You’re way off base. It can also create sexually explicit pictures of men.

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them.

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands.

Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

> you...could have done something about it

What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?

It's already happening in India. Voicefakes are working unnervingly well and it's amplified by the fact that old people who had very little exposure to tech have basically been handed a smart phone that has control of their pension fund money in an app.

It is happening already, recently Brazilian woman living in Italy was scammed thinking she was having an online relationship with Brazilian tiktoker, the scammers created a fake profile and were sending her audio messages with the voice of said tiktoker cloned via AI. She sent the scammers a lot of money for the wedding but when she arrived in Brazil discovered the con.

Not at all. I’m saying AI doesn’t exist to scam elderly, which is saying nothing about whether it’s dangerous in that respect.

Sure, phones aren't directly doing the scamming, but they're supercharging the ability to do so.

Phones are also a very popular mechanism for scamming businesses. It's tough to pull off CEO scams without text and calls.

Therefore, phones are bad?

This is of course before we talk about what criminals do with money, making money truly evil.

> the voice and video impersonation is definitely being used to scam elderly people

And like with the child pornography, the AI companies are engaging in high-octane buck passing more than actually trying to tamp down the problem.

It's easily doubled my productivity as an engineer.

As a filmmaker, my friends and I are getting more and more done as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

As long as humans are driving, I see AI as an exoskeleton for productivity:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft (this is what I'm making)

It's been tremendously useful for me, and I've never been so excited about the future. The 2010's and 2020's of cellphone incrementalism and social media platformization of the web was depressing. These models and techniques are actually amazing, and you can apply these techniques to so many problems.

I genuinely want robots. I want my internet to be filtered by an agent that works for me. I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

Apart from all the other madness in the world, this is the one thing that has been a dream come true.

As long as these systems aren't owned by massive monopolies, we can disrupt the large companies of the world and make our own place. No more nepotism in Hollywood, no more working as a cog in the labyrinth of some SaaS company - you can make your own way.

There's financial capital and there's labor capital. AI is a force multiplier for labor capital.

> [...] are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop.

True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Saying that the tools make mistakes is correct. Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

History is paved with people who got steamrollered by technology they didn't think would ever work. On a practical level AI seems very median in that sense. It's notable only because it's... kinda creepy, I guess.

Revolutionizing cat memes

What’s the point of attacking a straw man while ignoring the actual points being brought up?

The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant. Yet modern ‘AI’ has all sorts of actual problems.

It mentions ecological destruction, which I must say is way better than water usage, AI is a power hog after all.

If it's the "usual reply", maybe it's because....I dunno...water is kinda important?

I'm not so sure thats correct. The Labs seem to offer the best overall products in addition to the best models. And requirements for models are only going to get more complex and stringent going forward. So yes, open source will be able to keep up from a pure performance standpoint, but you can imagine a future state where only licensed models are able to be used in commercial settings and licensing will require compliance against limiting subversive use or similar (e.g. sexualization of minors, doesn't let you make a bomb etc.).

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

Nvda is not the only exception. Private big names are losing money but there are so many public companies seeing the time of their life. Power, materials, dram, storage to name a few. The demand is truly high.

What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.

>losing tens of billions

They are investing 10s of billions.

>Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

What happens when the AI bubble is over and developers of open models doesn't want to incinerate money anymore? Foundation models aren't like curl or openssl. You can't have maintain it with a few engineer's free time.

The other side of the market:

I agree with your point and it is to that point I disagree with GP. These open weight models which have ultimately been constructed from so many thousands of years of humanity are also now freely available to all of humanity. To me that is the real marvel and a true gift.

It's turning out to be a commodity product. Commodity products are a race to the bottom on price. That's how this AI bubble will burst. The investments can't possibly show the ROIs envisioned.

As an LLM I use whatever is free/cheapest. Why pay for ChatGPT if Copilot comes with my office subscription? It does the same thing. If not I use Deepseek or Qwen and get very similar results.

Yes if you're a developer on Claude Code et al I get a point. But that's few people. The mass market is just using chat LLMs and those are nothing but a commodity. It's like jumping from Siri to Alexa to whatever the Google thing is called. There are differences but they're too small to be meaningful for the average user

Copyrights last a very long time. Moreover nothing says it has to be open. The recipe to coke is still secret.

well practiced cynicism is boring.

imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.

hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.

