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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 6 months ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] ebu@awful.systems 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".

like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

The y-axis is absolute eye bleach. Also implying that an "AI researcher" has the effective compute of 10^6 smart high schoolers. What the fuck are these chodes smoking?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They're just one step away from "Ouija board as a Service"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ouija Board, Sexy Lady Voice Edition

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

Either sexy voice or the voice used in commercials for women and children. (I noticed a while back that they use the same tone of voice and that tone of voice now lowkey annoys me every time I hear it).

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but don't currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it "speak", then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly "engaged" with the idea of a person'd pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isn't there

(combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but they're not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

https://mander.xyz/post/13749821 that's probably this not sure if it ever happened

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.

I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying "Hi! I'm Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!"

Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.

When half his college students gasped, he said "THAT'S where all this AI hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're GREAT at imagining non-conscious things are people."

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

how exactly did he get googly eyes on a pencil. big "then an eagle flew around the classroom" energy

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 6 months ago

yeah, was that. not sure it happened either, but it's a good concise story for the point nonetheless :)

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Same with when they added some features to the UI of gpt with the gpt40 chatbot thing. Don't get me wrong, the tech to do real time audioprocessing etc is impressive (but has nothing to do with LLMs, it was a different technique) but it certainly is very much smoke and mirrors.

I recall when they taught developers to be careful with small UI changes without backend changes as for non-insiders that feels like a massive change while the backend still needs a lot of work (so the client thinks you are 90% done while only 10% is done), but now half the tech people get tricked by the same problem.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

i suppose there is something more "magical" about having the computer respond in realtime, and maybe it's that "magical" feeling that's getting so many people to just kinda shut off their brains when creators/fans start wildly speculating on what it can/will be able to do.

how that manages to override people's perceptions of their own experiences happening right in front of it still boggles my mind. they'll watch a person point out that it gets basic facts wrong or speaks incoherently, and assume the fault lies with the person for not having the true vision or what have you.

(and if i were to channel my inner 2010's reddit atheist for just a moment it feels distinctly like the ways people talk about Christian Rapture, where flaws and issues you're pointing out in the system get spun as personal flaws. you aren't observing basic facts about the system making errors, you are actively in ego-preserving denial about the "inevitability of ai")