You missed the point about early states of tech and pointed to something irrelevant.

The kiddy table is over that way. Adults are speaking here.

Why don’t you point to the things you want to stress and let others point to what they want to make fun of, Sparky?

Since, however, the point of the strawberry thing is escaping you, let me explain it.

EARLY automation was a game changer, pretty much from the day it was introduced. The spinning jenny magnified worker productivity 8-fold in its very first model, and expanded rapidly thereafter. The production of yarn dramatically increased while at the same time the price of any individual unit of it plummeted. A chronic shortage of weft yarn that had been limiting the production of the weaving industry at large suddenly vanished. Any company that put a spinning jenny into their production line saw instant, massive benefits.

EARLY LLMs were amusing idiots recommending glue on pizza and eating rocks. Later LLMs were amusing idiots that couldn’t count the letters in strawberry. Current LLMs are amusing idiots that can’t find the obvious solution to a trivial problem that I literally just tested before posting this:

At NO POINT have LLMs done anything anywhere near as impactful and beneficial as the Industrial Revolution did. They did, however, match and then exceed all the bad effects of the Industrial Revolution, so hey, at least they accomplished something!

So, Sparky, though the strawberry thing may have been clumsily fixed, here’s another just-taken snapshot that shows even the latest LLMbeciles are still trivial to fool, hallucinating the dumbest fucking thing that a TODDLER could find the answer to!:

But hey, now they can count the Rs in “strawberry” finally! Good job! Two big thumbs up!

Seriously? The strawberry thing is well-documented (and personally tested). But of course the people who make the systems don’t ever change them to fix these humiliating errors.

This is the best you can do to defend your slop machines? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

“LLM can too count the Rs in Strawberry (now)!” isn’t the flex you seem to think it is, Sparky.

They could always burn down the buildings.

Where by “they” I mean “the people who are getting screwed over by their county government”.

Must be nice living in a nation whose government looks after the citizens’ interests.

Someone needs to tell universities this. And students, for that matter.

This is precisely why I am suspicious of any and all “disruptive” technologies.

If this technology is so disruptive that it will generate unparalleled wealth for society, then that’s enough wealth that you can afford to keep paying the people about to get displaced and their livelihood destroyed. Don’t want to do this? Fuck your “disruption”.

(And if it’s like LLMs, it won’t be positively disruptive in any light. It’s just a Ponzi scheme for the highest stakes ever.)

Industrial Revolution: New machines almost instantly made factory owners 1000 to 10000 times wealthier.

LLMbeciles: New machines can’t count the 'r’s in “strawberry”.

Sustainable AI practices: practice not using LLMs.

That’s the model every LLMbecile vendor wants and offers. The free chatbots are the loss leader. (With “loss” holding up a lot of lost dollars!) The intent is to have you convert into the paid subscriptions.

Which almost nobody is doing.

I think the better way to word the Turing thing isn’t that the LLMbeciles passed it but rather that humanity failed it.

Yes. That was the important point. The apostrophe. Because nobody could possibly figure out what the message was without it. Even though spoken it would be the same with or without it and readily understandable.

Because pedantry is an extremely attractive trait that is in no way, shape, or form obnoxiously pointless.

Sold back in an inferior version as a subscription.

Destroying Business Value.

Maybe that’s too on the nose?

I take a far harder stance.

People should erase any company that places these adds, any architecture that hosts these ads.

Burn it all down.

You know, as someone who despises LLMbeciles in almost every field they get applied (I think once the hype dies down and the companies pushing them collapse that useful things will come from them, just not in the near future), I find myself in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with someone’s reasons for hating AI.

And note: I’m not saying you shouldn’t hate AI, nor am I saying that your reasons aren’t good reasons for you. I’m saying that your reasons may be symptomatic of something else; that your reasons have been said before about other technologies we all now take for granted, and that in a couple of places you’re being extraordinarily self-absorbed.

Let’s go over a few of these.

That instantly deflated me. This guy really hadn’t done anything other than forward my question, and that elusive keyboard of mine was one question away in some search engine. I should have been excited to finally find out what it was, but somehow instead it felt hollow and totally pointless all of the sudden.

To me this is utterly bizarre. Instead of feeling excited that something you’d looked for for ages was found, you got upset at how it was found. I’m sorry, I can’t relate to this at all. I’m not saying you didn’t feel this way nor even that you should feel this way, but to me it looks like you value years of frustration and failure over getting the thing you were looking for. This is hair shirt territory for me and I suspect to most people. Some of your other things you mention (c.f. below) I have some comprehension of and even sympathy for. But this one just strikes me as a low-grade form of masochism.

To see why, dial this conversation back to pre-1998 when search engines REALLY sucked (just like now!) and before Google came in and completely, radically changed the landscape (your searches actually FOUND things before Google enshittified!).

