I have the $8/month ChatGPT 'GO' plan. I generally use it in the traditional 'text query'/'text response' type format, but yesterday I was driving back on the freeway from another state and decided to use the Android app's voice feature and was kind of shocked. I had to look up this morning what I was using (the latest 'Live 1 Instant' mode) but it's surprisingly natural. It's convivial, and responsive in the manner of an interested, enthusiastic sparing partner who never gets offended, in pretty much whatever wild thing you want to discuss, from a moment to moment basis if that's what you want. It's eerie in the way that you can interrupt it and re-point the direction of the discussion, and it just instantly jumps on-board.
re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was saying that I could easily see populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.
And like a cult to those of us preferring not to engage, for whatever reason, with everyone and their dog telling us that we should (and sometimes getting quite offended, like our refusal to play that game is a personal attack on them for choosing to).
I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so many people when the benefits were just plainly obvious.
If you want to avoid the technology go nuts. I just hope you're doing so knowing how important it will be to the future. It's also almost satire how outdated the assumptions of many people who don't engage are. "It mostly lies to you anyway" or "It can't even count the number of letters in a word" are such silly things to say about the technology these days. As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.
My gripes mostly come with people who don't engage with it and then spout memes/misinformation (ironic) about AI as if they're experts. Usually akin to "That internet stuff is garbage, pictures take 2 minutes to load!" after everyone and their dog already has broadband.
You can also find something uninteresting without brow-beating people about it. Goes both ways. Just giving my experience with it, take it or leave it. The comment I was replying to seemed to wonder why people didn't understand non-engagement with the tech, I gave my reasoning. The cost of engaging is also so slim (and it's freaking everywhere) that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.
The amount of strawmen and false equivalencies here is crazy. I bet you can't name one person who refused to get Internet because photos don't load fast enough.
There was a whole gaggle of people who refused to get it for that and a few other "user friendliness" reasons. And I completely understand it.
>Across all groups of users, taking too long to download pages (i.e. "speed") is the most commonly experienced problem with the web (64.8% of respondents).
>Online retailers especially should take note: 53% of respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching for product information simply because the site was too slow.[1]
It's strange to think about now but roughly half of people in the US didn't have internet in the year 2000. And half of people that had the internet weren't making any purchases. People didn't trust or see much use for the tech back then and it was really hard to convince them.
I understand that internet adoption wasn't universal in 2000. You're saying they refused to get it because photos took too long to load. That's an absolutely absurd statement.
I genuinely cannot understand how you can possibly find fun in LLMs. They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do, they are being shoved down the throat of the entire industry by massive FOMO, and if they ever can actually live up to the hype it's clear that we will all (every human, not just programmers) be out of jobs as the oligarchs replace us with machines who don't get tired or require a cut of the money. So they are either useless toys, or the most dystopian thing the tech industry has ever created. Where, exactly, is the fun in either of those outcomes?
Some of us don't believe they're useless toys or that they're going to destroy society.
I was a skeptic of them for a long time, but I appreciate that I can use them to get tedious nonsense out of the way thus allowing me to spend more time on the interesting and challenging parts of my projects.
The initial hype of them is annoying, but as time goes on it'll die down and we'll figure out where and how best to use them. There's no reason to believe that this will finally be the time a new technology ruins everything.
>They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do
This is the one I don't understand the most out of all the gripes. I find it genuinely unsettling how much I've done over the past couple of days (and with little to no mistakes or bugs in the code that I can find) by just broadly asking Astra to do it. I understand why you'd feel the technology sucks 2 years ago, but these days the models are becoming way too good at what they do.
I agree that if it lives up to the hype we're in for major societal upheaval. Existential crisis is a very real part of looking at this tech for what it is. But I also don't see how not using it stops that. It'd be like not ever taking an airplane to prevent climate change and wondering why it didn't work.
The fun is in being able to finish projects you've had rattling around in your head for years but never had time to do. Or researching and discovering things that you'd never bother with previously because the internet has become an impossible to navigate cesspool. Or learning things in a way that is completely customized to your speed and level of knowledge.
I have to hold 2 thoughts in your head at the same time: the technology is empowering at an individual level while also being highly disruptive at a societal level. We're not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point.
> As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.
As is going on about the water thing being somewhat over-blown, while quietly ignoring the other environmental issues:
• The use of energy meaning greater carbon output because that side of the power industry can initially spin up more quickly (in part by using resource that we'd previously decided not to use in favour of other options), an issue exacerbated by the US essentially trying to block one of the alternative options (due to Trump's fear of wind).
