… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).
On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.
… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).
On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.
LLMs are for murdering the entirety of human culture and experience. They cannot work without doing so; it is their entire purpose: murder human creativity and then feed its rotting, dismembered corpse back to us.
So I say the parallel stands. Guns kill people. LLMs kill culture.
(P.S. Target shooters seem to not be killing when using guns.)
Is it the training process that you take issue with or the usage of the resulting model?
Training model and the fact that you have to, in effect, burn down a tree to get it to generate an email for your¹ lazy ass. And a small copse of trees to generate a piece of shit “art”.
¹ General “you”, not you specifically.
The energy usage is mainly on the training side with LLMs. Generating afterwards is fairly cheap. Maybe what you want is to have fewer companies trying to train their own models from scratch and encourage collaborating instead?
It’s a bottle of water per ChatGPT-generated email just for cooling, plus the electricity of 14 typical household LED bulbs running over an hour.
That’s the price for using it. Not training it. Training it is far higher.
Source
Indeed. Though what we should be thinking about is not just the cost in absolute terms, but in relation to the benefit. GPT-4 is one of the more expensive models to run right now, and you can accomplish very good results with their smaller GPT-4o mini at 0.5% of the energy cost[1]. That’s the cost of running 0.07 LED bulbs over an hour, or running 1 LED bulb over 0.07 hours (i.e. 5min). If that saves you 5min of time writing an email while the room is lit with a single LED bulb and your computer is drawing energy, that might just be worth it, right?
[1] Estimated by using https://huggingface.co/spaces/genai-impact/ecologits-calculator and the pricing difference between GPT-4o, 4o mini, and 3.5 (https://openai.com/api/pricing/). The assumption I’m making is that the total hardware and energy cost scales linearly with the API pricing.
This is not a good assumption. NONE of the GPT plans make any amount of profit, so the pricing is not going to be linked to hardware and energy costs, but rather toward addicting people to the product so they can raise the prices into profitability at an impossible future when people can’t live without their shit products.
The benefit is zero, so the cost:benefit ratio is ∞.
Yeah, they operate very opaquely, so we can’t know the true cost, but based on what I can know with certainty given models I can run on my own machines, the numbers seem reasonable. In any case, that’s not really relevant to this discussion. Treat it as a hypothetical, then work out the math later to figure out where we want to be and what threshold we should be setting.
For me the threshold is zero. LLMs are dead ends and cannot really be improved much beyond where they are now, complete with hallucinations and techbrodude confidence.
The billions being wasted on LLMs are better spent on less idiotic technologies less likely to destroy trust in information sources.
I don’t agree with that. If you use it to destroy human creativity, sure that will be the outcome. Or you can use it to write boring ass work emails that you have to write. You could use it to automate boring tasks. Or a company can come along and automate creativity badly.
Capitalism is what’s ruining it. Capitalism is what is ruining culture, creativity, and the human experience more than LLMs. LLMs are just a knife and instead of making tasty food we are going around stabbing people.
and yeah people made guns just to put holes in pieces of paper, sure nothing else. If you do not know how LLMs work, just say so. There are enough that are trained on public data which do not siphon human creativity.
It is doing a lot of harm to human culture, but that’s more of how it’s being used, and it needs real constructive criticism instead of simply being obtuse.
Of course you don’t. You’re one of the non-creatives who thinks that “prompt engineering” makes you a creative, undoubtedly.
But the first “L” in “LLM” says it all. The very definition of degenerative AI requires the wholesale dismemberment of human culture to work and, indeed, there’s already a problem: the LLM purveyors have hit a brick wall. They’ve run out of material to siphon away from us and are now stuck with only finding “new” ways to remix what they’ve already butchered in the hopes that we think the stench from the increasingly rotten corpse won’t be noticeable.
