Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire.
Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
You're right. They did it. The old man and dog joke has been realized, but the real answer of the future turned out to be: "the dog programs the game, and the man feeds the treat hopper."
Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.
In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.
I can because I have also used similar arguments. There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use. Yet in actuality asking a human to draw something will require more water. There are people who think AI uses more resources than humans which is why it must be said.
> a human to draw something will require more water.
That human would require the same amount of water whether you ask them to draw or not, and would exist anyway because they are not born for productivity reasons. "Creation" of humans isn't driven by the amount of work to accomplish.
You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.
Same for energy consumption.
This argument doesn't work at all.
What you do for humans to use fewer resources is to work on making us produce less garbage, and produce things using techniques that are less resource-intensive.
I don't do any moral judgement at all, and I also don't predict the future.
I respond to "You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.", because that statement is false. (Mental) work has an effect on the human metabolism.
I'm not judging, I'm telling you (a bit snarkily, true) that your brain activity won't stop with something else doing (a part of) your work. And this is the subtility that makes the statement true. Said overwise: sure, you consume marginally less at rest, but you won't be at rest, making the remark pointless.
Even if it were false, the difference in energy consumption is not significant, taking on acount what the AI uses, and also all the energy that you use to live (housing, heating, products and food you buy whose production uses energy, etc).
And about the water, it's even worse, even disregarding the AI: at rest, maybe you'll drink, I don't know, 1L less (that's a wild number!), compared to the 100(s) L that you use to cook, wash, clean, etc, not even counting the water used to produce stuff you buy.
But again, you won't do nothing. We are commenting on a post of a guy who was fired and couldn't help creating something. That's how we are. We hate boredom.
Worse: the way our societies are setup makes is so that ai, if it helps at all, likely won't free us from work, it will likely just make us collectively produce more garbage. That's more energy consumption, not less.
That "but don't forget humans consume a lot of energy too" argument is at best not connects to reality, more likely a Sam Altman lie and you shouldn't take it seriously.
> There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use.
Nobody I know says this. In fact, I've never heard of this ever before, and I read artist and hobby communities pretty hostile to AI, but I never once read this nice strawman you've built.
People say you should use a real artist instead of AI for a multitude of reasons:
- Because they want to enjoy art created by humans.
- Because it provides a living to artists, even artists for minor work like advertising or lesser commercial illustrations.
- Because AI "art" is built by stealing from human artists, and while human art has a history of copying and cloning, never before has tech allowed this in such a massive, soulless scale.
Sam Altman gave a deranged, completely out of touch reply, and he should be called to task for it, not defended. A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal. That's a very stupid thing to say.
> A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal
But from the perspective of the business and capitalism that's exactly what a human is. A tool that consumes resources and hopefully produces more value for the business than it consumes.
Sure we can dance around this and you can pretend your employer gives a shit about you and your family and your childhood stories but they don't.
You said that a CEO was out of bounds for framing employees as numbers on a spreadsheet. To me this suggests that you believe company owners should care about the humanity of their workers. And I'm saying they don't.
I get the general point you're making. Indeed, Altman's take is capitalism taken to 11. There was a lot of that going on before AI or the past few decades, but I don't think it wasn't as extreme and for every company. There's definitely a conversation to be had about modern capitalism (and plenty of people studying it, too). However, not everything is a FAANG or tech startup. Some owners do care about their employees to a higher degree than just numbers on a spreadsheet (not going into the whole "we're a family" bullshit speech, I mean the genuine stuff).
Imagine thinking of people as "resource-hogs before they reach peak smartness"!
What's new here, in my opinion, is people like Sam Altman behaving as if they didn't understand normal human behavior. You cannot simply compare an LLM to a growing human. You cannot say things like "grow a human over 20 years before they achieve smartness". What? That's not how human beings think about human beings, and Altman is detached from real human behavior here. He's saying out loud the thoughts he should keep to himself, a bit like a person with coprolalia. And it's ok for us to dislike him for this, even if he's just voicing the opinions of extreme techno-capitalism.
