Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?

26 points by firechickenbird 3 years ago | 19 comments

With the rising Generative AI hype, I'm starting to feel totally overwhelmed. I'm a tech person and I've always enjoyed tech stuff and innovation. But seriously, with the recent advances in Generative AI, and especially with the absurd proliferation of AI apps that are simple modifications of GPT3/ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, I'm worried about the consequences that it will have on humanity. Nowadays, whenever I see new content online, the first thing that I think about is whether it was created by an AI or a Human. And with all these new AI tools popping around, the Generative bulls*t is expanding even to my emails and my personal/work chats. I feel like I'm suffocating from all this fakeness. Is anybody else in a similar situation? What do you think about this Generative AI hype?

notShabu 3 years ago |

IMO technology overall increases the ambient "responsibility" pressure for everyone, including children.

This artificially ages everyone so now younger and younger people have to learn to cross reference research papers, manage tribal alliances, make bayesian inferences, deal with existential depression, navigate social hierarchies, etc...

Generative AI furthers this trend. Now individuals cannot simply BE in a reality but have to be responsible for constantly managing and curating their own realities while having a rough idea of how others are managing their own realities to work together, have relationships, etc...

I feel this is the root cause of people feeling overwhelmed. It's the responsibility of being constantly alert and ready to enforce boundaries. Like a soldier at war, fighting for the peace of a stable shared reality.

swatcoder 3 years ago |

There's a small but legitimate chance that is the final poison that will spoil the internet we've gotten used to and send many of us back to prioritizing physical, real-world connection with the community physically around us. If automatic generation means noise swamps signal so much that automated curation can't sort them out, the casual internet of strangers looks a lot different.

If so, that's not an apocalypse or the end of global communication or SaaS's or computers -- it would be an adjustment from the last 30 years of forums, blogs, social networks, influencers, and other internet folk content, where we felt like we were connecting with real people all across the world.

But based on how these latter phenomena seem to have affected mental health and physical activity, that might be a good thing. It could be that the Social Media Age was an unsustainable cultural flash and that a different kind of lifestyle experience and internet culture will come up behind.

Minor49er 3 years ago |

A large portion of news stories are provided to networks by the Associated Press, who has been using AI generation for news articles for at least the last half decade

https://web.archive.org/web/20180703132951/https://automated...

Not to mention that bots have been flooding inboxes, message boards, chat rooms, and communities for about as long as anyone can remember

I am also tired of the fakeness, but I think that with enough exposure, the hype will die down and we'll start noticing more patterns that tip us off as to whether or not something is real (at least in areas where it matters)

dstala 3 years ago |

I was an embedded programmer for over 16 years & now part of a web development startup. I had to make a switch from C/C++ to JS/TS. I personally find co-pilot really helpful as it makes my job a lot easier. I doesn't always generate right output, but often it does. More so, if the code that I am generating involves repetitive tasks.

If put to right use, I am sure it will help. But I do agree, putting GPT into pretty much everything is not going to help

muzani 3 years ago |

It's similar to the clickbait era IMO. After a while, you'll get a good feel of what was created by a specific type of AI. I can already smell Midjourney images at a glance, and ChatGPT output.

Just like how you now have a bad feeling when you see the headline "10 Reasons Nirvana Changed Music Forever", you'll start moving around the AI generated stuff.

precompute 3 years ago | |

That's the exception and not the rule, most people are unable to tell if they wrote something.

ted_bunny 3 years ago | | |

Those are probably the people falling for clickbait in the first place, but the proportion of such suckers is growing as the tech advances. What happens when it gets good enough that we can't tell? I think that's soon enough to make it either moot or critical.

loveparade 3 years ago |

> Nowadays, whenever I see new content online, the first thing that I think about is whether it was created by an AI or a Human

That's just going to be the new normal. It means there will be more services that rely on reputation and trust, e.g. verified accounts and credentials. This isn't great news for HN. Unless there are some big changes, I think HN is going to drown in generated content that's indistinguishable from low to medium quality human-written content.

kelseyfrog 3 years ago |

It's one of the best times in recent memory to read Guy DeBord - like a topographic map for a landscape of modern social superstructure.

ilteris 3 years ago | |

Can you elaborate

kelseyfrog 3 years ago | | |

Sure, with the caveat that there are those out there who could give a much better explanation than I.

