Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
I’m going to wait and see how he handles this hurdle before I form any long term opinions. Could be an honest mistake that he learns from and improves for the future.
He didn’t state what his actual process was. People assume that just means firing out a query and no bothering to check it, he said he uses it to summarize sources to see if they are worth reading. I don’t think that’s unreasonable if he still reads them.
Regarding using it to write scripts, I think if you use LLMs to generate something you are good at making and are picky and opinionated about, the review process very quickly makes you skeptical about the output.
Before the response, IP rights and environmental effects of LLMs are completely valid and are a valid reason for opposing them. Don’t just assume someone’s using it out of laziness instead of in an attempt to scale up their own work.
I read a decent number of papers. If you’re looking for something specific, and abstract isn’t enough. If you want to research something specific that’s not the core focus of the paper, you at least need to skim it.
If Hank Greene is understaffed, using AI to prefilter papers isn’t a terrible use of the technology.
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
I know all AI is an ecological hazard and none of its use cases aside from very narrow medical and scientific applications justify using it at all.
People have been eating meat longer than humans have had languages. Your whataboutism is boring and irrelevant. Just because there are other, larger, necessary steps to take doesn’t mean we need to act as unpaid apologists for technocultists shooting our species in the foot while we try to get there. Fuck your AI.
no its true. ChatGPT is confidently wrong all the time, but I find its wrong in ways I can learn from anyway. I ask the question. it gets the answer wrong. But its wrong in a useful way where I actually learn more by correcting it than just getting the right answer.
I could get the same experience from talking to a person for much less money though
They tend to work much better when you point them at things. Hallucination rates go way, way down when they aren’t pulling from their “memory.” They are, also, like you say, wrong in ways that are noticeable and often “interesting” in the Ibsen way. I also doubt that you could get the same experience for less money. I’d have to go back to college to get the education I’m getting with AI. At least community college. It’s a lot of near-experts at once. And when you point it at expert literature it basically is a senile college professor. But yeah the senile part of that statement is pretty important.
I like Hank, and this is a shitty article.
That aside he should be facing a revolt.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
Facts
I’m going to wait and see how he handles this hurdle before I form any long term opinions. Could be an honest mistake that he learns from and improves for the future.
He didn’t state what his actual process was. People assume that just means firing out a query and no bothering to check it, he said he uses it to summarize sources to see if they are worth reading. I don’t think that’s unreasonable if he still reads them.
Regarding using it to write scripts, I think if you use LLMs to generate something you are good at making and are picky and opinionated about, the review process very quickly makes you skeptical about the output.
Before the response, IP rights and environmental effects of LLMs are completely valid and are a valid reason for opposing them. Don’t just assume someone’s using it out of laziness instead of in an attempt to scale up their own work.
Papers have an abstract and summary sections SPECIFICALLY for this reason and usually aren’t more than a paragraph; there’s no excuse to use LLM.
I read a decent number of papers. If you’re looking for something specific, and abstract isn’t enough. If you want to research something specific that’s not the core focus of the paper, you at least need to skim it.
If Hank Greene is understaffed, using AI to prefilter papers isn’t a terrible use of the technology.
Addictive behavior often includes being incapable of accurately describing or confronting their usage habits.
You know llm sources are just as verifiable as anything else right? All information is imperfect and has to be verified, period.
I don’t know about going that far - LLMs can be a great starting point …. As long as you click through to the sources rather than blindly accept
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
I know all AI is an ecological hazard and none of its use cases aside from very narrow medical and scientific applications justify using it at all.
People have been eating meat longer than humans have had languages. Your whataboutism is boring and irrelevant. Just because there are other, larger, necessary steps to take doesn’t mean we need to act as unpaid apologists for technocultists shooting our species in the foot while we try to get there. Fuck your AI.
no its true. ChatGPT is confidently wrong all the time, but I find its wrong in ways I can learn from anyway. I ask the question. it gets the answer wrong. But its wrong in a useful way where I actually learn more by correcting it than just getting the right answer.
I could get the same experience from talking to a person for much less money though
They tend to work much better when you point them at things. Hallucination rates go way, way down when they aren’t pulling from their “memory.” They are, also, like you say, wrong in ways that are noticeable and often “interesting” in the Ibsen way. I also doubt that you could get the same experience for less money. I’d have to go back to college to get the education I’m getting with AI. At least community college. It’s a lot of near-experts at once. And when you point it at expert literature it basically is a senile college professor. But yeah the senile part of that statement is pretty important.