Comment by the__alchemist
6 months ago
I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty.
I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.
> I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics"
The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics.
Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual context of what you're responding to.
To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics".
That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.
I read it more as a claim that people who advocate against AI are picking arguments as a means to an end rather than because they actually believe or care about what they're saying.
Expecting a purely technical discussion is unrealistic because many people have significant vested interests. This includes not only those with financial stakes in AI stocks but also a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. For these groups, the discussion is inherently political, not just technical.
I don't really mind if people advocate for their value judgements, but the total disregard for good faith arguments and facts is really out of control. The number of people who care at all about finding the best position through debate and are willing to adjust their position is really shockingly small across almost every issue.
Totally agree. It seems like a symptom of a larger issue: people are becoming increasingly selfish and entrenched in their own bubbles. It’s hard to see a path back to sanity from here.
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Only among the people who are yelling, perhaps? I find the majority of people I talk with have open minds and acknowledge the opinions of others without accepting them as fact.
> a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology.
Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300 employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.
Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI, and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."
There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We do in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily, but the reality is it has had no outward/visible effect on profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and mandate continues. The only thing that matters is appearing to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line go up.
I've heard the same breathless parroting of the marketing hype at large O(thousands ppl) cloud tech companies. A quote from leadership:
> This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up.
This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.
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| Drop the politics
Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.
Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.
The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.
Hear hear, It's funny having seen the same issue pop up in video game forums/communities. People complaining about politics in their video games after decades of completely straight faced US military propaganda from games like Call of Duty but because they agree with it it wasn't politics. To so many people politics begins where they start to disagree.
There are politics and there are Politics, and I don't think the two of you are using the same definition. 'Making decisions in groups' does not require 'oversimplifying issues for the sake of tribal cohesion or loyalty'. It is a distressingly common occurrence that complex problems are oversimplified because political effectiveness requires appealing to a broader audience.
We'd all be better off if more people withheld judgement while actually engaging with the nuances of a political topic instead of pushing for their team. The capacity to do that may be a privilege but it's a privilege worth earning and celebrating.
My definition is the definition. You cannot nuance wash the material conditions that are increasing tribal polarization. Rising inequality and uncertainty create fear and discontent, people that offer easy targets for that resentment will have more sway.
The rise of populist polemic as the most effective means for driving public behavior is also downstream from 'neutral technical solutions' designed to 'maximize engagement (anger) to maximize profit'. This is not actually a morally neutral choice and we're all dealing with the consequence. Adding AI is fuel for the fire.
The negatively coded, tribal/political speech can be referred to as 'Polemic' which stems from 'warlike' expression.
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IMO this is one of those areas where we (English speakers, likely most other languages as well) collectively suffer from ambiguous words.
It might be more accurate to say "drop the partisanship" or "drop the in/out-group generalizations", etc.
I mean, it is intellectually honest to point out that the AI debate at the point is much more a religious or political than strictly technical really. Especially the way tech CEOs hype this as the end of everything.
> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits.
I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.
It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.
Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous.
It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place.
People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?
Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly take the position that air travel should be banned for environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless, anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find them non-credible.
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The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?
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I wouldn't ignore those arguments but most of the time, they're so poorly formed (eg. using data without logic), they aren't really worth listening to. If you believe AI provides no value, then any environmental cost is too high for you but you can't convey that by trying to dramatize how high it is. That's dishonest and I think people rightly turn off it.
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We’ve all used the tools, and they’re… fine. They probably will contribute modestly to overall productivity in certain fields, but they certainly aren’t as transformative or magical as the current hype suggests. I’m not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn over these things.
> I’m not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn over these things.
I'm not sure why all the replies under this comment are full of projections of extreme opinions I do not hold and never said I did.
If you want to have a conversation with someone who thinks like this you can probably find one in this very thread, so why do you respond to me?
No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument assuming "AI skeptics" are illiterate and/or incapable of understanding. You ironically are the one refusing to accept the possibility that you are wrong.
> No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument
There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN.
If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.
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Maybe you've used it-- but a very large number of the AI skeptic comments I see that actually cite particular experiences, even comments in the pages of HN, amount to things like, "ChatGPT hallucinated when I asked about the local price of product X and if it was in stock anywhere around. How can anyone take LLM and AI seriously?"
Or worse, things like "Real science and real engineering doesn't rely on tools that behave randomly.".
> it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.
Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media?
I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can study the math behind the model, the transformer architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see how it can get more purely technical than that.
The frustrating thing is when you're debating people who firmly believe that generative AI "has no utility"... but also refuse to ever try it themselves.
(Which they might even justify because they've read the transformer paper or whatever. That doesn't help inform you if these things actually have practical applications!)
It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism."
I have no idea why.
I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.
Yep. Same for the other direction: there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and praising AI on Twitter.
Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the agents for things that work better, but being burned out for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they created to our code.
IMO this is a Rorschach test for the politically obsessed because I can't stand politics and have no clue what you are talking about.
You have just trained your brain to be so obsessed with politics you can't but help to see it everywhere.
The adoption and use of technology frequently (even typically) has a political axis, it's kind of just this weird world of consumer tech/personal computers that's nominally "apolitical" because it's instead aligned to the axis of taste/self-identity so it'll generate more economic activity.
AI hating is part of the omnicause because it overlaps with art ho socialism, degrowth environmentalism, and general tech skepticism/ludditism.
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> On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits.
Zero obligation to satisfy HN audience; tiny proportion of the populace. But for giggles...
Technical merits: there are none. Look at Karpathy's GPT on Github. Just some boring old statistics. These technologies are built on top of mathematical principles in textbooks printed 70-80 years ago.
The sharding and distribution of work across numerous machines is also a well trodden technical field.
There is no net new discovery.
This is 100% a political ploy on the part of tech CEOs who take advantage of the innumerate/non-technical political class that holds power. That class is bought into the idea that massive leverage over resource markets is a win for them, and they won't be alive to pay the price of the environmental destruction.
It's not "energy and water" concerns, it's survival of the species concerns obfuscated by socio-political obligations to keep calm carry on and debate endlessly, as vain circumlocution is the hallmark of the elders whose education was modeled on people being VHS cassettes of spoken tradition, industrial and political roles.
IMO there is little technical merit to most software. Maps, communication. That's all that's really needed. ZIRP era insanity juiced the field and created a bunch of self-aggrandizing coder bros whose technical achievements are copy-paste old ideas into new syntax and semantics, to obfuscate their origins, to get funded, sell books, book speaking engagements. There is no removing any of this from politics as political machinations gave rise to the dumbest era of human engineering effort ever.
The only AI that has merit is robotics. Taking manual labor of people that are otherwise exploited by bougie first worlders in their office jobs. People who have, again with the help of politicians, externalized their biologies real needs on the bodies of poorer illiterates they don't have to see as the first-world successfully subjugated them and moved operations out of our own backyard.
Source: was in the room 30 years ago, providing feedback to leadership how to wind down local manufacturing and move it all over to China. Powerful political forces did not like the idea of Americans having the skills and knowledge to build computers. It ran afoul of their goals to subjugate and manipulate through financial engineering.
Americans have been intentionally screwed out of learning hands on skills with which they would have political leverage over the status quo.
There is no removing politics from this. The situation we are in now was 100% crafted by politics.