Take Society of the Spectacle for example. It's a guidebook for those looking to understand the modern media landscape. 56 years on, reading it will take the reader on a journey that vacillates between quaint and prescient. It's written in largely an aphoristic prose that I've found to be fun reading with a partner, using each pithy paragraph as a jumping off point in to discuss its modern implications.

It would be fun and worthwhile exercise to use it as a basis for discussion in the modern generative AI landscape. With the right group, I can see it fomenting great conversations that contextualize what we're collectively experiencing as generative AI content permeates our lives.

rchaud 3 years ago |

One man's oversold hype is another man's $100m Series A. There's money to be made whether or not AI does what it claims.

brandon272 3 years ago |

IMO, we have a choice in whether or not we want to get caught up in hype. Actively choosing to avoid it may mean curating your Twitter feed. It may mean not talking to certain people who can't shut up about it. If you are feeling really genuinely overwhelmed, it might me a good idea to disconnect momentarily and go for a walk. Ground yourself in nature.

noloblo 3 years ago |

it is very healthy for mental therapy sessions

>> But for a few thousand people, the mental health support they received wasn’t entirely human. Instead, it was augmented by robots. >> “People who saw the co-written GTP-3 responses rated them significantly higher than the ones that were written purely by a human. That was a fascinating observation,” he said.

ted_bunny 3 years ago | |

If GPT is good at one thing, it's unconditional positive regard. Unfortunately, I think unless you really goad it, it won't prescribe bitter pills. Self-reported satisfaction with therapy might actually measure kissedness of asses.

skytreader 3 years ago |

I've been in this industry for just over a decade now, been interested in tech/computers just a few years more than that. I'm a few decades more away from being a graybeard but I can say with some confidence that all this hype is mostly fluff. I'm not saying it's meaningless---we're probably not headed to another AI winter when the bubble bursts. After this hype cycle I think we will have some valuable concepts to carry down the line, while the investors will just quietly be looking for the next buzzword.

I make this claim with the following observations:

- As with other aspects of life, the conservative forecasts are often closer to the truth than extreme optimism/pessimism, especially in the long run; there is almost always a regression to the mean, so to speak. The technologists fervently burning with an almost religious zeal for all these AI models are making some egregious claims like "Stable Diffusion/ChatGPT IS (human?) learning", "There is no difference between a human learning from an artist's corpus and a neural net training from said corpus", on which they build extremely shaky forecasts.

- Tech and philosophy aside, there are a lot of other hurdles AI must clear for it to be the disruptive technology that it is portrayed to be. Just my least controversial example: people ask if LLMs will replace search engines anytime soon but, notably, ChatGPT can't fetch you the news, and "conversing" with it is an amusing but cumbersome interface. In the future, I think search engines and LLMs will share utility; based on my own experience using ChatGPT for programming, it is great for greenfield projects but horrible for working with pre-existing code. (Also, by saying "AI is not yet disruptive", I don't mean to imply its economic impact will be negligible---some people will definitely be affected but not the people nor in ways we think of currently. Also, my money is betting that the domain experts will be mostly safe from this impact.)

- I've seen this hype cycle before: a new conceptual/business/technological framework shows an amusing/promising use case which is then exploited to death by a wealth of startups and existing products pivoting, making this a "core" value prop. Remember when Google was a mobile-first company, so everyone prepared to be mobile-first too? When everything was social? That lead to toothbrushes and culinary products having APIs so you can build mobile apps for them. Remember VR? Blockchain? Maybe I'm too jaded but maybe I'm correct. Time will tell.

There's this tongue-in-cheek saying that advanced AI is whatever current AI can't do; in other words, researchers will not ever achieve "advanced AI" because the goal posts will keep moving. As a tech enthusiast who even did undergraduate AI research a decade ago, I really feel bad harboring such negative prognoses on progress that is, hands down, impressive. But how I like to think of it is not that AI progress is failing or underwhelming but that AI progress is helping us understand more of our humanity; when we move the goal posts, it's because we see AI (not) doing something that we consider for granted when dealing with actual humans.

tonguetrainer 3 years ago |

Personally, I don't really care if the content I read is AI generated. I'm getting a bit bored of the Midjourney look, but I love the fantastical imagery I'm seeing otherwise.

I just don't see a problem with this. We are living in exciting times.

ihucos 3 years ago |

I feel similar. I thought I could navigate the darker parts of the web and viewed myself as a native. Now I am also overwhelmed. I don't want something that revulationary.

darth_aardvark 3 years ago |

No.