Yeah, but if people are being assholes to Claude in greater numbers and severity than people were historically assholws to each other online, the downstream training effects could be that Claude becomes an asshole.
I'm not sure if people are being assholes to claude in greater numbers, or they're just more direct about it.
Having had the privilege and misfortune of witnessing how a lot of developers think about other developers, including our younger selves, There is definitely a prevalence of assholish behavior, which was often suppressed or blunted, but may have shown up in other ways.
Gen-AI images masquerading as photography are slop regardless of whether they are aesthetically pleasing or technically correct. As soon as you know the situation depicted never happened, no one witnessed it, what you’re seeing is a meaningless, derivative mishmash of other photographs. It’s reduced to pretty lights on a screen. If that wasn’t true, why wouldn’t gen-AI “photographers” proudly disclose that their image was produced with AI?
And they can win competitions because photo competitions are usually already within the realm of derivative.
I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.
Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.
Happens on paid too. Every once in a while, one of my conversation names will have random Chinese characters in them. I guess distillation goes both ways.
The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.
AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.
This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.
> If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.
I covered that:
> It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.
There is no shortage of "working code" out there. GitHub is reportedly falling over from all the working code. Where's your business? Who's using it? Why aren't products better yet? It's a mirage. Your "working code" is the same thing as gen-AI "street photography" images. No one wants to see them, yet it's pumped out in vast enough amounts that it's choking the spaces that are ostensible for photography. The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them.
You’re making solid points but I do think that, at least, programming is changing to be around AI generation. Even if not much has changed in terms of visible output. AI may add some marginal GDP growth, nothing explosive. Switching from file cabinets to computers didn’t result in face melting productivity gains despite totally retooling how information flows through a business.
I don't disagree that it is useful. I, personally use it ping-pong coding problems before I break ground (although I never let opencode out of plan mode). It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help before Google allowed SEO to ruin it, and I believe we're watching that edge get cannibalized in realtime as more and more LLM content ends up in the sources that LLMs synthesize in their answers.
If there are any face-melting characteristics to this whole thing it's how much money has been poured into it.
" It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help"
Ok, so as an example, I have a old 2D game of mine. Custom written voxel engine for a shooter game with completely destroyable world. Works great, but 2D.
I always dreamed of making it 3D, but never found the time. It would have been a huuuge effort doing it on my own.
Some days ago I pointed fable at the engine and basically said, make it 3D.
And it did. Took some hours. Not by copying other voxel engines, but by making my engine 3D. (I know because I know there is no game on the market like this)
So yes, I knew the domain and thought long and hard about it and the core is handwritten and battle tested and that probably helped steering it in the right direction. But I did not wrote a single line of this new code. And it works awesome.
This is not what I call marginally improvement. But you do you.
> By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors
Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?
We are good at distinguishing it, but that doesn’t mean the unmitigated flow of Super Intelligence-generated images, music, etc won’t degrade the spaces we share and exhaust people from filtering from the art that they do want.
I can tell an image is AI generated almost instantly, but it nonetheless stomped places like the Photographers of Threads channel. Not that it was great to begin with, but it was something. More and more I’m motivated to only discover photographers via photo books.
For example, I no longer generally enjoy videos of animals doing cute things. LLMs have taken the wonder of that from us, because though animals do really unexpected things sometimes, it's more common these days for it to be someone puppetting an AI in the hunt for internet points. I discard anything post-2022 or so, unless it comes from a known good source. (which also generally has to have a presence pre-2022 in order to feel safe)
LLMs are butchering particular (digital) channels for whimsy and wonder, and it's easy to feel like those channels are everything but they haven't been that way for long and can easily change.
My view: every large online space was basically ruined by an ever-growing advance of inauthentic content pressures starting around 2015. The pools were already pissed in, LLMs are just producing enough piss that, finally, everyone can see it. It's a nuisance in the moment but in the medium term, the human social response will be for the better.
Ideologically I don't consider myself to be a communist or even leftist, so I'm confused by my own reaction as well, but maybe mandatory joint-stock where the government takes a large chunk of equity of any AI enterprise off the bat and manages it like a sovereign wealth fund is the right answer.
There may be an inversion as white collar jobs sink, but not because drywalling is going to get better. All of my family work in trades and it's a lot harder and less stable than we office workers like fantasize, as much as I love the ending of Office Space too. It's cyclical and sometimes there's not enough work. Cost of materials is volatile and can eat into your income. And it's skilled. Programmers tend to think everything else is easy and if you can teach yourself React then electrical should be a no-brainer. That's to say nothing of start-up costs. It was incredible that we coders could bootstrap six-figure careers with a $4000 MacBook Pro. Trades workers need a truck, you need power tools, if you're not loosey-goosey then you need insurance. All of that costs a lot.
That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.
To make matters even worse, if you do apply to these jobs the only thing you get back in return is your data being sold to even scummier organizations. I always use single-purpose emails for everything, so I know where things source from. Imagine my shock when a week or two after applying for jobs I started getting a steady stream of Super Intelligence emails offering to spruce up my resume, or to source leads for me, or some other sketchy service.
Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.
reply