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?
They are lying about their fear. That’s all they can do. Stop believing any claim of theirs. Stop being manipulated.
They are snake oil salesman. They sell vaporware. Don’t fucking buy it.
AI use is like drug-use. One of its effects is hopium. These people are effectively high on their own supply.
and people are addicted to it.
I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.
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AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.
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It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.
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They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.
And, of course, there’s
- It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don’t quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.
- i wonder the ones still have jobs is only in AI right now, and i know someone that relies on it heaivly and he was in tech.
Okay cool, thanks!
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If the techies believe it and they are the “experts” what makes them crazy? Wouldn’t their opinion be the most informed?
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Yeah that part definitely makes sense
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That definitely makes sense from a capitalist perspective. But, is the argument against regulations that they would be bad for the concentration of power it would give select companies? Or just that they aren’t necessary because the tool is of little use so it’s just wasted time/money.
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That makes sense but trillions of dollars are being spent. Anything that amount of money is sinking into is gonna be talked about a lot. Especially thousands of jobs cut because of it.
- No, their opinion would not be the most informed. They are biased in favor of making money. They know they can’t deliver on strong AI, but they’d be happy to milk your fears.
I’m not talking about execs.
If the techies believe it and they are the “experts” what makes them crazy? Wouldn’t their opinion be the most informed?
Listening to them speak about it, no. They’re morons. They clearly didn’t make the tech. Workers made AI. Just like they make everything. These freaks make nothing. They can’t give single coherent explanation of how LLMs work, how they could “kill” us, nor do they seem to know how or what “guardrails” need to be put in place.
But if they really are a cult then we all know what the next step is. They need to STFU and get off of our planet.
That’s what I mean though, the subject of this article was a 27 year old worker. Not some high level Sam Altman type.
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„Computers are still computers are still computers and will only do what a human being programs them to do, and people are stupid. Stop assigning them agency. Say that “Microsoft created an automatic hacking program which was inadequately contained.” Assign the blame CORRECTLY, because you cannot blame a computer, it’s doing exactly what it’s programmed to do.
OpenAI is a dead slab of metal and electrons arranged to mimic a human face and if you refuse to see that then you’re as brain-dead as any chunk of silicon.“
Oh how I would love for AI to actually start rapidly self-improving.
‘Sensationalist hooey, cooked by superstitious yokels seeing phantoms of their own imagining.’
There’s blood on their hands. Either they keep the hype up or go to jail regardless of any of their statements being true or not.
Here’s an idea: don’t use unsafe software where safety is needed.
What makes it unsafe?
You don’t know? … Wow. How about the error rate? Let’s start there.
No, as previously stated I am not educated on the subject almost at all. Why I framed the post as a question.
For a start you might want to read this interview with Emily M. Bender who is a well-known critic and has much to say about what people need to understand when using these systems that are incorrectly labelled “AI”:
How ironic that she is called Bender
Awesome. This is the exact type of thkng I was looking for. Will read soon. Thanks!
To me, what makes LLMs unsafe is they are nondeteramistic.
If I remember correctly; Nondetermanistic means the LLM can, could, and will have different answers/outcomes for the same question.
The lack of consistency potentially leads to negative outcomes?
Well, if the output varies in a way you can’t predict, then even if one of the inputs is “don’t do anything negative” it might not always follow it exactly.
Makes sense
Yeah, because it’s all statistical. You can test this yourself. Go to Google and search for something. Then search for that same exact thing again. Gemini will give you a different response each time.
Many are skeptical that there is a push by ai companies to make them appear more than they are due to their weak economic footing. From my experience with the llms I am not frightened they will become self aware. I am frightened that we are wasting energy and resources while polluting the planet further for little return and it will result in messing up our economies even more.
Good job in helping with their guerilla marketing campaign.
When a corporation realises that working for government will be more profitable than working for consumers, they pivot to scaremongering, but always with the undercurrent of “and that’s why you should PAY US so that you own the nukes, and not your enemies”
I don’t have the confidence in my knowledge/understanding of the topic to just take a “its all bullshit” view. Especially when many of the people who believe that act like you. You don’t have to be a prick to explain something or talk about it.
