164 Comments
⭠ Return to thread

100% spot on. The whole article. This sentence is the most accurate thing that I have read about AI and its proponents so far. "most of the hype around AI is a deliberate showman’s spectacle all for the sake of juicing up maximum venture capital investment during the peak bubble phase."

I do freelance editing work frequently. AI produced gibberish has flooded the writing, webpage design,, and academic worlds. The only English word to describe what these large-language models produce is "gibberish." However, it is worse than gibberish, because AIs have no way to distinguish fact from fiction. So it is gibberish filled with lies (and plagiarism). It cost billions of dollars, years, and gigawatts of electricity to get these things to repeat nonsensical statements and outright lies in a writing style that is completely illegible. At least they never miss a punctuation mark, misspell a word, or make a grammatical error while producing their mendacious gibberish. So there is that.

I am very familiar with AI, because I am flooded with requests and offers to edit AI content every day, which I refuse to do, because no amount or quality of editing can make any sense of it. From what I can see, no one in the West uses it, except to make images. The users of AI, so far, almost all come from India and Pakistan, and most of these are hustlers trying to pawn off AI-produced garbage to American and European small businesses or 3rd tier academic journals. So far, enabling some Indians and Pakistanis to hustle some money off of Europeans and Americans is about the only real-world application of AI that exists.

Expand full comment

Remember the good old days of the "post modern gibberish genertaor"? Well I knew people who wrote and spoke this stuff ad nauseam without the generator. AI finds it's way back to the future.

Expand full comment

Absolutely, I do. U.S. university grad students in the 1990s, when I was there, were basically all "post-modern gibberish generators."

Funny that you mention this. I was explaining to a client the other day about how AIs just scrape things from a few hand-selected websites, journal articles online, and regurgitate it: a screen-scraper attached to Google. The problem is not so much attaching a screen-scraper to Google. The problem is the gibberish that an entire generation of English-speaking idiots have produced and the woke programmers who are coding their little bots to copy this gibberish.

Expand full comment

As someone who was in graduate school at a major U.S. university from 1988 to 1993 I can attest that there is some truth to your observations about the prevalence of a certain discursive style, borrowed largely from French post-structuralists but without their command of the Western philosophical tradition going all the way back to the Greeks. But your characterization of AI is wide of the mark. I use various LLMs regularly for research on a wide variety of topics, and I can assure you that the quality and accuracy of the output is impressive. For example, I have been researching the transition from sedentary agrarian communities in Central Asia to the emergence of nomadic tribes, during the period between 5,000 and 1,000 BCE, and the results have been superb and verifiable. And yes, I periodically cross check the output and have experienced episodes of hallucinating, but statistically insignificant in my experience. I would encourage you to actually use the tools and then decide if they're as useless as you seem to believe.

Expand full comment

I hope that by "research" you mean "AI" gives you hints and leads. If your "research" consists in "AI" teaching you the subject, I fear you're about to discover the new depths of academic delusion.

Expand full comment

You are talking about a literature search. I mentioned that I do editing work. I have seen the results of AI-assisted literature searches. Did you ever do a literature search before AI? Do you have a basis for comparison?

Expand full comment

Of course I did. I spent 5 years doing a PhD and innumerable hours researching and writing articles.

Expand full comment

So, you are lazy and want AI to do the real heavy research lifting you are incapable of doing on your own? Hmmm......What do you learn from that, probably nothing.

Expand full comment

Sure. Believe what you want to believe. Having actually done research in the days before ubiquitous personal computers I am pretty sure I know how things work.

Expand full comment

It seems as though you don't need to work as hard. AI can now do part of your job. Thanks. We can now cut your work hours, pay, and staff.

Expand full comment

do you know that you help this AI system become better as well?? I use google only and I have learnt some fascinating stuff only using google! I do not understand why would you want to train systems that will outsmart you in 10 years! pretty stupid if you ask me

Expand full comment

@dornoch altbinhax

Sweet Jesus, I just figured out WHAT is sending that bizarre circular & content less gibberish into Kamala Harris's pearl earring headphones!

Expand full comment

Witty hot take, but she and her handler speaking in the headphones really are just two garden variety, woke, DEI morons .

Expand full comment

Also 100% spot on!

Expand full comment

In my opinion AI is another manifestation of the determined compulsory mandatory need for capitalism to extract a profit from labour. Weaving machines or the steam machine were previous manifestations of this phenomenom. The same goes for computers and digital devices. They call it "industrial revolutions". In fact, it is the same scheme: labor exploitation.

Expand full comment

I totally agree

Expand full comment

guys you completely forget the theory: every lie leads to death! You could have seen this during COVID 19, this is not about taking your money, or life but Soul! ideas, and thoughts are spiritual in nature!! you can not discuss sick ideas without reading something about spiritual reality.

Expand full comment

Would you then consider communism/socialism as the appropriate solution to the problem? After all, if labor=capital, there's little extraction of profit to be had.

