AI Sucks

This strategy, the influencers say, allows them to passively make $10,000 a month by flooding social media platforms with stolen and low-effort clips while working from private helicopters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc. What I found was a complex ecosystem of content parasitism, with thousands of people using a variety of AI tools to make low-quality spammy videos that recycle Reddit AMAs, weird “Would You Rather” games, AI-narrated “scary ocean” clips, ChatGPT-generated fun facts, slideshows of tweets, clips lifted from celebrities, YouTubers, and podcasts.

The easiest and most common way to go viral on TikTok, Mustafa explains in one unlisted video, is to steal content from famous content creators and repost it.

The people who hold the purse strings for Sports Illustrated are more interested in gaming Google search results and the resultant ad revenue from that practice than actually serving their readers.

This paper should serve as yet another reminder that the world’s most important and most valuable AI company has been built on the backs of the collective work of humanity, often without permission, and without compensation to those who created it.

The relationships between these tokens span a large number of parameters. In fact, that's much of what's being referenced when we call a model large. Those parameters represent grammar rules, stylistic patterns, and literally millions of other things.What those parameters don't represent is anything like knowledge or understanding. That's just not what LLMs do. The model doesn't know what those tokens mean. I want to say it only knows how they're used, but even that is over stating the case, because it doesn't know things. It models how those tokens are used.

The fundamental task of software development is not writing out the syntax that will execute a program. The task is to build a mental model of that complex system, make sense of it, and manage it over time.

The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They're positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it's only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it's not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they'll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it.

Moderating the output of these models depends on armies of low paid and precariously employed human reviewers, mostly in Kenya. They're subjected to the raw, unfiltered linguistic sewage that is the result of training a language model on uncurated text found on the public internet. If ChatGPT doesn't wantonly repeat the very worst of the things you can find on reddit, 4chan, or kiwi farms, that is because it's being dumped on Kenyan gig workers instead.