Yes, especially since they're talking about wiping about most or all white-collar jobs in our lifetimes. What's wrong with that?

If they want to abandon noblesse oblige we can certainly go back to the old way of evening things out. Their choice

some would say their money is our money via the ltv :-)

This seems to be a touchy subject for YC people with 500+ karma. Not a repudiation but an 'invisible hand' downvote to avoid a response or exposure of an opinion. My ancestors fought in the revolutionary war and like them, I'll die on this very subtle rolling hill of a question. I loved you all as brothers, this may be the end for mrwaffle.

I would love to have responded something like “only one: yours”

But in all seriousness, ai does a pretty good job at impersonating VPs. It’s confidently wrong and full of hope for the future.

I use various agentic dev tools all day long, mostly with Opus. The tools are vary capable now, but when planning mid-complexity features, I find the time estimates hilarious.

Phase 1: 4 days

Phase 2: 3 days

Phase 3: 2 days

4 hours later, all the work is done and tested.

The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.

All of them because cost cutting is a red flag in business regardless of what year it is.

You forgot about 'open source contributors' and 'musicians'.

The picture will be incomplete if we don't mention that those 'artists and writers' are using the results at scale.

Techbros trying to replace wage theft as the largest $ crime in the US

Something something… great artist steal.

well if all the talent is stolen and put into our water destruction machine we can make significantly worse and more expensive versions of just giving the job to a wagey

Sonething something for a brief moment we created a lot of value for the shareholders

McSweeney’s was never consistently funny. This is a good piece though.

For me I guess I don't really see what it's adding. You can watch an actual video clip of Jensen begging people not to "bully" or say "hurtful" things about AI while wearing a stupid leather jacket. It's a million times funnier to watch him squirm in real life.

I find it unfunny for the same reason I don't find modern SNL intro bits about Trump funny. The source material is already insane to the point that it makes surface-level satire like this feel pointless.

Like it or not, we're in an attention economy. We've seen that if we aren't loud and brash about it that the adminsitration will happily be loud (and sometimes lie) to push their narrative.

Maybe if we ever return to normal times and also don't let the other 90% of corruption stay where it's been for the past 40 years we can start to ease off the noise.

I think that someone interested in discussing facts would not write the phrase "immoral technofascist life". If I took the discussion at face value, I might respond asking for examples of how e.g. Dario Amodei is a "technofascist", but I think we can agree that would be really obtuse of me.

Centralization of technology has been happening at a rapid pace, and is only a tiny bit the fault of technology itself.

Capitalism demands profits. Competition is bad for profits. Multiple factories are bad for profits. Multiple standards are bad for profits. Expensive workers are bad for profits.

Even this has little to do with AI and points right at the capitalist society that already exists. HN really doesn't like to talk about their golden child that let's money flow, but the concentration of wealth and IP by the super wealthy occurred before GenAI was a thing.

This also ignores the broken fucking copyright system that ensures once you create something you get many lifetimes of fucking off without having to work, so if genAI kills that I won't shed a tear.

Oh, I mean they’re still doing that too:

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

I'm not sure what you are wanting here, are you actually requiring me to be a bully to affect change?

I can certainly criticize specific things respectfully. If I prioritised demonstrating my moral superiority I could loudly make all sorts of disingenuous claims that won't make the world a better place.

I certainly do not think people should be making exploitative images in Photoshop or indeed any other software.

I do not think that I should be able choose which software those rules apply to based upon my own prejudice. I also do not think that being able to do bad things with something is sufficient to negate every good thing that can be done with it.

Countless people have been harmed by the influence of religious texts, I do not advocate for those to be banned, and I do not demand the vilification of people who follow those texts.

Even though I think some books can be harmful, I do not propose attacking people who make printing presses.

What exactly are you requiring here. Pitchforks and torches? Why AI and not the other software that can be used for the same purposes?

If you want robust regulation that can provide a means to protect people from how models are used then I am totally prepared (and have made submissions to that effect) to work towards that goal. Being antagonistic works against making things better. Crude generalisations convince no-one. I want the world to be better, I will work towards that. I just don't understand how anyone could believe vitriolic behaviour will result in anything good.

Photoshop has been around for a long time.