alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of the problems or gains attributed to AI are just reflections of the humans that use them.
I dont care if you used AI to produce something. If you share it with me, I assume you are responsible for it. You own it, whether you agree or not.
> it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before
What is the direction of causality here? Does AI make people jerks, or they were already or prone to be jerks?
The same applies to innovations or breakthroughs made by people who use AI in their work.
> LLMs are solving novel math problems and successfully emulated a PS5
Did the AI independently accomplish those things, or did highly competent people accomplish them using AI as a tool?
What would happen if you give someone with no mathematical or programming background the same frontier models that OpenAI used for their mathematical proofs [1]. Would they produce the same discoveries?
I think of humans as constants. They can bring positive, or negative value to the table. The AI is the multiplier.
Take software engineering. If you let someone who doesnt care about code quality (their constant is negative since any code they write will introduce a tech debt) push code to your repo using AI, it will destroy your project. But let an engineer with strong fundamentals and high standards use AI to push code to your repo, they can improve the project much faster than they could without AI.
I guess my comment was done a bit too quickly and comes across as muddled. I mostly agree with you, in the hand of competent people AI is a very powerful tool. I'm a bit of a misanthrope and I think that incompetent, stupid and malicious people vastly outnumber competent, well-intentioned people. This leads me to feel rather pessimistic about the impact of AI because it is a multiplier when the human constant is often less than great.
In a lot of big companies, you had a small majority of people who were incompetent but mostly harmless because their lack of competence prevented them from causing too many issues and another group of people who were competent and productive. Nowadays, with AI those incompetent people can be maximally effective at causing issues due to their incompetence.
The same happens with opensource projects who are now flooded with mostly useless PRs and bug reports from incompetent people directing LLMs to do so. etc...
So yes individually AI makes people productive but I'm not sure if that is true at the scale of a company nor do I think it's necessarily true with opensource projects.