Fuck AI

This actually relates, in a weird but interesting way, to how people get broken out of conspiracy theories.

One very common theme that's reported by people who get themselves out of a conspiracy theory is that their breaking point is when the conspiracy asserts a fact that they know - based on real expertise of their own - to be false. So, like, you get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography that they know aren't true. Or you get some MAGA person who hits their breaking point over the tariffs because they work in import/export and they actually know a bunch of stuff about how tariffs work.

Basically, whenever you're trying to disabuse people of false notions, the best way to start is always the same; figure out what they know (in the sense of things that they actually have true, well founded, factual knowledge of) and work from there. People enjoy misinformation when it affirms their beliefs and builds up their ego. But when misinformation runs counter to their own expertise, they are forced to either accept that they are not actually an expert, or reject the misinformation, and generally they'll reject the misinformation, because accepting they're not an expert means giving up on a huge part of their identity and their self-esteem.

It's also not always strictly necessary for the expertise to actually be well founded. This is why the Epstein files are such a huge danger to the Trump admin. A huge portion of MAGA spent the last decade basically becoming "experts" in "the evil pedophile conspiracy that has taken over the government", and they cannot figure out how to reconcile their "expertise" with Trump and his admin constantly backpedalling on releasing the files. Basically they've got a tiny piece of the truth - there really is a conspiracy of powerful elite pedophiles out there, they're just not hanging out in non-existent pizza parlour basements and dosing on adrenochrone - and they've built a massive fiction around that, but that piece of the truth is still enough to conflict with the false reality that Trump wants them to buy into.

AI only seems good when you don't know enough about any given topic to notice that it is wrong 70% of the time.

This is concerning when CEOs and other people in charge seem to think it is good at everything, as this means they don't know a god damn thing about fuck all.

Which explains why C-suites push it so hard for everyone

The breadth of knowledge demonstrated by Al gives a false impression of its depth.

AI has been excellent at teaching me to program in new languages. It knows everything about all languages - except the ones I'm already familiar with. It's terrible at those.

let's not confuse LLMs, AI, and automation.

AI flies planes when the pilots are unconscious.

automation does menial repetitive tasks.

LLMs support fascism and destroy economies, ecologies, and societies.

I just focus on the parts of what I do know that AI can help me with, not try to say AI can replace other people, but not me. That's some dumb shit.

That's also why the billionaires love it so much:

they very rarely have much if any technical expertise, but imagine that they just have to throw enough money at AI and it'll make them look like the geniuses they already see themselves as.

This has also been coined the Gell-Mann [Amnesia] effect and is perhaps a kind of corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people fail to recognize competence.

Truly intelligent people respect the work of professionals and experts in other fields. Or maybe, this is even fundamentally a respect problem.

It's why managers fucking love GenAI.

My personal take is that GenAI is ok for personal entertainment and for things that are ultimately meaningless. Making wallpapers for your phone, maps for your RPG campaign, personal RP, that sort of thing.

Ignorance and lack of respect for other fields of study, I'd say. Generative ai is the perfect tool for narcisists because it has the potential to lock them in a world where only their expertise matters and only their oppinion is validated.

So the only real business model here is for people to be able to produce things they are not qualified to work on, with an acceptable risk of generating crap. I don't see how that won't be a multi-trillions dollars market.

and all the things we aren’t experts in, we’re unqualified to be the evaluators of the AI’s output

IDK about that I'm a professional slop maker and I think it could replace me easily.

So Gen AI is like Dan Brown, the more you know about the subject the more it sucks

This is why leadership loves it. They don't know shit about fuck.

Gell-Mann amnesia

Hot take: it's reasonable for a comics student to use AI for script-writing and for a screenwriting student to use AI for concept art, not because machine can generate meaningful artistic work at these fields but because these are not the fields they are trying to learn.

In a way, this can be used to level the field. The comics professor can use the same LLM to generate scripts for all their students. It'll be slop script, but the slop will be of uniform quality so no student will have the advantage of better writing and it'd be easier to judge their work based on the drawing alone.

And even if AI could generate true art in some field - why would it be acceptable for a student to use it for the very field they are studying and need to polish their own skills at?

Funnily enough, all my engineering professors seem to encourage the use of genAI for anything as long as it’s “not doing the learning for you”

What’s funny is that there’s basically no practical use for GenAI in engineering in the first place. Images like technical drawings need to be precise and code written for FDM/FEA etc. needs to be validated by some kind of mathematical model you derived yourself.

They say “it’s a useful new tool” and when I ask “what is it useful for” they typically have no answer besides “writing grant proposals” lol

There are lots of useful applications for machine learning in engineering, but very few if any practical applications for genAI.

I agree with this. I tell people to ask it questions about things they know about. Then, when they see how many errors it makes, ask them why they assume it's any better on a topic they don't know about.

You see the same effect in journalism. News stories seem pretty authoritative until you read one about a subject you know.