The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
That’s what I’ve been arguing with a fellow programmer recently. Right now you have to tell these programmer LLMs what to do on a function-by-function basis, because it doesn’t have enough capacity to think on a project level. However, that’s exactly what can be improved by scaling the neural network up. Right now the LLMs are limited by hardware, but they’re still using off-the-shelf GPUs that were designed for a completely different use case. The accelerators designed for AI are currently in the preproduction phase, very close to getting used in the AI data centers.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of weird takes on AI. It all seems to come down to ego guarding: But it can’t take my job, it just regurgitates combinations of what it was taught unlike me, only humans can be creative, who wants coffee made by a machine, well you still need a person to do things in the physical world, etc… Really highlights how difficult it is for people to think about change. Especially a change that might not end with a place for them.
The creativity argument I don’t get at all. Being creative these days means taking a bunch of known ideas and mashing them up, and that’s exactly what an LLM does. Very few people can really think outside the box.
I’ve had a few things where it was actually the other way around. I’m running a lot of TTRPGs, and my storylines are always pretty bland because I’m not that creative. I’ve started to use ChatGPT4 to give me a few ideas for stories, and it helps me break out of that box by suggesting completely different things than what I’d have thought of.