LLMs are not a knife. They are a collection of knives and bone saws purpose-built to dismember culture. You can use those knives and saws to cut your steak at dinner, I guess, but they’d be clumsy and unwieldy and would produce pretty weird slices of meat on your plate. (Meat that has completely fucked-up fingers.) But this is like how you can use guns to just shoot at paper targets: it’s possible, but it’s not the purpose for which the gun was built.
LLMs and the degenerative AI built from them will never be anything but the death of culture. Enjoy your rotting corpse writing and pictures while it lasts, though!
Sure, that’s exactly what I believe … Wow I’m so called out. I use it as a tool to do boring menial tasks so that I can spend my time on more meaningful things, like spending time with my family, making some dinner, spend time on the parts of my work I enjoy and automate the boring tedious parts, like writing boilerplate code that’s slightly different based on context.
Can you elaborate on how and the mechanisms by which this is happening as you see? Why do you see it that way? Do you not see any circumstances in which it could be useful? Like legitimately useful? Like have you not written a stupid tedious email to someone you didn’t like that you couldn’t be bothered to put more than 2 seconds to prompt it to some one or thing else to deal with it for you?
This is true it’s starting to eat its own tail. That also doesn’t mean all new models are using new data. It could also be using better architectures on the same data. But yes using ai generated data to train new ai is bad and you’ll end up creating nerfed less useful model that will probably hallucinate more. Doesn’t mean the tech isn’t useful cause you’ve not seen it used for anything good.
No, I haven’t. I call out bullshit in my job instead of acquiescing to it. I’m not sure when I last wrote an email at work at all, not to mention a stupid, tedious one.
If there’s a part of your job that can be done by degenerative AI, change how your job works. If your boss won’t let you change the bullshit, change your job. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. It’s not that hard.
Here, this may help you grasp it.
Because I looked into how it works and spotted the bit where it needs a huge volume of input data. That input data is going to be indiscriminately vacuumed up because it’s not feasible to check each piece for permission. (Or do you naively believe that if I put a disclaimer on, say, a blog saying “this material is specifically not permitted to be used as training material for AI projects” means that it won’t be Hoovered in with everything else?)
And here’s some cool little factoid for you if you don’t believe that it’s being vacuumed up indiscriminately: Meta announced a new AI siphonbot and gave the information needed to block it. Two weeks after they started using it. And this is generally positive behaviour. Most of the AI bot-crawlers have been found out by sleuthing, not by an announcement. Even AI research teams at universities aren’t doing the basics of ethical conduct: getting consent.
Yes. It’s very useful for non-creatives to pretend they’re actually creative when they send a machine to stitch together the corpse of human culture in entertaining new shapes rendered from rotting flesh. Personally, though, I can live without masterpieces like “Sonic the hedgehog gives birth to Borat” or whatever idiotic shit these keyboard monkeys think is art.
There is no use sufficiently good to justify the dismemberment and destruction of human culture. Sorry.
Sounds like all your problems are with capitalism and not LLMs but you can’t see that.
And good for you that you’re in a position to not deal with bullshit in your work. Not everyone has that luxury.
Get some empathy for people in different circumstances as you. You sound like a child.
Also there’s a fuck ton of useful training data with permissive licenses. Also, fuck copyright law. It’s been weaponized by capitalists to control our lives. Especially cause the artists barely gets theirs.
We’re never gonna see eye to eye so don’t bother. Peace and love. Have a good day.
Show me an anarchist use of LLMs that respects consent. I’ll wait. Indeed, since there are no such examples and thus this is an unfair challenge, I’ll loosen it: Just describe such an LLM: one that people will explicitly opt-in to instead of having to keep track of every two-bit, LLM-pumping moron that pops up so they can opt-out.
That’s the foundation of the dismantling of the corpse of human creation, after all: the lack of consent mechanism. If you can conceive of a feasible way to provide said consent, then your system is just the looting of the corpse of human creativity.
And you sound like a techbrodude (read: child) throwing a tantrum at people pointing out the absence of clothing on your emperor.
This is true. Because you believe in idiotic bullshit and I don’t.