I think there is a major difference in that climate change is real, while AI companies are constantly hampering on about a threat which is basically just science fiction. It would be like if Exxon was constantly warning about oil drilling opening up a portal which would unleash monsters with 10% chance of killing all humans.
AI companies are still very silent about the actual risks of their products. That this is addictive, that it causes atrophy, that its usage among children is bad for their education, that in worst cases it psychosis, and is often used to harm others and for criminal activities.
This reminds me of the behavior of cigarette companies. Except instead of only staying silent on the risks of their products (and funding pseudo-scientific studies to muddy the waters) they invent risks which do not exist. And then use these stories as evidence for these made up risks. In the non-AI world this is called consumer hostile behavior, but in AI the fact that their products are faulty, and unsafe, is called misalignment.
Our fracking activity is causing the tap water to catch on fire, causing small earthquakes, and killing all the wildlife, so you (government) better stop us. But we can't stop because if we do, China might open up the hell portal first!
I think I heard that we’ll be fracking with nuclear materials soon so we can harvest the tritium water as a byproduct. Does anyone know if that’s just a wild, stupid theory that will never work, or an actual idea being explored? Sounds horrifying.
Tech companies have not had to answer to the law for a long time. We are now seeing that tech companies straight up break into each others servers and nobody is charged with any crime for it. I think it is safe to say that crime is legal for rich tech companies.
So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.
Tech companies have gotten away with many things in Europe too. Case in point TEMU is allowed to brake basic consumer protection laws throughout the continent probably because it is considered a tech company. Other cases include Spotify which is allowed to break media laws because it is considered a tech company (ditto Facebook).
The fines given to tech companies is only nominal and really only a spectacle. There should be consequences for breaking laws, these fines have just turned into the cost of doing business and are ultimately just payed for by the consumers who pay by watching more ads or paying higher subscription fees.
The most telling sign is when they don’t make sense — for example right here.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
AI is not likely to kill all humans. This is just fantasy or science fiction which for some reason (mass hysteria; or more likely malicious marketing campaign by evil AI companies) a lot of HN users seem to believe is real. It is not real. AI does not have the agency nor the capabilities to kill all humans, nor is there any way for any technologically possible AI (no matter how powerful) to possess the agency nor the capabilities.
This 10% chance should be replaced with “a number some people made up”
As it stands the chances of AI killing every human is exactly 0%. There is no scenario which exist in the realm of all possibilities where AI even comes close to killing all humans.
I don‘t think Europe, Africa nor (most of) Asia is dealing with crimes committed via AI any differently then USA. I think the problem runs much deeper then USA = bad here. Europe in particular has been laxing their consumer protection for decades now (since the end of the Cold War) and it is very rare that regulators enforce existing regulations on big tech companies.
I think the problem is neo-liberal laissez-faire capitalism.
They do. Even if you exclude homicides and accidents (which you shouldn’t) major depression becomes much much much more deadly if you have access to a gun.
Guns make violent crimes (including common stuff like robbery, domestic disputes, or even road rage) much more deadly then it needs to be.
This is silly. There is close to 0% chance humans kill all humans, and there is exactly 0% chance AI kills all humans.
AI is bad because of the harms it currently causes. It is highly addictive is bad for your brain, it is being given away for free to children in hopes they become addicts. It is being used to harm people including via sexual exploitation and coercion.
The 10% chance of AI killing all people is a made up figure that we need not nor should be concerned about. We should be concerned about AI for the proven harm it already causes.
Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.
It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.
Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.
That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.
Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.
Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.
This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.
It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
Please, do not use LLMs to do actual statistics. They suck at doing actual statistics (like they suck at everything else).
Use proven traditional statistical methods like supervised learning for this. You can use traditional (not large) language models to tokenize the content and then a supervised learning trained on the most popular models to detect if those models generated the content.
As someone that hates Tailwind, I think there is actually a use case here. If you are fluent in CSS reaching for Tailwind is probably a mistake. But for better or for worse there are lots of developers who can write HTML and JavaScript (or more likely React) who will not, and do not want to, learn CSS, for them things like Tailwind is a godsent.
I do think Tailwind is overused, but it obviously has some legitimate use case.
AI companies are still very silent about the actual risks of their products. That this is addictive, that it causes atrophy, that its usage among children is bad for their education, that in worst cases it psychosis, and is often used to harm others and for criminal activities.
This reminds me of the behavior of cigarette companies. Except instead of only staying silent on the risks of their products (and funding pseudo-scientific studies to muddy the waters) they invent risks which do not exist. And then use these stories as evidence for these made up risks. In the non-AI world this is called consumer hostile behavior, but in AI the fact that their products are faulty, and unsafe, is called misalignment.
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