LLMs basically work like auto-correct. They’re much more sophisticated, but it’s the same basic principle. Instead of “Which letter is most likely to follow after this series of letters?” it’s “Which token is most likely to follow after this series of tokens?” A token can be anything, but usually it’s a word.
Now, given that, consider a statement like
We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!
Okay, how? A statistical model generating tokens doesn’t have thought, it doesn’t have emotions, so it can’t want to do something, much less make plans and carry them out.
Could AI give somebody the ability to kill all humans? How? Under what scenario? Is somebody putting an LLM in charge of their nuclear stockpile? You don’t blame the LLM. You blame the humans who made that decision.
Okay that all makes sense. Appreciate you taking the time to type it out.
It’s been reported a few times that Ukraine is already using AI for drones.
The human operator chooses the target, the AI takes over and eliminates the target.
Is that “just an LLM”?
Seems more capable than that to me. But, I don’t know if this is actually true, or just a claim to frighten the Russians (and me).
Not quite true. It was an experiment almost a year ago. I think three Russians were killed.
Am not sure if my pedantic correction brings any comfort to anyone.
Whatever. Ban all these people from employment and public assistance. Make them starve
I doubt any of them have ever been employed nor do they look like they ever eaten anything that wasn’t adderall or ketamine.
Personally, this just feels like marketing and these big asshole companies trying to resurrect the 2025 level of hype in order to salvage their IPO’s.
If they honestly believed this I can’t imagine that their workers wouldn’t do something more drastic.
In addition to what everyone else said, I’ll tell you why I don’t think that what we have currently can become some runaway superhuman intelligence:
All “AI” people are talking about are basically “just” LLM wrappers: tools built to run a LLM in a loop while giving it access to the ability to write and run code. This gets pretty powerful, since you can do a lot programmatically (including monetary transactions), but has a fundamental limit:
LLMs are trained ahead of time. And that’s a very cost intensive, long process. Beyond that, the LLM has only a context window of finite length. So there are no long-term planning capabilities. While running after being trained, the LLM can only condense knowledge into a summary and then re-read it, a lossy process that might introduce mistakes in “understanding” and will make any prolonged task degrade over time.
And even if they figure out how to make the things actually self-modify and learn things, you can’t give every session that ability, since that’ll vastly increase the storage and performance requirements. Do sessions with that ability will be closely monitored and limited.
So I don’t see any space where an evil AI could emerge, even when factoring in an essential possible future improvement to the technology.
I’m not worried about AGI. I’m worried about the insane military applications they’re developing right now, and giving Artificial Incompetence control.
Yes, but when the shit hits the fan and they blame the AI, we shouldn’t let them get away with it. It’s their fault, not the computer’s.
I watched a grokbot get confused connect to the wrong vnc console and try to shut down its own little computer.
I’m not worried about AI taking over the planet. I’m worried about it clicking the wrong button with no oversight
Same, I am worried about humans using ANNs to kill people. Current society is a gigantic apparatus that is constantly shifting shuffling responsibility around. LMMs only accelerate the problem.
Humanity should be way more frightened of greedy psychopaths running the world than any technology.
And they’re peddling “AI” so aren’t they married in this case?
A lot of us here hate streaming platforms because they’re designed to benefit greedy capitalists first and foremost. That doesn’t mean the core idea or the technology behind streaming platforms is bad, though. An open source project like Jellyfin that is designed purely to benefit the end user is something that legitimately enriches all of our lives.
Similarly, just because scumbag companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are plundering the world for their own deranged benefit doesn’t make the underlying idea or technology bad. The tech is built on contributions from a lot of brilliant people over a long period of time whose names are not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Open LLMs that run on gaming rigs are quickly catching up with cloud-based models as well.
At this point, I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on a gaming GPU that has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 5 without giving Sam or Dario my data or $200 a month, just like I run Jellyfin without giving Netflix or Disney my money or data.