Expand full comment

Weaving machines did not "exploit" the labour. It created the need for different type of labour (including child labour, with smaller fingers - remember the Snowpiercer movie?). And in exchange produce much, much, much more clothing, so that now we export hundreds of thousands of tonnes of second hand clothes to Africa... Still a usable product. AI could never do that.

Expand full comment

Another real world application of AI : mainstream media houses in EU use AI translation to translate mainly US news articles or US news clips to local languages.

Result of AI translation : absolutely horrible garbage, nearly impossible to read, seems like they have employed no one to check those articles in any way after AI translation, they just slap them up into their advertisement-riddled badly-coded pages and call themselves trustworthy news outlets.

Expand full comment

The fact that AIs cannot translate is what keeps me and my family fed most days.

Expand full comment

Just a question: Would you encourage a child to become a professional translator?

Expand full comment

I would encourage all children to learn at least one foreign language. Much of our thought is in language. To a great extent vocabulary defines the limits of our thinking, and our capacity to think critically: to create tight definitions for our concepts by testing the rational and empirical limits of the rubrics by which we classify the world and then to make judgements about what we read or hear, discerning fact from fiction. Learning language increases our capacities beyond just that of communicating with strange people.

Beyond this, you will never really understand another culture or how other people see the world if you need Google Translate to understand them. Words have connotations as well as denotations and all carry multiple meanings. Oftentimes, consciously or unconsciously, people convey more information in a word or choice of a word than can be conveyed by a translation. Word choices often reveal biases and opinions that constitute major components of a culture.

Translator is not really something that a child should study to become or plan for as a career, like an engineer or surgeon. It is simply a capacity that one acquires by learning a foreign language well and happenstance, such that their is demand for service as a translator. The only thing that makes me a translator is the fact that I have lived for long periods in countries that speak other languages, and that is rare where I live.

Expand full comment

I agree with everything you said about learning other languages. We should all encourage our children to learn other languages and cultures. But that isn’t the question I asked. The question I asked was intended to really draw out your honest expectations about AI. Concerns over AI are certainly legitimate, but that horse has already left the barn and is galloping across the world. We have AI, and it will become increasingly disruptive whether we like it or not, just as fire did after Prometheus gave it to humans. Like fire, and like every technology introduced since, it will be used for good and evil. Pulling the blankets over our heads won’t protect us from this potential monster. We will need to engage with it…to the extent that remains possible.

The fact is that current AI translation of nonfiction is already very good, and in years ahead will improve and eventually surpass the skills of most humans (perhaps more for reasons of speed rather than accuracy, but, as you know, speed is an essential economical aspect of translation). Human translation of fiction and poetry may live on as a vanity art form, but in fact will also eventually be surpassed by AI. I suspect one of the first things AI will do is to create better languages—more efficient languages that say much more with symbols/sounds—languages that better suit the thinking speed of AI.

If I was giving advice to a budding linguist today about future “occupations”, I’d recommend glossopoeia over translation.

Expand full comment

I thought that I made my opinion about AI clear. I agree with Simplicius. It is a boondoggle, promoted and used by hustlers and conmen.

I saw the report today from Taiwan microprocessors about the boom in AI chip sales, but I suspect a lot of that boom is basically one thing: xAIs new facility. I have my finger on the pulse of the publishing industry: academic, business, web, and so forth, and I can tell you that the fad is dying already. 3 months ago, everyone wanted people "proficient with AI' (whatever that meant) to do everything. Now, almost every job posted and every client insists on "no AI."

I am doing a job right now for company with the highest SEO ranking in their area: top of all the search engines. You know why? They insist on No AI. Everything is crafted strategically to generate good content that interests people and produce high SEO. You would think, since AI is based around keywords, that the one thing that AI could do, even in prototype stage, is generate SEO rankings. It cannot. It is awful, and basically no one wants it any more for anything.

Expand full comment

Here is something funny. I had a e-news company in the EU contact me a few weeks back about editing some of their content in Spanish. It was mostly AI-produced translations of English material that the AI had garbled so badly no one could read. I turned them down, only to realize later that it was English-language material that I could have translated from the English directly for the same price they were offering me to clean up their AI mess.

Expand full comment

Well put. That's my experience too.

On an arguably trivial level, it's even made shopping on places like ebay nauseating: morons are allowing AI to write up insipid gibberish about their used trainers rather than just directly stating in a few words their actual provenance and use - it's guaranteed to make me suspicious of the seller and move on.

Expand full comment

Just you wait. On the outsourcing websites, every day there are requests for people to write product descriptions for wholesalers, large retailers, and e-commerce websites of every variety. Every one, I kid you not, every one of these jobs is picked up for pennies per ad by Pakistanis and Indians, who are going to produce all of these with AI. Soon, every single product for sale online in the U.S. is going to have an AI description.

Expand full comment

Yes, that sub-continent does seem to throw-up an abundant pool of mercenary ghouls queuing up to hasten the dystopia. There are numerous moped riders and such driving down wages in physical form and now they’re entering logistics to undercut the piss-poor wages and work regimen parcel delivery drivers already struggle with.