• While the use of water might be overstated overall, it is a problem in some places where new datacentres are being planned - this is one of the reasons that some cities are blocking permissions currently.
Other issues with the growth of datacentres is local parts of power grids not being designed to cope with the load and many building plans not taking this into account (and therefore offering investment to help the situation).
And there are economic factors…
[splicing in your other comment to keep things together]
> The cost of engaging is also so slim
For now, because all the providers are currently pumping in the investment money without turning a profit, with the notable exception of the shovel sellers (Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD and smaller chip makers, ref: https://isaiprofitable.com/). Even most of the paid accounts operate at a loss ATM, it is the Amazon model pushed industry-wide. Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency right around the corner, that is a trap and those becoming dependent on it being a cheap resource are going to get bitten badly when it comes time that those investments start getting called in.
Then there are the problems elsewhere with demand making other equipment much more expensive both for end users and companies.
Of course me opting out won't affect these issues in any meaningful way, but I can at least claim not to be even a small part of the problem. The same for supporting companies that have run roughshod over the sort of IP issues that an individual would have seen ridiculous fines and even prison time for, with slaps on the wrist being the most anyone saw from their actions (at least going by their own public accounting) - I don't want to feel part of that either. And the weighing down sites with constant scraping matter.
And that is before considering that maybe I'm a bit odd and the things it is taking on in my profession are the few parts of it that I haven't grown a dislike for! I want to puzzle over the details and not lose contact with what is actually going on, thankyouverymuch. “It is like being a manager” people say, as if that will attract me despite knowing how many times I've refuse advancement in order to avoid being a manager over the years. That and “why not consider it a remote colleague”, when it is known in the company that remote work really doesn't work for me (i nearly went completely bat-shit in 2020/2021) and only put up with it because I have no choice but to make the effort (I may be in the office, but if the people I'm working with are not then I'm still effectively remote). I foresee a future where most devs have no one to talk to all day but Claude or similar, and before that happens I will have long since left for pastures different (and yes, I know, likely rather menial).
> (and it's freaking everywhere)
So is vaping, I don't fancy trying that either.
> that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.
Or a principled aversion. You might not agree with the principals, or consider acting upon them to be pointless self-sacrifice, but that doesn't make them non-existent. The fact that you must have read some of these concerns from a number of people by now but either dismiss them out of hand or just assume those acting on them are nuts, is a soft form of the religious reaction I initially referred to: anything that isn't what you are comfortable with, is pointless, silly, or just plain wrong.
I don't badger colleagues and friends who use the tech for doing so, but by buggery do some of them badger me for not.
These companies are going too far too fast like we always do as humans, and I agree the negatives aren't going to be pleasant. But there are industries and products out there that we all use currently that have way worse externalities that we just shove to the side in our minds because they've been around since before we could yell on twitter about them. The beef industry is a nutty thing to exist in its current form. Oil and plastics what the hell are we even doing? My guess is if you put your head down and did the research AI doesn't even rank in the top 10 of problematic things that people use daily.
Air travel, everyone having a nice green super watered lawn / golf courses, air conditioning in every home, fast fashion. A single person using AI for their work doesn't even register on the list of offences if you compare it to these things. Driving an ICE car every day for more than 30 minutes is wild. Hell it probably doesn't even use as much power as playing a video game on a good graphics card for 2 hours.
The thing I've resigned myself to is very few people will change anything at all for the greater good of society that gives them even a minor inconvenience. See: COVID restrictions. My honest take is we're absolutely doomed as a species unless we come up with novel solutions to the problems we're facing. And guess what AI is showing itself to be extremely good at in various fields [1][2][3]? It's a pipe-dream hope, but the hope is there. And AI when compared to the decades (sometimes centuries) of oil, beef, coal, whatever else won't even be a pixel on the screen of reasons why climate change is happening for some time yet. And it will highly incentivize mass production/adoption of the cheapest power sources which also happens to be renewables. I understand it doesn't look like that right now as people like Elon make their disgusting data centers, but over time I'd bet on it only because the financial incentive is there.
The discussion is far more nuanced than "AI bad". I understand the horrific aspects of it, but there is plenty of good to be found there too. Accessibility, translation, help with learning disabilities. The list of good outcomes goes on for a long while. It's a powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. In my opinion we need more people with the principles you speak of to be using powerful tools for the benefit of those principles.
