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veen  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ed Zitron has lost all patience with your AI Boosterism

    It's the mediocrity of the situation that gives me hope.

At risk of circling back on points already made… it’s the same mediocrity that isn’t giving me hope, because the mediocrity is not determined by our sense of taste but by the information set processed to create the model. If LLMs are mostly stochastically picking something in the middle of what they know/have seen, that means the middle is defined by the model’s inputs (& training & heuristics) and, crucially, not by our judgement of what the model outputs. In other words, the middle of what range does it produce? It used to be that Midjourney could produce at best a mediocre, deep fried jpeg of, say, Will Smith - one that was recognizable but not much more. 4o can clearly produce a mediocre Miyazaki. There is a mark of progress in that jump - the median of blurry jpegs is objectively worse than the median Miyazaki frame. Similarly, the models have evolved from mediocre code noob to mediocre CS grad to mediocre junior engineer. Without ever doing anything else than seeking the middle of the road, there has been steps of progress towards smaller, more professional, better niches to produce mediocrity in.

Now it’s no replacement for Miyazaki. And I’m pretty sure younger me would’ve realized quickly that there is no ghost in the shell. But if I would’ve chosen to accept that lower quality, that mediocrity, I might at least have someone to talk to about my day or my feelings.

A lot (most?) frustrations surrounding AI now comes from other people choosing to ignore or accept the mediocrity because they get something out of it. The other day I got a document to review from my procurement specialist. After a while I realized he’d given me a largely AI generated document. At that point I’d already spent a good half hour rewriting the text. I felt…betrayed and a bit surprised. Isn’t this your job you’re not doing? but also How did I not notice sooner?

In the meeting to discuss I confronted him with “dude if you’re handing me slop you should tell me”. He said he prefers doing it this way because it means he needs only two or three revisions instead of five+ to get to v1.0 of the procurement document. So he got something out of it (speed) and we’d be rewriting it anyway. If he’d been upfront about it I think I’d been on board, because the truth is that I now regularly use the same workflow: getting the AI to write the shitty first draft so I can get to v1 in 3 hours instead of in 6.

Yeah, I played Farmville for a bit because I’m not actually a gamer. It was fun for a few weeks! Then I got bored. But at no point was I thinking “boy if only I’d be playing a better game right now” because mediocrity is often just passable enough to not second-guess what you’re doing. And I think that’s why I’m worried. I feel like you and I have a pretty good grasp of the technology and its edges to assess when to use it, when to doubt it, and when to absolutely not touch it with a ten foot pole. What about the rest though.

Maybe another analogy here is that of ultra processed foods - they too give you what you want (tastes and textures) but not what you need (a varied and healthy diet). Now I might walk through a Kroger’s thinking about how bad most of these products are, how uninteresting they taste, but most people will still load their cart full of it, won’t they? The mediocrity is not the saving grace there, and it feels like it won’t either with AI.