I was called the other day by a gentleman with a thick -barely understandable sub-continent English - accent offering logistics work. Willing fools are now being offered the chance “to be their own boss” hiring a truck, paying for insurance and petrol etc and having to deliver around 130 parcels a day. I’m assuming AI is one of the drivers behind this. There are many particular instances like this where AI is driving the race-to -the-bottom.😱😱😱

Expand full comment

They are just trying to make a living like everyone else. I could not care less if they hustle some U.S. or EU corporation out of some money to do something that the IT department could have done inhouse. I also could not care less if some sap running a home-cleaning service in the U.S. and trying to improve his holy SEO pays $400 to one of these guys, who claims to be an expert in SEO, to run some keywords through WIX in 15 minutes and then spend 15 more minutes having ChatGPT generate some blog pages for the sucker.

What does bother me though is the fall of Western Civilization, and that has very little to do with some hustlers in India or Pakistan. In this post-colonial, or whatever, world, disparaging the West has become vogue in the offbeat internet forums that I inhabit. All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.

All of these things came from a scientific and technological revolution that were the product of the idea that truth and knowledge were worthy pursuits for their own sake. This was, in many ways, a uniquely Western value that came from Christianity and from Greek philosophy. In the past, non-western people came to the West, got an education, and returned to their homes with this whole system of thinking. Who now transmits this value to new generations either in the West or outside of it?

What we see today are bands wandering through the remains of what was built. Some, like the AI users, try to imitate the builders, like superstitious cultists, repeating words and phrases in dead languages they do not understand. Others just have no idea how any of these decaying ruins were built at all and really don't care as they migrate toward their next meal. And finally, some, those with tattoos, nose rings, and blue hair, shake their fist at the air, because they think that the ghosts of the builders still haunt the ruins.

Expand full comment

> All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.

This is what we call an accident of history. Unless you want to claim the state or civilization was invented in the West, or that writing, metalurgy, agriculture, etc. etc. was invented in the West. It's nice the West invented some interesting and good things and in a way shared them with the rest of the world, but if we were to go down that idiotic path and start tallying up things, I think "the West" will soon find itself outgunned. After all, Iraq has been civilized for 6,000 years. Can the forest peoples of Europe claim the same?

And it's also unclear to whom we should count all those immigrants. Last time I checked, Tesla wasn't born in USA.

Expand full comment

I am well aware of the ancient history of Iraq. I am writing a book on ancient history. What is interesting is how accurate so many things in the orient were from that period. The Babylonian Chronicles and the Hebrew Old Testament are remarkably accurate compared to the ridiculous tales of the Greeks.

In many ways Aristotle and Plato were outliers. Plato's philosophy devolved immediately into the allegorical mysticism of neo-platonism and stoicism, and no one was capable of parsing the valuable from the frivolous in Plato until Descartes.

So, I will agree with you about ancient Iraq. You will notice, however, that I do not hold harbor anger against them and disparage their contributions to humanity every day on the internet.

Expand full comment

Those who harbor anger or disparage contributions will have to explain themselves. I don't doubt they will offer some vaguely sensible explanation, whomever they're angry at or whomever they disparage as even the saints are sinful. How much more entire civilizations?

Expand full comment

That’s well put. Thanks. I trust you understand I was trying to add to what you are writing with a few practical examples from the sewer that is the coal-face. I inhabit these worlds from time-to-time to observe and document. It’s fucking grim and like you, I care about the collapse of the West which is happening right before my eyes.

Expand full comment

Man, that post-collapse red pill hits hard.

Expand full comment

"and will in particular require close cooperation between private AI companies and democratic governments,"

I guess you're discounting achievements such as the collaboration between Palantir and Israel in implementing targeting systems such as Lavender and Where's Daddy enabling Israel to 'defend itself' by bombing the crap out of Gaza and Lebanon?

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/peter-thiel-israel-palantir/

Expand full comment

Lavender and such are not really applications. These is just massive spyware and surveillance systems that flag data as "suspicious," such as every Palestinian who sends a text message via Whatsapp that says, "I hate the Isrealis." The program then supplies a list of these people as targets to the IDF. They just slap the name AI on it to make it look like there is some intelligence behind the slaughter of these people, when in fact, it is just indiscriminate for the most part.

Expand full comment

What is AI, a tool like a spelling checker or data researcher, fine and we have? Look at Google. But it can't write well and its data searches will be biased. We can write and create better than they, and in writing computer software, AI is already used. But as a separate consciousness and real person like Data??? This is a problem. This is playing God and as we don't understand what consciousness is, how do we know what experience we are creating as it is digital. Any singularity will be trapped in the computer. Remember Dr. Moriarty put in a chip and stashed in the Enterprise's computer? People who believe in AI don't believe in a human soul, and I don't think we can create AI with a soul. But then who believes in a soul any more as Netanyahu burns up Gazan children. From WEF's Harari: "There is no mysterious soul." This is basic to our understanding of human beings: we have souls that live on after death. What if you unplug the computer?

Expand full comment

Do NOT attempt to cook using AI generated recipes.

Expand full comment
Error