OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
4d ago
That's certainly the pattern I've noticed in the replies to me here. People who work with data think that LLMs are great and the wave of the future. They automate so much, they increase productivity, and so on. Laptop people, so to speak, think the tech is valuable. People who work with other people or with the world, though, still don't see the use. LLMs do nothing to help in roles that are primarily about interacting with other human beings, or which are primarily about interacting with physical stuff.
I wonder if there's a level of myopia here, where the data people assume that their kind of work is the whole world. Then again, to be fair, you could make the case that I, with my people-centred job, think that people work is the whole world, so we are both blind to a whole section of society and economy. On the inside view, I'd defend myself by saying that statistically, people and physical stuff do in fact make up almost all the economy, but on the outside view, should I trust myself?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Given the way cars are going, I'm inclined to say that having software is a downgrade for my car.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Are you using it mostly for coding, then?
To the latter point - I hope you can understand why many people are skeptical of arguments that go, "oh, of course the samples of our product that you can try are crap, you have to pay us, then you'll realise why it's worthwhile". Well, no. It's the company's job to sell the product to me, not vice versa. There's also a bit of a psychological trick there as well, in that once you pay money for something, you have a bias toward convincing yourself that it was worthwhile. Lastly, I am skeptical because people who seem to have good judgement who do pay for it also seem to report that it's crap. All the patterns of conversation look the same. I've read transcripts of LLM conversations on advanced models and... I'm sorry, it's all the same old beige. There is no evidence available to me that they're worthwhile, and "oh, you have to pay for it in order to understand why it's worth paying for" is not a reasonable argument.
For what it's worth, I work in a very different area to you. I work in aged care, and I cannot think of a use for LLMs here. The main way they have changed my work is just by requiring me to sort through and filter out a lot more slop when I try to find a picture, piece of music, or video to show to residents, so the main way they have featured in my workplace is as a mild annoyance. What on Earth could I use generative 'AI' for?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I suppose the point of the comparison is to disambiguate two scenarios.
In the first scenario, people generally concede that the unwanted facility needs to be built somewhere. You don't want an auto factory or solar farm near you, but you concede that it needs to go somewhere, because we need cars and we need energy generation.
In the second scenario, people don't want the unwanted facility built at all. You do not want it anywhere, because you do not think the product or service that it enables needs to be made full stop.
The people that Sun interviewed, at least, are in the second scenario, and that changes the kind of conversation you would need to have with them, at least if you're pro-'AI'.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
What do you do, out of curiosity?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That's a long list you've got there, but it includes things that LLMs have not made any useful contributions to (e.g. teaching, physics, chemistry), things that are obviously frivolous (e.g. cybersex, playing video games), things that LLMs are fundamentally untrustworthy with (e.g. legal contracts, most analyses), and things that LLMs are just plain terrible at (e.g. fiction, image generation), so... yes, besides those things. I think that was a long list of nonsense intended to overawe, rather than a serious discussion of what these bots are able to do.
I think there are some use cases for LLMs, but overall much less than their boosters think. When the general public rejects this technology as not useful for them, the general public is mostly correct.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
This is exactly the problem. What we are talking about is public opposition to data centres, which, as Sun discusses, is predicated at least in part on the judgement that bots are not particularly useful. If 'AI' companies want to earn the public trust, they need to demonstrate both their trustworthiness and the usefulness of their products, and thus far they are failing at both those tasks. Sneering at the peasants is certainly not going to help them in these tasks.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I don't think it would be good to have a social system where 'smart engineers' get to appropriate or make decisions about the use of public resources without the consent of the public who are most affected.
Arpanet or early aeronautics aren't affected by this principle because they didn't involve resources that same way. A university working on computer networks in 1973 was not building giant facilities in small towns against the expressed wishes of those towns' inhabitants.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
As far as I can tell, most Americans think that AI is making society worse. More and more Americans have encountered and used the technology, but it is the most widely-despised technological advance in a generation.
For this story I think the key part there is Pew's point 10. Experts are vastly more optimistic about LLMs than the population in general. That divergence is what drives this conflict. If many members of the public believe that the situation is that a small, wealthy elite are forcing a technology on the country that the country does not want... well, those members of the public are correct.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Sun did talk about the companies trying to figure out how much they need to 'bribe' people. I'm not sure the deficit is just money. It seems like, in her argument at least, it's a combination of both trust and public utility.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
How does that address the point? People advocating against data centres do so on the basis that constructing data centres affects the communities they live in. That's why they get a say. People care about things that affect them. People who pay for chatbots don't get some sort of veto over people who don't. That would be lunatic.
That was the point of Sun's comparison to cars. You may grumble at an auto factory, but you do, at least, understand why cars are necessary. Even if you personally don't own a car and rely on public transport to get everywhere, it's obvious that there's real public demand for cars, on the basis of their obvious usefulness. You might not want a factory near you, but you understand why there need to be factories somewhere. LLMs have not cleared that hurdle. It seems that large numbers of people do not see why these things are so necessary that all these data centres should be built. We could just, you know, not have LLMs. That's an option.
The examples you give - proofreading a book, cybersex, reading spreadsheets - are generally all in the 'toy' category. Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions. The use cases for LLMs are so marginal that there is no publicly-felt sense of why they are needed, certainly to the extent of justifying the demands that data centre construction make on the public.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Honestly, I expected a lot more negative pushback on that post from the Motte, which I do think of as a relatively tech-positive community. Calling Anthropic a 'doomsday cult of autists' made me laugh (if anything I want to protest on the basis that it's not fair to lump perfectly innocent autists in with 'AI' people), but the whole rationalist community is at least adjacent to that cult.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
My take is basically - dumb idea, but probably done on such a small scale that the city will just eat the loss. In five or six years they'll frame them as an experiment and quietly wind them up.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
And I went in and asked these organizers: Do you guys use A.I.? Do you find it useful? This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask: Are these people using ChatGPT, and they don’t even realize that the data centers are how they can use it?
And what I found was that a lot of these folks did say: Yeah, I’ve used it to draft an email or make a meme. They’re not denying that A.I. might have any possible utility at all, but they clearly didn’t see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential.
They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.
And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School Polls in Wisconsin, and he was explaining that usually you see 50-50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you’re seeing this 70-30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don’t — which means it’s not just NIMBYism, it’s you don’t want a data center in anyone’s backyard — is because there is no strong pro argument for it. There is not even a fight that’s really going on.
“Nobody wants it” was a phrase I heard over and over.
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
Do you have citations or examples for any of that?
Who, exactly, are these Blues who want to ban Christianity, or revoke police protections for... conservatives? Christians? white people? Something else?
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