Not So Intelligent

Hacker News is completely full of “AI” garbage these days. It’s all a race to the bottom of useless, pointless, and stupid LLMs, image generators, and so on with exactly zero showing real promise of any kind. But it’s dominating all the discussions. It’s so bad, because instead of interesting things it’s just idiots making a shitty BS generator, or saying an existing BS generator is going to change how we do business (by making everything shittier, maybe).

LLMs are fun until you realize they are completely full of shit. You can never trust they’ll give you the right answer, as opposed to a completely wrong answer said with utter confidence1. They can’t compose text because their Voice is consistently the voice of a bullshitter, rather than a person. They lie and they gaslight. If you call them out on their bullshit they lie and claim they are sorry and try to do better. They aren’t sorry and they won’t try to do better. But they’ll lie to your face about it.

Image generators are more fun, but after a while you realize that whatever training set and model you use, you’re getting out variants of what went in in the first place. And then you look around and you most of the results are obviously machine generated. They have the same look, the same feel, and the same lack of soul. There are a few models that at least make things that are somewhat interesting, but it takes a lot of effort to avoid garbage.

So a fun toy, but not a replacement for talented humans. Useful for me, a non-artist making silly album art for mix tapes. Not useful to anyone who needs real art or design.

I’m so sick of seeing this trash.

The latest today is “X AI released image model that will make anything!” Except it won’t. It has guard rails like everything else, and behind the veneer it’s just Flux, an existing image model. So congratulations, you have a wrapper for an existing model. And then the oh so high quality discussion about it brought out the right wing dickbags praising “anything!” and how “woke” models are bad. Fuck you. A few idiots going “we just will not be able to trust photographs any more” which isn’t true. Then a few more reasonable idiots point out how models just make shit up.

Yes. Exactly.

The models get bigger, more sophisticated, burn more energy, more resources, more time, and they don’t actually get smarter. They’re universally full of shit. May as well shut it all down. It’s over.

It was fun at first, but it’s not fun any more.

  1. Today’s example: I asked GPT-3 to summarize ASTM 2848-13 and it told me it was about making “fuel ash brick” which 1) should be fly ash and 2) is actually a solar PV testing standard. ↩

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Hi, I’m Steve Block. I like to hike, cycle, and take pictures. Most of my writing is in a journal, though the best ideas find their way here. My photography is a long ongoing hobby. My main photo site is at ev-15.

— Steve