Fuck AI

So, I do LARP. And LARP means you roleplay as someone else. To roleplay as someone else, you need to know a few things. For example, I play a pirate, so I need to know what a forecastle is, what a capstan does, who the boatswain is and that a mizzen is the third mast. I am entirely capable of inventing a 10 minute story that involves lots of nautical terms about chasing and boarding a ship. That story will be entirely plausible and will impress anyone who doesn't know anything about sailing a full-rigged ship. It might even be correct, but not on purpose.

And if you put me in a room with someone who DOES know about sailing anything larger than 4 meters, I'm going to fail as soon as they start talking. Because obviously I only know enough to pretend to be a sailor. I can sound like one just fine, but I'm not.

LLMs are larping at being experts. They can't actually do anything, they can only sound convincing. They might even be right, but they won't be right on purpose.

Personally, I don't think there is a solid plan. Any plan. They are throwing very expensive spaghetti at the wall, mostly undercooked, and little sticks. They are the gamblers at the roulette table betting the house on double zero.

Proven usefulness is rare. Helping people with disabilities leading a more independent life is one of those. Are those the folks with deep pockets? I think film making will include this in one way or another. Does that justify building all these data centers and the costs attached? The only area where I would say to hell with the costs is if this can help in the fields of medicine or pharmacology but I don't think they have proven usefulness there satisfactorily. So who will pay back the insane debt this pie in the sky is baked with? Answer: anybody, as far as the so-called-AI peddlers are concerned. But that wasn't the plan. That's probably already pivot plan T at this point. It's not built for normies, but it's marketed towards them, out of necessity at this point. To the detriment of overall ability to think critically and for the environment.

Yeah, that's the big irony of this all: natural language is pretty much the worst way of conveying information for any task that's even slightly technical. There's a reason why architects don't just tell the construction workers what the building is supposed to look like.

The one thing it does have going for it is accessibility, but unfortunately, it doesn't lead to transferable skills. Like, if you do something like building with Legos, cardboard crafts, make collages from magazine clippings etc. and you want to start doing something more advanced, say, carpentry or graphic design, then what you've learned previously is still valuable. But if you just vaguely order an AI around until in produces something that "looks about right", all you've gained is the skill set of a clueless executive and the limits of the model are your limits.

However I have to give it to them when it comes to amazing outsiders. They often already thought digital art or composing on the PC was something like what the AI was, only they didn't know what button to press.

I don't understand, what do you mean?

k