpreting?
Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that’s great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.
But yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to complain about how “inefficient” an early technology is and also call it “magic beans”.
Hey! Are you up to talking about your opinions on the value of current AI technology? I’m personally opposed due to how our society has chosen to organize itself, but I think the basic concept is interesting.
Agreed. I’ve been following the technology of neural networks and generative AI since before LLMs were the new hotness and it’s fascinating and powerful stuff.
My qualms with what’s happening now are more about how we organize our economy and society. Rushing them to market, aggressively trying to cull workers, etc. are critiques of capitalism not AI. In a different world we would all be excited about the prospect of having to work less and reap the benefits of AI, but we wouldn’t be reopening coal plants and leaving people to starve on the street.
No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.
Your estimation of what constitutes “objective reality” is in fact the opinion that you’re being asked about.
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.
Twitter wasn’t profitable for its entire existence, it’s often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.
Same for doordash and uber eats.
Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they’re not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.
None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality
You saying your opinion is objective reality does not make it so. I agree that LLMs have their (few, niche) uses, but you’re just being arrogant here.
I have made only factual statements. You can believe I’m arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is “niche” or “few” in number. Those are called opinions.
Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?
These ones:
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.
None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts.
It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And of course, the entirety of your first comment here.
Nothing of what you’ve stated has proven any of the above. Not that you care; you’ve decided you’re right, and therefore any opinion you hold must automatically be fact. Far as I can tell, you’re here to stroke your ego. Keep at it if you want, I guess — I’m not going to debate someone who only wants to hear themselves talk.
