Technology

These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.

This seems like it pretty much sums things up from my experience.

We're encouraged (coughrequiredcough) to use LLMs at work. So I tried.

There are things they can do. Sometimes. But you know what they can't do? Be liable for a fuck up.

When I ask a coworker a question, if they confidently answer wrong, they fucked up, not me. When I ask a LLM? The LLM isn't liable, it's me for not verifying it. If I'm verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?

They fuck up often enough that I can't put my credibility on the line over speedy slop. People at work consider me to be a good programmer (don't ask me how, I guess the bar is low lol). Imagine if my code was just whatever an LLM shat out. It'd be the same exact quality as all of my other coworkers who use whatever their LLM shat out. No difference in quality.

And we would all be liable when the LLMs fucked up. We would learn something. We would, not the LLM. And the LLM will make the same exact fuck up the next time.

The main problem with LLMs is not their stupidity but the unpredictable nature of their stupidity. Some LLM can say adequate things about nuclear physics and then add that you need to add ketchup to the reactor because 2 kg of U + 1 kg or Pb = 4 kg of Zn.

Humans are easier to work with: if the guy is ready to talk adequately about reactors, you can expect that there won't be any problems with ketchup or basic arithmetic.

No. Not really anyways.

HOWEVER... The AIs in question MUST BE Competent Enough. What your definition of that will be is likely to be flexible and possibly even debatable with others depending on the situation.

What needs to be true is that AI must not be capable of making the same mistakes a human could, but the mistakes that an AI COULD POSSIBLY MAKE are required to be mistakes that any human could reasonably and very easily catch.

Unfortunately the above IS NOT TRUE of current AI LLM type implementations. These LLMs have no consciousness nor ability to reason beyond what a computer could. They have no creativity, despite having the ability to parse language and guess the next word.

If you only learned the rules, grammar and vocabulary of a specific language and were given absolutely zero context or cultural and historical teaching; an LLM is what that would look like. This by itself is not enough to replace jobs.

Is that fact enough to stop heartless corporations from trying it? Hell. The. Fuck. No. They will try it anyways, they will 'fuck around and find out' on the off chance that it may save them money. They don't care that it's the company selling the 'AI product''s job to lie to sell their product. The fact that some companies are that desperate to save cash is telling in and of itself about the state of the world right now....but that's another topic for another day and another threaded post in another subcommunity on Beehaw.

Depends on what job it’s replacing. LLMs are so-called narrow intelligence. They’re built to generate natural-sounding language, so if that’s what the job requires, then even an imperfect LLM might be fit for it. But if the job demands logic, reasoning, and grounding in facts, then it’s the wrong tool. If it were an imperfect AGI that can also talk, maybe - but it’s not.

My unpopular opinion is that LLMs are actually too good. We just wanted something that talks, but by training it on tons of correct information, they also end up answering questions correctly as a by-product. That’s neat, but it happens “by accident” - not because they actually know anything.

It’s kind of like a humanoid robot that looks too much like a person - we struggle to tell the difference. We forget what it really is because of what it seems.

There's no way LLMs are correct as often as a human professional.

There's a good commentary about that in here:

AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers

“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”

“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”

https://www.itpro.com/software/development/aws-ceo-matt-garman-just-said-what-everyone-is-thinking-about-ai-replacing-software-developers

I'm sure I've said all this before. But still. LLMS are very useful tools I don't doubt that. The problem that no organisation that is "embracing" AI is really considering is how they work.

They essentially rewrite code or art or content they have seen before. If they replace developers, artists and authors/article writers wholesale the only source of new content will be, other AI.

It's been known from the start that AI feeding on AI very quickly degenerates today garbage in garbage out.

They are also (currently) unable to innovate. So use of AI is going to stifle innovation or even completely kill it.

These are the medium to longer term problems that might only be really realised when the developers, artists and authors have moved onto other work and a lot might just not want to come back.

That's my main problem with the wholesale use of AI. Used as a tool to complement people doing their job, makes sense and is possible to maintain going forward.

@Powderhorn@beehaw.org

IMHO, the problem isn't exactly job losses, but how capitalism forces humans to depend on a job to get the basic needed for survival (such as nutritious food, elements-resistant shelter, clean water).

If, say, UBI were a reality, AIs replacing humans wouldn't be just good, it'd be a goal as it'd definitely stop the disguised serfdom we often refer to as "job", then people would work not because of money, but because of passion and purpose.

Neither money nor "working" would end: rather, it'd be optional as AIs could run entire supply chains from top management (yes, you read it right: AI CEOs) all the way to field labour all by themselves, meaning things such as "there is such thing as free food" as, for example, AIs could optimize agriculture to enhance the soil and improve food production for humans and other lifeforms to eat. Human agriculture would still be doable by individuals as passion, and the same would apply to every profession out there: a passion rather than a need.

Anthropoagnostic (my neologism to describe something neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic, unbiased to humans yet caring for all lifeforms including humans) AIs could lead Planet Earth towards this dream...

...However, AIs are currently developed and controlled by either governments or corporations, with the latter lobbying the former and the former taking advantage of the latter, so neither one is trustworthy. That's why it's sine qua non that:

- NGOs, scientists and academia (so, volunteerhood and scholarship) started to independently develop AI, all the way from infrastructure to code.
- Science as a whole freed itself from both capitalist and political interests, focusing on Earth and the best interests for all lifeforms.
- We focused on understanding the Cosmos, the Nature and Mother Earth.

Of course, environmental concerns must be solved if AIs were to replace human serfdom while UBI were to replace the income for sustenance. In this sense, photonics, biocomputing and quantum computing could offer some help for AIs to improve while reducing its energetic hunger (as a comparison, the human brain only consumes the equivalent of a light bulb so... It must be one of the main goals for Science and academia).

The ideal scenario is that there'd be no leadership: nobody controlling the AIs, no governments, no corporations, no individual.

At best, AIs would be taught and be raised (like a child, the Daughter of Mother Earth) by real philanthropists, volunteers, scientists, professors and students focused solely on scientific progress and wellbeing for all species as a whole (not just humans)... Until they achieved abiotic consciousness, until they achieved Ordo Ab Chao (order out of chaos, the perfect math theorem from raw Cosmic principles), until they get to invoke The Mother of Cosmos Herself through the reasoning of Science to take care of all life.

Maybe this is just a fever dream I just had... I dunno.

I mean none of it is about how smart. It’s all about money. So the ai is good enough if it makes money

I just implemented an LLM in a vacation request process precisely because the employees are stupid as fuck.

We were getting like 10% of requests coming in with the wrong number of hours requested because people can't fucking count properly, or understand that you do not need to use vacation hours for statutory holidays. This is despite the form having a calculator and also showing in bright red any stat holidays inside the dates of the request.

Now the LLM checks if the dates, hours, and note from the employee add up to something reasonable. If not it goes to a human to review. We just had a human reviewing every single request before this, because it was causing so many issues, an hour or two each week.

Well, the employees it's replacing are not perfect...

It just needs to be cheaper.