I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
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- mEEGal@lemmy.worldEnglish43 minutes
Check out Robert MILES’ channel: he’s an expert, one of the most prominent on AI safety
take your time to understand the mechanics of it, its a bit technical at times but ultimately very understandable
and try not to freak out when you find out it’s from several years ago, mostly before the advent of LLMs
4 hoursI’m more worried about the people using AI than the tech itself.
- mEEGal@lemmy.worldEnglish47 minutes
it’s the former juuuuuuuust until the latter
once it escapes the lab there’s no putting it back in the bottle
The people claiming it’s humanity ending are all directly involved in the AI companies. One take is that they are the ones that know the most about.
My take is they are financially incentivized in making sure their investments grow in value.
- vividspecter@aussie.zoneEnglish6 hours
A third take is that they are unhinged cult members who are high on their own supply. Although I expect it’s a mix of both types (maybe within the same people).
- 8 hours
I knew a guy in high school that told girls they shouldn’t date him because his dick was so big it would hurt them. You can wax philosophical on his motives if you’d like, but spoiler alert - his dick wasn’t big.
- adhdsergio@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
That’s exactly what I think is happening. Remember a few months ago anthropic saying mythos is too dangerous to release until the government as the idiots they are starting believing them and banned them from exporting it, therefore losing them money. Very quickly they came up with fable (ironic name isn’t it) a week or two later saying it’s got the proper safeguards now. Now they’re all trying this marketing strategy asking the gov to regulate them, seemingly because they’re dangerous and not because they’re getting diminishing returns and feel threatened by the chinese competition
- 17 minutes
I mean there are people eating up this Anthropic crap.
- 5 hours
I’m going to take a guess that it prob worked once, then word got around he was exaggerating.
Ed Zitron’s podcast “Better Offline” recently talked about this. There is a small tech community called the Rationalists who believe AI super intelligence is inevitable and it will either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species. These rationalists are actually a very prominent faction within tech and the AI industry. Apparently the language used within top AI firms is largely about the immense danger posed by AI super intelligence if any other group or company were to achieve it first. This creates an echo chamber that makes the people in the industry kind of lose their mind and misinterpret the capability of LLMs.
Everyone outside that faction recognizes that LLMs are just unreliable cloud software with limited use cases and that there’s no evidence LLMs could actually lead to any kind of intelligence.
- 6 hours
My Problem is: Even if your take on AI is true, we give an unreliable piece of software access to the internet and more and more systems and infrastructure. Even if it is not a malicious AI, it can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence. a Sme can be said about some presidents…
LLMs are not intelligent, they lack morals, knowledge, and intent. The only remote risk of extermination is if a company with absolute impunity and endless resources told an LLM to hack the nuclear weapons and if knowledge of how to do that was already published online and processed as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new, they can only regurgitate information thats already been stolen.
- richmondez@lemdro.idEnglish5 hours
It won’t kill us as a species, but its use may lead to disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen. Much of the regulation in other industries is due to that kind of thing happening. Worse, the companies making them are trying to get regulation to curtail other parties development for economic advantage rather than regulation on use which will steer the entire industry.
- 7 hours
Aren’t they called TESCREALists or something? It’s like a mish-mash of pop culture and pseudo intellectual BS
The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.
Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.
Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish7 hours
its already here, mass surveillance under various “camera” companies/tech companies, Mass layoffs due to AI, inability to get jobs due to AI.
- 🌸𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻🌸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish8 hours
They saw the violence directed to the owner class in the industrial revolution and know what’s coming when they kick off a new one, so would like to avoid some of that.
I feel like the AI hype has died and people are trying to prop it up with doomsday scaring.
- 9 hours
The AI itself doesn’t need self-awareness to kill us all. It just needs an idiot with too much money and even less self-awareness controlling it. We are already headed towards disaster in the US. https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-06-05-priced-for-rescue/
- rafoix@lemmy.zipEnglish9 hours
Their product hasn’t done anything new or different in a while. They keep coming out with a bunch of scary hype stories every day so it all seems fake as hell now.
- Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
Yeah I can’t tell if an article like this has the intent to spread a fact, enforce anti AI attitudes or enforce pro AI attitudes. Realistically all three are possible but I think one of the latter two are most likely.
- Josey_Wales@lemmy.zipEnglish10 hours
It’s what models people have access to and how they use it. If you are not specific and overly broad it a search engine. If you move to the other end of the spectrum it can be incredibly powerful.
I tend to build projects with very limited sources for it to draw answers from and use complex instructions to guide how it interacts with the source material. It’s a tool. If you learn how to use it you can become extremely proficient/productive with it.
For example, stacks of PDFs may make sense to you and I as repositories of information. But is that the best format for AI to interact with the data? Probably not unless the actual formatting of the information on the page is relevant. I have been converting large groups of sources into databases containing page, line, and text data for groups of references for a given topic. Then you feed it the database and ask it to review and cross reference related lines of text. That serves as your “brain” for questions on a given topic.