Sam Altman once joked (?) he wouldn't know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT how to behave more like a human? Or at least fake it?
> Sam Altman once joked (?) he wouldn't know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT how to behave more like a human? Or at least fake it?
Not to mention that was at a time when all kinds of wild suggestions like glue in pizza were coming out of ChatGPT’s sloppy outputs. There are so many little things that quickly become big things with kids, annd exhausted parents should absolutely not use LLM’s for sussing those things out.
I could easily see well-meaning parents looking for healthy snacks to make their kids accidentally feeding their baby fresh honey, for instance. Or asking how much water to give their infant and not realizing the answer is absolutely none unless they are severely dehydrated from an illness or something.
There are a lot of hazards for kids under 1 in particular that make me incredibly nervous to ever suggest exhausted parents use LLM’s to answer kid related questions. Recommendations also change relatively frequently so who knows if it’s even pulling on the most recent best practices.
It's that second point. We live in an age of artificial scarcity created by a system of social organization that we've mostly not argued about since the 50s, that's now showing it's stretch marks.
If it weren't for the need to 'earn' a living, I'd say to the other two points: Por que no los dos? Save for the capital argument (which is valid, I'm not saying it isn't. You will starve if you don't make money), why is it necessarily true that the two (AI and people) are in competition?
In fact, I think "actual" artists would benefit incredibly from the use of AI, which they could do if it weren't a shibboleth (like I said, for good reason). You'd no longer have to have an army of underpaid animators from vietnam to bring your OC to life - you could just use your own art and make it move and sing. We'd not need huge lumbering organizations full of people who, let's be honest, work there making other people's dreams come to life in large part because it's a better bet than taking a joe-job at the local denny's (after all, you're doing the thing you love even if it isn't truly "yours").
I've had this discussion with younger folks, who are legitimately shook by the state of things. They're worried that all the work they've done to this point is going to be moot, because they've correctly assessed that the whole capital system isn't going anywhere any time soon, and they've been prepping to try and get a job at netflix, or disney, or paramount - because that's the world we've handed them. They see those positions drying up and what else are you going to do? They have the power financially and politically and without them you're doing "not art" for work, which sucks because you need to work.
I say; eat the rich. General wildcat strikes until UBI. Tax the everloving shit out of capital gains and peel back personal income taxes. We (the millenials) were handed a steaming pile of shit for a world, so at least we know what would constitute not an absolute disaster for Zeds, Alphas, etc. Have I gone totally off the rails for a conversation about AI? Actually, I don't believe so. The cultural pushback is a function of a busted system. After all, it's the economy, stupid.
Ok, let me reframe in a less assertive way: it's not common to say that you should hire human artists "because of water", so uncommon it's not a widely held belief I've seen in artist or hobbyist communities, and therefore using this to justify Altman's deranged remark seems weird to me.
Over a year ago yeah I occasionally heard that argument or some light variation of it, though not nearly to this ridiculous extent that you’re portraying now. Now? It’s basically a strawman. Most people’s objections revolve around the theft/reckless scraping that has literally taken down public infrastructure required to train these models as well as the ridiculous expectations being put that all of us implement it in literally every aspect of our lives even if it doesn’t fit, especially professionally.
It helps to picture some sort of extraterrestrial saying this. Maybe someone like Alan Tudyk in "Resident Alien". It makes much more sense than to assume it's a human being saying these things.
Some dude vibe codes OpenPaw and gives credit to his XL Bully called Threadripper that would never hurt another person, gets acquired by OpenAI for 7 figures total comp purely on clout, and both simonw and Karpathy are calling it the next best development in AI because it draws penguins and industrialises slop while Sam Altman talks about the negative impact of human life compared to AI data centres while pleasuring Jony Ive in a coffee shop.
This makes sense! Many people trust that the functions of a human worker are asking questions and clicking ok. What if AI become better so we just a dog?
slightly concerned tomorrow morning's top HN story will be karparthy telling us how dog-based LLM interfaces are the way of the future
and you'll be left behind if you don't get in now
(and then next week my boss will be demanding I do it)