If I ask an AI for help to download some public data to make a graph, and then I publish the graph on my website, is that consuming or producing? Seems like both?
You have a deterministic path from published data to graph output which you signed off on, and the AI wrote the code. In my view the AI did not produce the news any more than the script did.
> If I ask an AI for help to download some public data
They only describe the LLM as helping withdownloading data, this means the creation of the plot could be done by hand.
I agree that the rest of the post then proceeds to ask a question in a way implying the machine also created the plot, but that's not actually in the stated premise.
A certain pattern I’ve noticed: people are vary of and condemn AI use in many domains; complain about hallucination and inaccuracies. In just a few years, the use of AI in these domains will become mandatory and not using AI will be almost seen as risky.
Example: if you don’t use AI as a reviewer for your code to check for vulnerabilities, it will be seen as risky - as compared to a year ago when people were complaining about hallucination.
Expect the same pattern for healthcare as well. Also journalism
Did they type "Write a news article make no mistakes?" and hit Publish
or
Did they use it to find secondary sources for a set of details to then manually go check them? Or use it for copy-editing or have a discussion with a frontier model about the best term to describe a concept (something I find them very good at!)? Or a myriad of such interventional uses.
Are those considered the same by the audience? Was the difference explained in this survey? I'm betting the audience is a lot more accepting of the latter and the former is what everyone imagines "Use Gen-AI" means and words like "mostly human generated with some AI help" don't really capture the difference OR value.
I hate to be the "there is nuance" guy, but...isn't there significant nuance here?
There absolutely is nuance here, but you have to consider the pressures operating on newsrooms, which are already a shadow of their former selves after the internet hit.
The pressure is intense to save money, there have been decades of cuts, and they’re now operating on trimmed budgets and rarely do real journalism any more.
So for most newspapers and online news sources generative ai will be used to the hilt, to simply replace employees, or by freelancers on a deadline. The pressure will be for ever faster news. It will be used for writing not research because of these pressures, and already is in many places.
It’s already flooding some online spaces like Apple News on the stocks app with dross from simply wall st or generated bitcoin price articles. In the case of financial news it was always full of nonsense of the form ‘stocks rise today because of factor X’.
It sounds like this is the exact discussion happening within software world: Vibe code one shot app make no mistake push to prod, or write boilerplate, discuss architecture, assist migrations and vulnerability research?
I think we lost all nuance in the world, though. Everything has to be black or white, otherwise nothing sells anymore.
What does AI for news even mean? In what world are people using it for search, but not for news? Search looks at and summarizes the news! If I ask why Nvidia dropped today, is that the news?
The comments here are enlightening. All the anti-ai hype posts are downvoted. I think justifiably, this is a transformational moment. But what we can surely agree on is two fold, it is built on theft, and the regular non-hn people are increasingly likely to demand a reckoning for that theft.
It’s interesting to see the general public is trying to bestow a secular “original sin” onto AI. It could’ve been climate change. It could’ve been job loss. But I think we’ve converged on copyright and theft - ironically from people who usually don’t think highly of copyright.
So glad the public hates this stuff in journalism. I hope all the news agencies that use it are left with the same kind of remnant audience that found Q-Anon so inspiring.
This is an hallucination. We all know humans hallucinate just like LLMs and this is another form of it.
It’s like if I asked you if you enjoy talking shit about people or saying things and gossiping without people knowing about it.
Most people would say no they don’t enjoy it. But most people would be lying. Not lying to you but lying to themselves. It’s one of the most obvious lies because everyone can definitely think back and recall themselves talking shit.
People say they don’t want to use LLMs and they say they hate ai and they say they appreciate human art and effort and human endeavor and all of this is true and at the same time not true as the same people who say they don’t like it use it all the time. It’s both true and not true. Human brains like LLMs did not evolve to enforce strict logical conclusions because such a thing is not absolutely necessary for survival. You can hold contradictory opinions and beliefs in your mind.
It’s just the hype train is excessive and in everyone’s faces and anything that’s like that genuinely becomes hated.
Imagine if I saved the lives of hundreds of people everyday. And I would throw this fact in your face everyday via TikTok, email spam, YouTube, social media.
Pretty soon you’ll become sick of it. You’ll not care for anyones life. Thats what is happening with ai. Ai is genuinely from a logical standpoint, incredible. But all of that is diluted by overhype.
Except AI isnt saving lives. It isnt even usually improving lives. For the most part it is being used to justify laying people off, to heap more responsibility on those that remain, to destroy the livelihood of artists, and to flood public spaces with slop. Even if the capabilities are incredible, the average lived experience of it is awful.
It's not the hype we are tired of. We're tired of the hype being wrong, and pro-AI people being quasi-religious zealots about, while ignoring the massive costs and harms. And if you question the AI dogma, you are accused of being either a Luddite who doesn't understand, or a victim of a Chinese influence campaign.
The hype is not wrong. It’s just too much. Navier stokes and hundreds of other unsolvable math problems were solved. That is genuinely real and worth the hype.
My entire company now uses AI to code. Nobody writes code by hand at my company anymore. At this point if you can’t see how incredible and horrifying it is then you’re delusional.
I get it though. One year ago you’d be right. The paradigm shift is happening so fast people haven’t updated their priors. What you believed to be true just changed. It flipped several times this year and people who keep up to date had to completely flip their understanding of the world and the nature of AI several times. This is not an easy thing to do and thus many people like you just missed the boat.
