this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Feel like we've got a lot of tech savvy people here seems like a good place to ask. Basically as a dumb guy that reads the news it seems like everyone that lost their mind (and savings) on crypto just pivoted to AI. In addition to that you've got all these people invested in AI companies running around with flashlights under their chins like "bro this is so scary how good we made this thing". Seems like bullshit.

I've seen people generating bits of programming with it which seems useful but idk man. Coming from CNC I don't think I'd just send it with some chatgpt code. Is it all hype? Is there something actually useful under there?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As a professional editor, yeah, it’s wild what AI is doing in the industry. I’m not even talking about chatGPT script writing and such. I watched a demo of a tool for dubbing that added in the mouth movements as well.

They removed the mouth entirely from an English scene, fed it the line, and it generated not only the Chinese but generated a mouth to say it. It’s wild.

Everyone is focused on script writers/residuals/etc, which is very important, but every VA should be updating their resumes right now.

Not the exact same thing but you will get the idea here

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow it's smooth too; I was expecting it to look like a creepy old Clutch Cargo cartoon.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will give you just one example. Pharmaceutical companies often create aggregate reports where they have to process a large number of cases. Say, 5000. Such processing sometimes includes analysis of x-Ray or other images. Very specialized and highly paid people (radiologists) do this. It is expensive and is part of the reason why medicine prices are high. One company recently had a trial - if AI can do that job. Turns out it can. Huge savings for the company. And the radiologist lost their job. This is just one example of good and bad things that will and already are happening in our society due to AI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You know this personally or did you just read an article? My wife works in a pharmaceutical company. And if I learned one thing by her stories: there will always be some person responsible for decisions! I doubt the radiologist lost her/ his job. I mean who’s going to jail if the quality was poor and people die?

I rather think AI downsized her/ his engagement. Either just doing an supervision and sanity check or used the tool by itself and increased productivity.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

First of all AI is a buzzword that's meaning has changed a lot since at least the 1950s. So... what do you actually mean? If you mean LLM like ChatGPT, it's not AGI that's for sure. It is another tool that can be very useful. For coding, it's great for getting you very large blocks of code prepopulated for you to polish and verify it does what you want. For writing, it's useful to create a quick first draft. For fictional game senses it's useful for "embedding a character quickly", but again you likely want to edit it some even for say a D&D game.

I think it can replace most first line chat based customer service people, especially ones who already just make stuff up to say something to you (we all have been there). I could imagine it improving call routing if hooked into speech recognition and generation - the current menus act like you can "say anything" but really only "work" if you're calling about stuff you could also do with simple press 1,2,3 menus. ChatGPT based things trained on the companies procedures and data probably could also replace that first line call queues because it can seem to more usefully do something with wider issues. Although companies still would need to get their head out of their asses somewhat too.

Where I've found it falls down currently is very specific technical questions, ones you might have asked on a forum and maybe gotten an answer. I hope it improves, especially as companies start to add some of their own training data. I could imagine Microsoft more usefully replacing the first few lines of tech support for their products, and eventually having the AI pass up the chain to a ticket if it can't solve the issue. I could imagine in the next 10 years most tech companies having purchased a service from some AI company to provide them AI support bots like they currently pay for ticket systems and web hosting. And I think in general it probably will be better for the users, because for less than the cost of the cheapest outsourced front line support person (who has near 0 knowledge) you can have the AI provide pretty good chat based access to a given set of knowledge that is growing all the time, and every customer gets that AI with that knowledge base rather than the crap shoot of if you get the person who's been there 3 years or 1 day.

I think we are a long way from having AI just write the program or CNC code or even important blog posts. The hallucination has to be fixed without breaking the usefulness of the model (people claim guardrails on GPT4 make it stupider), and the thing needs to recursively look at it's output and run that through a "look for bugs" prompt followed by a "fix it" prompt at the very least. Right now, it can write code with noticeable bugs, you can tell it to check for bugs and it'll find them, and then you can ask it to fix those bugs and it'll at least try to do that. This kind of needs to be built in and automatic for any sort of process - like humans check their work, we need to program the AI to check it's work too. And then we might need to also integrate multiple different models so "different eyes" see the code and sign off before being pushed. And even then, I think we'd need additional hooks, improvement, and test / simulation passes before we "don't need human domain experts to deploy". The thing is - it might be something we can solve in a few years with traditional integrations - or it might not be entirely possible with current LLM designs given the weirdness around guardrails. We just don't know.

