The difference for me personally:
Web3/NFT/Crypto: what? why?
DALL-E/ChatGPT: wow!
Web3/NFT/Crypto realities: using it is expensive and hard, scams left and right and the government actually arrives but doesn't remedy the damages. People are not in to save pennies on transactions but to get rich quick.
DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it.
DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc.
We will probably hit the limits soon and won't have GAI next year but the stuff already delivered is already useful. The crypto stuff might become useful but its nowhere near the hype.
> DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc.
That's a pretty generous if not biased take, is it not? For me personally, ChatGPT is underwhelming and hasn't done anything remotely impressive when I have used it. And there's a lot of fervor around people using it, but are there interesting use cases outside of advertising? And are there not a ton of harmful use cases? The internet is going to be absolutely filled to the brim with GPT generated junk.
For example, I needed a tag cloud in SwiftUI. Very easy but very boring task, I guess there are tons of libraries for it but I don't like using libraries for this kind of things.
As if it's my junior, I told ChatGPT to generate a tag cloud and it did. It got the main things right but I need it to loop through an array of custom Structs, gave the structure of the Struct and told it to modify the algorithm. ChatGPT did it very well, as if understood the structure of my custom Struct type.
But I needed the tags be clickable, told it to make it clickable and it did and it correctly guessed how to connect a property from my custom type to the click action. I told it to change the colors, size etc and it was able to do it all. Sometimes it generated incorrect syntax but that wasn't a problem because I told to fix it and it did.
If having a junior developer as an assistant isn't valuable, I don't know what is.
I also use it to drill down on my curiosities. Yesterday I was curious how a torrent client can connect to peers to share a file and I made chatGPT explain to me step by step how NAT works, what strategy developers use to overcome issues with it(If curious, apparently they use this thing called STUN server, which is basically a remote machine that the client can connect to learn its own remote IP address). So it's not just a junior but also an expert in a domain that can answer questions conversationally. Much better that Googling keywords because Google is ridden with spam and tries to be clever about your queries without actually being clever. So once I learned the technical keywords like STUN server, then Google became useful again.
This is a silly example but I asked for a list of Star Trek references in Seinfeld and it gave 6-7 examples that all sounded genuine (Jerry makes a joke about transporters in the Contest episode) but were 100% made up. If I wasn't super familiar with the show I wouldn't have been able to tell most were invented. With code generation that's less important because we have ways of testing code for "truth" but I would worry about relying on any factual statements from the thing.
It's a tool that makes some things significantly more easier and it does have risks. It will replace only people who are doing jobs not suitable for people.
I give it five years until even we here are unable to get the attention of a tech company employee to fix our wrongly locked out account because not only are the primary touch points """automated""" but the appeals and appeals of appeals are also entirely automated.
Everyone here will get to enjoy "machine says no" a hundred times more often. Every tech support or bill support or anything support will put you through half an hour of terrible "AI" interaction before you are even allowed to be routed to a human, and businesses will use this to get rid of even more call center employees.
Hate not being able to understand the thick accent in your support call? Get ready for 1% of the time the AI in the phone call puts together sounds that don't actually form words, or just straight up misunderstand what you say, and nobody will believe you because "it's so accurate". Get ready to be gaslit by your fucking phone.
I have an increasing pile of issues with companies’ services that just persist because fixing them requires getting in contact with a human and a human who actually knows something and isn’t just a terminal for the computerized system.
But that didn't stop companies from doing it anyway. The C-suite isn't listening to researchers and the general public, they're looking at what their shareholders think they 'should' do. Once McKinsey and BCG whip out their "AI Digital Transformation" powerpoints, it's over.
It is already filled with human generated SEO junk that is largely worse than GPT junk. Smart people who like to shit on this stuff forget how fucking dumb most people and things are.
This is like turning on your microwave while playing a shooter on WiFi because "the space my router is in is already full of 2.4ghz noise".
I needed a lecture on regex, ChatGPT wrote it for my in 30 seconds. Then I asked it for some problems for the students to solve and it wrote those too.
It may not be relevant to you, but for some of us it is changing the way we work. That hasn't happened since the dawn of the internet, or social media, or mobile phones.
The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.
If you do something in your area of expertise half-way with AI, someone somewhere WILL try to do it all the way and market replacing your expertise with just more black boxes for cheaper, and the people who pay you who aren't experts in your field, WILL be sold on that offer.
