You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
I can talk to something that’s not human all day long, the question is does that thing have qualia? Does it experience? Do my words have even the most abstract meaning to it? Most animals experience even if they don’t have language. What LLM’s are, are simply mirrors. Very complicated mirrors.
It’s fine, it’s great, it’s a step towards making actual intelligences that experience the world in some way. But don’t get swept up in this extremely premature hype over something that only looks magical because you wildly overestimate and over-essentialize the human being. Lets have some fucking humility out there in tech-bro land, even just a little. You’re not that special and the predictive text programs we’re making are not worth the reverence people are giving them. Yet.
Does it matter if it is actually experiencing things? What matters is what you experience while talking to it, not what it experiences while talking to you. When you play videogames, do you actually think the NPCs are experiencing you?
It’s pretty insane how negative people are. We did something so extraordinary. Imagine if someone told the engineers who built the space shuttle “but it isn’t teleportation”. Maybe stop being so judgemental of what others have achieved.
“Uhh actually, this isn’t a fully simulated conscious being with a fully formed organic body that resembles my biological structure on a molecular level… Get this shit out of here”
It’s not negativity, it’s reigning in unwarranted faith and adoration, this is a technology, a product that is largely being made by and for corporate mega-giants who are not going to steer this towards betterment of anyone or anything, just like every other technology, it will take decades or more for any of us to see this take the form of the life changing wonder that too many people are already seeing in it. If you can stop being impressed by how easy it is to mirror human traits back at us, you will let these companies know that you do NOT want advertising AI’s in your fucking toaster.
You want the real thing? Then put some pressure where it belongs and don’t be a hype-person for advertising platforms and plagiarism simulators.
“How easy it is to blah blah blah”… Dude, what the hell are you talking about, there’s nothing easy about this system.
If they release a real AI you’d still dislike it because it was created by a corporation.
And you’re going to be waiting a suspiciously long time before your life is tangibly, positively impacted by any of this. Nothing is changing for the better any time soon, and many things are going to get worse. The carrot will always be a few years away.
The worst part is I want it to succeed and live up to it’s promises, but I am old enough to be smart enough to know that as a species, and I fucking cannot stress this enough, not that fucking special. We do the same sad shit over and over, this is tech promises that will change the world, but not soon enough to actually help because they want to make money from it. That’s the hard truth, the real pill you and all the kids watching this shit are going to have to slowly… ever so slowly… swallow.
I’m already using Copilot every single day. I love it. It helps me save so much time writing boilerplate code that can be easily guessed by the model.
It even helps me understand tools faster than the documentation. I just type a comment and it autocompletes a piece of code that is probably wrong, but probably has the APIs that I need to learn about. So I just go, learn the specific APIs, fix the details of the code and move on.
I use chatgpt to help me improve my private blog posts because I’m not a native English speaker, so it makes the text feel more fluent.
We trained a model with the documentation of our company so it automatically references docs when someone asks it questions.
I’m using the AI from Jira to automatically generate queries and find what I want as fast as possible. I used to hate searching for stuff in Jira because I never remembered the DSL.
I have GPT as a command line tool because I constantly forget commands and this tool helps me remember without having to read the help or open Google.
We have pipelines that read exceptions that would usually be confusing for developers, but GPT automatically generates an explanation for the error in the logs.
I literally ask Chatgpt questions about other areas of technology that I don’t understand. My questions aren’t advanced so I usually get the right answers and I can keep reading about the topics. Chatgpt is literally teaching me how to do front ends, something that I hated my whole career but now feels like a breeze.
Maybe you should start actually figuring out how to use the tool instead of complaining about it in this echo chamber.
As someone who actually has used most of these applications and has to learn how to keep up with it for my own professional reasons, I am speaking from a place of education that this isn’t going to help as many of us as it supposedly is helping you. Nothing you write can make me feel positive about the immediate future.
I know the tech will transform our society, I know it will change everything. I’m not disputing that.
I’m disputing the absolute fucking adoration and hype that you and others are gushing all over this tech like it’s daddy’s big fat knob that has to be lubricated constantly. It’s disgusting because right now it’s all hype and bullshit and exaggeration. It’s making everything worse. We’re a LONG fucking way from transforming humanity for the better with this, that goal is far further away and on the other side of a lot worse hardships that people are cowardly dodging, and none of this is going into helping the people who need the help the most in our world.
It’s so very yay and happy that it makes you feel important at work using shortcuts. I’m sure that you feel special being able to be lazier at work. Yippee. Now please fix the internet while we wait for things to get as good as you’re promising. Please, fix it. It’s getting worse every second with slop we didn’t ask for. I’m sure with all your shortcuts you can do the work of a team to solve this mess.
Yes, I’ll keep using it because it helps me get things done faster, just like vehicles help me move faster.
Read everything you wrote again. You’re so toxic and irrational. It’s just a tool man, just understand its limitations and work with it. It’s very useful even if it isn’t perfect.
Read the way you talked about this shit at the start:
And if my harsh, scary, grown-up language with bad words got you to now call it this:
Then I consider this entire interaction a success. Thank you. I’m done.