There’s no doubt that there is a financial ai bubble. But that bubble is completely orthogonal to the complete paradigm shift of the actual capabilities of AI.
I think the point is not that AI is not great, but it's less than what was promised.
Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course. Is is the thing that was promised to come out 10 years ago? Far from it.
If you expect AI to do everything for you, it's still not there. And if you're sceptic or even neutral to this topic- AI is just causing more problems (especially in security) by the day.
> It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.
What are you even talking about? You can see it do the magic yourself for like $20. The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses disproof for exampe is straight up on github right now for you to look at.
What magical thing are you waiting for? It is literally currently revolutionaizing all engineering work.
It's just fantastic, to think the cost of running the Stasi was once 20% of national GDP and now that same oppressive all seeing surveillance and data collation is available for pennies on the dollar.
For clarity, I'm more or less indifferent to AI, I do understand how it all works - it's humans with AI I don't trust and that I don't see being adequately reigned in.
They only describe the LLM as helping withdownloading data, this means the creation of the plot could be done by hand.
I agree that the rest of the post then proceeds to ask a question in a way implying the machine also created the plot, but that's not actually in the stated premise.
Example: if you don’t use AI as a reviewer for your code to check for vulnerabilities, it will be seen as risky - as compared to a year ago when people were complaining about hallucination.
Expect the same pattern for healthcare as well. Also journalism
Did they type "Write a news article make no mistakes?" and hit Publish
or
Did they use it to find secondary sources for a set of details to then manually go check them? Or use it for copy-editing or have a discussion with a frontier model about the best term to describe a concept (something I find them very good at!)? Or a myriad of such interventional uses.
Are those considered the same by the audience? Was the difference explained in this survey? I'm betting the audience is a lot more accepting of the latter and the former is what everyone imagines "Use Gen-AI" means and words like "mostly human generated with some AI help" don't really capture the difference OR value.
I hate to be the "there is nuance" guy, but...isn't there significant nuance here?
The pressure is intense to save money, there have been decades of cuts, and they’re now operating on trimmed budgets and rarely do real journalism any more.
So for most newspapers and online news sources generative ai will be used to the hilt, to simply replace employees, or by freelancers on a deadline. The pressure will be for ever faster news. It will be used for writing not research because of these pressures, and already is in many places.
It’s already flooding some online spaces like Apple News on the stocks app with dross from simply wall st or generated bitcoin price articles. In the case of financial news it was always full of nonsense of the form ‘stocks rise today because of factor X’.
I think we lost all nuance in the world, though. Everything has to be black or white, otherwise nothing sells anymore.
People is the gateway, their effort, their experience, to learn from.
https://youtube.com/shorts/I8OEbSB70fk
Funny how they call mass surveillance these days. /s
It’s like if I asked you if you enjoy talking shit about people or saying things and gossiping without people knowing about it.
Most people would say no they don’t enjoy it. But most people would be lying. Not lying to you but lying to themselves. It’s one of the most obvious lies because everyone can definitely think back and recall themselves talking shit.
People say they don’t want to use LLMs and they say they hate ai and they say they appreciate human art and effort and human endeavor and all of this is true and at the same time not true as the same people who say they don’t like it use it all the time. It’s both true and not true. Human brains like LLMs did not evolve to enforce strict logical conclusions because such a thing is not absolutely necessary for survival. You can hold contradictory opinions and beliefs in your mind.
It’s just the hype train is excessive and in everyone’s faces and anything that’s like that genuinely becomes hated.
Imagine if I saved the lives of hundreds of people everyday. And I would throw this fact in your face everyday via TikTok, email spam, YouTube, social media.
Pretty soon you’ll become sick of it. You’ll not care for anyones life. Thats what is happening with ai. Ai is genuinely from a logical standpoint, incredible. But all of that is diluted by overhype.
My entire company now uses AI to code. Nobody writes code by hand at my company anymore. At this point if you can’t see how incredible and horrifying it is then you’re delusional.
I get it though. One year ago you’d be right. The paradigm shift is happening so fast people haven’t updated their priors. What you believed to be true just changed. It flipped several times this year and people who keep up to date had to completely flip their understanding of the world and the nature of AI several times. This is not an easy thing to do and thus many people like you just missed the boat.
There’s no doubt that there is a financial ai bubble. But that bubble is completely orthogonal to the complete paradigm shift of the actual capabilities of AI.
Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course. Is is the thing that was promised to come out 10 years ago? Far from it.
If you expect AI to do everything for you, it's still not there. And if you're sceptic or even neutral to this topic- AI is just causing more problems (especially in security) by the day.
Not of course. I'll call it good to great the day it gets beyond level 2, and no sooner.
And LLMs are similar in a lot of use cases.
Does that put food on the table? It does not, to the contrary, this AI thing is taking food off the table for many, many people.
It is literally incredible, that is, the claims people make about it are not believable. It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.
What are you even talking about? You can see it do the magic yourself for like $20. The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses disproof for exampe is straight up on github right now for you to look at.
What magical thing are you waiting for? It is literally currently revolutionaizing all engineering work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
For clarity, I'm more or less indifferent to AI, I do understand how it all works - it's humans with AI I don't trust and that I don't see being adequately reigned in.
The what now? I don't know what that is. Can AI help me put food on the table and pay my bills? That thing I can understand.