You’ve been searching for your keyboard on Ask Jeeves and Yahoo and couldn’t find a thing. Then Google pops up and someone Googles it for you and up pops your keyboard. Are you similarly upset? If not, why not?

Fast forward a few years, the same thing happened with my builder the other day: I asked him if he could build a boardwalk in the backyard, so my disabled wife could go get some fresh air safely. I started explaining what I wanted and sketching things on a piece of paper. At some point, he simply got on his feet, whipped out his cellphone, shot a picture of the backyard and asked ChatGPT to draw a boardwalk to my specifications. And in 2 seconds flat, it came up with a photo of the finished thing. And for the second time, it felt totally hollow, and the whole project felt meaningless. It was what I wanted for sure, but it’s now how I wanted it - if that makes any sense.

Here’s where I think you’re being extraordinarily self-absorbed. Sure, you may enjoy tinkering around with paper sketches, talking back and forth, and generally puttering around with manual processes. (I know I do. I mean I’m learning to hand-carve signature chops in a world where I can give a manufacturer an image file, pay under five bucks, and get back a custom signature chop made of any material suitable from wood to stone to brass that is done to perfection on a CNC. But I still prefer to learn carving them by hand with manual chisels.)

But here there’s more than you in the loop. There’s the builder. Whose livelihood this is. They’re not going to want to sit there and futz around with your fetish for hand-drawing sketchy diagrams (pun intended) when there’s a tool that gets exactly the information he needs to actually perform his livelihood in seconds. To the builder time is money, and you’re in effect bemoaning that he doesn’t want to waste time/money to suit your preferences.

Genuine, if pointed, question here: where do you draw this line? If you insisted on, say, measuring everything with a 30cm ruler and he pulled out a tape measure would you be just as upset? Or does that sound ridiculous to you? If the latter, do some simple substitution and…

You are basically demanding here that someone who doesn’t share your fetish for hand-made stuff take time out from his livelihood to suit you despite them being entirely uninterested in it. This goes beyond having a preference for yourself and into the realm of inflicting that preference on others; and here I sharply disagree.

This then leads to these ruminations:

For instance, I’m a fan of 360 photography. I take pride in reworking the nadir in all my shots (don’t ask…) AI could clean it up in seconds and probably do a better job than me with Gimp. But what’s the point? I don’t want to do that! It’s tempting, but then I’d be totally disinterested in the photo after AI is done cleaning it up. So I do it myself.

Likewise, if I have a technical problem, I’ll look for the answer the traditional way, with a search engine. I know I could probably ask Google’s AI thing and it would probably give me the right answer rightaway, but then what would I have learnt? And more importantly, what’s the point of learning anything if the answer is always there? So I refrain. And yet it’s tempting…

AI makes everything pointless and bland, and it leaves me empty and not wanting for more.

Absolutely nobody is telling you to use AI for your own stuff. (Or, rather, nobody whose opinion is worth hearing is. LLMbecile pushers are not people whose opinions are worth hearing.) You can continue doing things the way you enjoy doing them. Like I enjoy carving signature chops by hand. Like I genuinely enjoy writing with a dip pen. Like I enjoy running tabletop RPGs in person instead of playing computer games or using online tabletops. And how I like designing RPG scenarios myself instead of asking an LLMbecile to make a half-assed one, but with lots and lots of fancy verbiage, for me.

You’re coming across here like, say, a painter saying “I don’t want to use a Kodak camera!” in 1888. Or like a photographer saying “I don’t want to use a Land camera!” in 1948. Nobody says you have to, just like nobody told the painter they had to become a photographer or told a photographer they had to put up with crappy, low-quality snapshots. LLMbeciles don’t change anything for you unless you want them to. (Or unless they’re forced upon you by your employer, which is also relatable and something I’d agree with opposing.)

(Also I find it really funny that you’re opposed to using LLMbeciles for search but not opposed to using search engines when in my lifetime there were people sneering at using search engines instead of doing proper research in libraries. “Google-U” was a real insult used by people who Googled stuff instead of doing “proper research”.)

That’s my beef with AI. That’s what I realized today: it’s a bright future I’m utterly indifferent to, that holds zero excitement for me.

But … it’s not for you. Even if LLMbeciles weren’t a hot mess of terrible ethics, fascist creators, IP theft, and hallucinations, even if they were actually as useful as the pushers claim they are, it’s clear that LLMbeciles aren’t for you. And I can respect that.

But … I’m entirely unexcited by video games. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why video games are bad because they don’t suit what I want from games? I’m entirely unexcited by automobiles. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why gearheads are missing the point of life?

I guess I’m trying to say that I find the nature of your objection really … weird. In the “old man shakes fist at clouds” sort of way.

Have you considered just not using LLMbeciles instead of letting them drain the joy from your life and damaging your liver?

What makes you think an AI would have no prejudices, biases, or religious slants even if it didn’t hallucinate everything it said?