Nobody will listen to you when you talk about how it is problematic or wrong or error prone or anything. Think of how angrily people argue about Tesla's camera based self driving, think of all the bad takes people have about how "it's safer than a real person" despite the lopsided and bad statistics behind that claim. Now instead of arguing this with strangers on the internet about an extremely rare outcome that could theoretically kill a random person, now you are having this exact style of conversation with your boss about how the AI model he is saying will replace you has an entire class of errors that humans aren't familiar with and don't seem to notice very well and will absolutely hurt things, but only rarely, in the future.
Get ready for a future where pretty much everything inexplicably fails 1 out of 50 times and nobody will ever be able to tell you why, they won't be able to fix it, and companies prefer this anyway.
So we should expect the Flynn effect to reverse even harder the coming years? The modern classroom is already making kids dumber, this might actually reverse many of the effects of education and put us back very far.
And your students will use it to solve the problems! In the end no one will learn anything and nothing of value was created. Rinse and repeat.
I guess this is my concern - if everyone starts using LLMs for stuff like this, then what's the point of anything?
Because higher education needed more shitty materials for students to parse. Truly a Visionary.
Chat.openai.com is how you are using it in class? They haven't licensed it out in some fashion yet have they?
A chatbot that's relatively accurate at interpreting and summarising stuff compared with previous generation chatbots and an image generation algorithm that's actually pretty good are a damned sight more useful than NFTs which is why I agree with others that the comparison isn't helpful, but I don't think it's realistic to characterise OpenAI and AI enthusiasts in general as under-promising
It's a bit like thinking autonomous parallel parking will automatically bring you fully autonomous cars soon
These people usually aren’t people signing checks—just angry people online, and oftentimes tied in with political motivations. I don’t think many companies are licking their lips at the idea of firing artists (yet). They’re probably thinking about how they can use this to assist artists to get more done faster and at higher quality.
I’ve seen very few people who believe this. On the contrary, most prognostications about Stable Diffusion et al. killing artists’ livelihoods have come from artists themselves, e.g. https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...
The main issue here is that someone is using her name. Luckily she does have legal protections available to her! She can trademark her name!
> “I feel like AI can kind of mimic brush textures and rendering, and pick up on some colors and shapes, but that’s not necessarily what makes you really hireable as an illustrator or designer. If you think about it, the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I’m seeing AI struggling with that.”
Which is spot on! AI is fantastic at rendering (which tends to be everyone's least favorite part of the process) and not so great at everything else.
> “As far as the characters, I didn’t see myself in it. I didn’t personally see the AI making decisions that that I would make, so I did feel distance from the results. Some of that frustrated me because it feels like it isn’t actually mimicking my style, and yet my name is still part of the tool.”
Good art is and will always be about the end result after a series of creative decisions made by the artist.
Professional artists have had assistants that paint large portions of their works since at least the Renaissance. In these cases they rely on their assistants for basic rendering tasks like backgrounds and folds on clothing. What makes it their painting is that they made the creative decisions.
And this is very important: We haven't had these for a very long time. Imagine what they can do in 10 years? Or 6 months?
What about ChatGPT, imagine it in 10 years? Every single task that simply requires reiterating known information can be replaced if desired. That doesn't mean I desire it. But I also know what kind of world we live in. The economy comes first, people second.
That people are angry I can completely understand. I can also understand trying to argue that "this means nothing", and "its a grift", like someone working in oil hearing about climate change. Personally I am in awe that this is possible, but also sad at what will inevitably happen.
AI translation has been around for decades now. It’s pretty damn good these days. But translators still find plenty of work and most of them will tell you that they use AI translation to improve their work efficiency. As with any job, the last 10% of work is always the hardest. AI can get a pretty good “sketch” of what someone wants, but a real artist can polish out the details and make it even better.
The artists that currently make x$ a year off their work will lose access to that income and have to find new careers and then a giant conglomerate will buy all the companies that create digital works and their PR arm will tell us how much better off we all are that Art is cheap and automated and once again we will see individual income not increase for fifty years as GDP doubles again and wealth inequality reaches even stupider heights.
Not saying that there aren't issues that need to be discussed, nor am I saying that there isn't any (unnecessary) hype. But the comparison to Web3 is a stretch.
The author addresses this:
> One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd.
So aren't they just saying "hype is hype"?
(edited an incomplete sentence)