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[–] lowleveldata 4 points 1 year ago

It is a useful tool to do something that I already know the answer but too lazy to work out. E.g. generate dummy data

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I am super amateur with python and I don’t work in IT, but I’ve used it to write code for me that allows me to significantly save time in my work flow.

Like something that used to take me an hour to do now takes 15-20 minutes.

So as a nonprogrammer, im able to get it to write enough code that I can tweak until it works instead of just not having that tool.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes and it should not be in a handful of companies and also be regulated up the ying yang. https://www.smartless.com/episodes/episode/256975de/mit-professor-max-tegmark-live-in-boston

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That tegmark guy is a good example of what I was talking about. That future of life institute he's a part of has jaan tallinn as one of its founders; a person who is invested in AI companies. So I have a hard time telling what's neutral information and what's marketing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He is not marketing anything except his awful news site and he answers everything very carefully. He talks about them being murder machines but can cure cancer, etc. He said it's like fire in that it's neither good nor bad. I say we try and control fire though.

I was trying to find the NHK World show where they had 6 experts on to talk about he future but couldn't find it. They had one guy saying AI is wonderful and perfect and will only do good. They had one woman saying, regulate, regulate, regulate that used to work for Google. The other 3 were using it all the time so liked it but were still worried about it. Couldn't find it though. It was on last week if you want to give it a go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah ill check it out

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We’ve been using it at my day job to help us outline ideas for our content writers. It writes garbage content on its own, but it is a decent tool for organizing ideas.

At least that is what we use it for. I’m sure there are other valuable uses, but it is not as valuable (to me at least) as it has been made out to be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you say it is comparable for summarizing ideas as a spelling/grammar checker is at checking spelling/grammar?

Helpful, but not close to perfect?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think that is a great way to look at it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm currently building a Jungian shadow work (a kind of psycho therapy) web app using local machine learning and it's doing a decent enough job to continue developing it.

ChatGPT 4.0 is also quite helpful in making my python code less terrible and it's good at guiding me through wherever I'm facing challenges, since I'm more of an ops person instead of a developer. Can't complain, though the coding quality of GPT4.0 has declined noticably within the last weeks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

As someone who works in machine learning (ML) research the use of ML has hit almost every scientific discipline you can imagine and it's been tremendously helpful in pushing research forward.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using it at my job to help me write code, and it's a bit like having a soux chef. I can say "I need an if statement that checks these values" or "Give me loop that does x y and z" and it'll almost always spit out the right answer. So coding, at least most of the time, changes from avoiding syntax errors and verifying the exact right format and turns into asking for and assembling parts.

But the neat thing is that if you have a little experience with a language you can suddenly start writing a lot of code in it. I had to figure out something with Ansible with zero experience. ChatGPT helped me get a fully functioning Ansible deployment in a couple days. Without it I'd have spent weeks in StackOverflow and documentation trying to piece together the exact syntax.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You should try out Codeium if you haven’t. It’s a VSCode toolkit completely free for personal use. I’ve had better results with it than ChatGPT

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

AI has gone through several cycles of hype and winter. There's even a Wikipedia page for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Of course it's valuable to discuss the dangers and inequities of a new technology. But one of the dangers is being misled.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Crypto and AI can't be compared at all. One is an extremely useful and revolutionary tool. The other is just pump & dump ponzi schemes for libertarians.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

layman here.

probably because..

  • it can sift through alot of garbage.
  • its easy to use. and not complicated to understand its value.
  • its useful. like a super search engine for idiots.
  • it can probably automate alot of jobs. also it can probably correct or coverup alot of gaping flaws that have existed for the last few decades.
  • there's nothing else exciting going on right now.
  • it is an interesting and valuable tool. progress has hit a point at which it is hard to ignore the achievements.

** relating to LLMs/chatgpt types. snarky, opinionated, and somewhat speculative, subjective review!

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