Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?

Phones are also a very popular mechanism for scamming businesses. It's tough to pull off CEO scams without text and calls.

Therefore, phones are bad?

This is of course before we talk about what criminals do with money, making money truly evil.

True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Saying that the tools make mistakes is correct. Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

History is paved with people who got steamrollered by technology they didn't think would ever work. On a practical level AI seems very median in that sense. It's notable only because it's... kinda creepy, I guess.

As a filmmaker, my friends and I are getting more and more done as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

As long as humans are driving, I see AI as an exoskeleton for productivity:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft (this is what I'm making)

It's been tremendously useful for me, and I've never been so excited about the future. The 2010's and 2020's of cellphone incrementalism and social media platformization of the web was depressing. These models and techniques are actually amazing, and you can apply these techniques to so many problems.

I genuinely want robots. I want my internet to be filtered by an agent that works for me. I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

Apart from all the other madness in the world, this is the one thing that has been a dream come true.

As long as these systems aren't owned by massive monopolies, we can disrupt the large companies of the world and make our own place. No more nepotism in Hollywood, no more working as a cog in the labyrinth of some SaaS company - you can make your own way.

There's financial capital and there's labor capital. AI is a force multiplier for labor capital.

I mean, I think you have not put much thought into your theory.

And like with the child pornography, the AI companies are engaging in high-octane buck passing more than actually trying to tamp down the problem.

The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant. Yet modern ‘AI’ has all sorts of actual problems.

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.

They are investing 10s of billions.

What happens when the AI bubble is over and developers of open models doesn't want to incinerate money anymore? Foundation models aren't like curl or openssl. You can't have maintain it with a few engineer's free time.

As an LLM I use whatever is free/cheapest. Why pay for ChatGPT if Copilot comes with my office subscription? It does the same thing. If not I use Deepseek or Qwen and get very similar results.

Yes if you're a developer on Claude Code et al I get a point. But that's few people. The mass market is just using chat LLMs and those are nothing but a commodity. It's like jumping from Siri to Alexa to whatever the Google thing is called. There are differences but they're too small to be meaningful for the average user

imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.

hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.

But in all seriousness, ai does a pretty good job at impersonating VPs. It’s confidently wrong and full of hope for the future.

Phase 1: 1-2 weeks

Phase 2: 1 week

Phase 3: 2 weeks

8 to 12 hours later, all the work is done and tested.

The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.

I find it unfunny for the same reason I don't find modern SNL intro bits about Trump funny. The source material is already insane to the point that it makes surface-level satire like this feel pointless.

Maybe if we ever return to normal times and also don't let the other 90% of corruption stay where it's been for the past 40 years we can start to ease off the noise.

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

> , there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.

Same with LLMs.

> AI is not a net good.

You're falling into the same trap as previous generations when you do that. You won't actually end up fixing or improving the negative impacts of AI and your country/society will lose out big time in all sorts of ways.

Tech doesn't make things bad, people do to the most part. Where AI is abused, it needs legislation, not resistance and you should know it is a LOT more nuanced than that. How is an LLM language translator for tourists being loped in the same bucket as LLMs being used to target people for assasination? Your lack of nuance is laziness, no political or ideological stand can justify that laziness.

Nuclear energy had a lot of negatives, and people made the same types of arguments and outright banned it, next time you complain about climate change consider that your way of thinking might be part of the problem. Right now datacenter build outs are contributing to water scarcity for example, so instead of doing the hard and nuanced work of actually regulating and fixing that you oppose AI entirely. You do the easy thing, in the end we live in the real world and supply/demand economics rules, so your resistance is only performative at best, or catastrophic to the economy at worst. The latter part isn't for billionaries, and it isn't just for job markets, when the economy goes, all the climate change talk goes with it, all the EVs, green energy initiatives,etc... go, wars and crises increase, disease outbreaks increase. Doing the easy thing leads to this is my point, not that you need AI to prevent those.

> I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.

100x it would! although whose children depends on who regulates it first. My bet is China and the EU will regulate the crap out of it and extract the most value for themselves and future generations. AI is just solution, a tool, it isn't magic as you very well know. Companies have being using ML for surveillance for a long time. The US gov was using life of pattern analysis ML ten years ago to pick out assassination targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have a fundamental lack of laws and a broken system of governance, don't take that out on tech.

Capitalism demands profits. Competition is bad for profits. Multiple factories are bad for profits. Multiple standards are bad for profits. Expensive workers are bad for profits.

This also ignores the broken fucking copyright system that ensures once you create something you get many lifetimes of fucking off without having to work, so if genAI kills that I won't shed a tear.

I can certainly criticize specific things respectfully. If I prioritised demonstrating my moral superiority I could loudly make all sorts of disingenuous claims that won't make the world a better place.

I certainly do not think people should be making exploitative images in Photoshop or indeed any other software.

I do not think that I should be able choose which software those rules apply to based upon my own prejudice. I also do not think that being able to do bad things with something is sufficient to negate every good thing that can be done with it.

Countless people have been harmed by the influence of religious texts, I do not advocate for those to be banned, and I do not demand the vilification of people who follow those texts.

Even though I think some books can be harmful, I do not propose attacking people who make printing presses.

What exactly are you requiring here. Pitchforks and torches? Why AI and not the other software that can be used for the same purposes?

If you want robust regulation that can provide a means to protect people from how models are used then I am totally prepared (and have made submissions to that effect) to work towards that goal. Being antagonistic works against making things better. Crude generalisations convince no-one. I want the world to be better, I will work towards that. I just don't understand how anyone could believe vitriolic behaviour will result in anything good.