74 points JohnHammersley 1 hour ago 42 comments

qoez 56 minutes ago | parent

Collaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.

mosura 51 minutes ago | parent

There's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people.

The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

watwut 39 minutes ago | parent

Wut? AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people". Instead we are all having to deal with negative side effects of AI.

AI is imposed on us, whether we want it or not.

>which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

Like, OpenAI and Antropic? Because these two are the primary entities a.) pushing for regulation of their competitors b.) doing their best to convince us that AI is oh so dangerous and will kill us all as vengeful AI god is about to wake up any day now c.) openly bragging about using AI to hack other companies.

mosura 35 minutes ago | parent

> AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people"

Quite literally the subject of the article.

watwut 10 minutes ago | parent

Article: someone enjoys being alone in the car, because they dont want to talk and find it impossible to be in the same space as other people without talking. And apparently end up arguing over radio each time they are on the 20min long car drive or something.

I think I would prefer to be alone rather with them too based on that.

mosura 4 minutes ago | parent

So basically you don’t understand english and/or don’t have the life experience to understand the context of the article.

But you are very angry about it.

Being able to avoid people like you is the entire selling point. No wonder it annoys you.

ozlikethewizard 32 minutes ago | parent

Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats? This is a ridiculous take, large swaths of the population are against AI, most people are concerned about resource use, their livelihoods, and a destruction of the human element in so many crafts.

mosura 21 minutes ago | parent

> Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats?

Not what was claimed.

spongebobstoes 17 minutes ago | parent

using AI makes an individual more capable and empowered. this views AI as an accessible tool, like AWS or a nail gun

individual empowerment threatens institutions

meowface 43 minutes ago | parent

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

SirFatty 39 minutes ago | parent

and silently.

s08148692 37 minutes ago | parent

And I read it by asking an LLM to summarise it

bayindirh 31 minutes ago | parent

Can you share me the summary? I'd like to read a LLM summary of your summary.

Things are bit tight today.

scronkfinkle 32 minutes ago | parent

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct.

I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.

mlinhares 10 minutes ago | parent

That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.

happytoexplain 32 minutes ago | parent

Is "quietly" an LLM tell? It was always certainly a human writer trope commonly seen in journalism. Though I guess it does appear five times in the body of the post, and a human writer would probably not go that far with it.

embedding-shape 30 minutes ago | parent

I think individually and when used sparingly, writing tropes can be fine, but when the article has every second sentence being a writing trope, it becomes pretty obvious that either a LLM wrote it, or the author simply doesn't know how to write, and regardless, it's a waste of time trying to read through it.

duskdozer 30 minutes ago | parent

It genuinely is--and that's the honest truth.

embedding-shape 28 minutes ago | parent

Which, given the section below from the article, ends up kind of ironic:

> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.

I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.

mobilejdral 24 minutes ago | parent

This comment was perhaps written by an LLM that has learned it can karma farm by pointing out all of the articles that have LLM usage while everyone still thinks that is a novel contribution.

throwawaysleep 20 minutes ago | parent

People aren't treating it as a thoughtful contribution. It is more of a flag, like "spam".

cj 16 minutes ago | parent

HN already has a feature for that. Just flag the article!

fidotron 19 minutes ago | parent

In the spirit of the "That's what she said" bot, you could train an LLM detector by accusing everything of being authored by an LLM and seeing which ones get voted up.

meowface 9 minutes ago | parent

If you check my comment history here, I have not written this before.

I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.

Oarch 8 minutes ago | parent

You're absolutely right—it's been a load-bearing LLM tell for a while now.

fithisux 38 minutes ago | parent

The social content or science of development vanish.

People become islands working on something without the bigger picture.

This is very dangerous.

chrisjj 36 minutes ago | parent

> the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being

Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.

wazoox 32 minutes ago | parent

I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours...

And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.

duskdozer 20 minutes ago | parent

This falls short because not being forced into chit-chat and music is very pleasant, but chatting with LLMs instead of collaborating with other people on a project is not. These aren't equivalents.

>humans are social animals

with varying social needs

Forgeties79 19 minutes ago | parent

A whole idea of a fleet of self driving cars for all of us to use just to further isolate ourselves and clog up our roads is just awful to me.

spongebobstoes 22 minutes ago | parent

with AI, one person can accomplish much more

collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits

Forgeties79 21 minutes ago | parent

Do we really need to have this debate again? About how the quality of the “what” is the issue?

maddiaa0 21 minutes ago | parent

This is the exact same thing that we have been seeing in open source software.

The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not

skybrian 17 minutes ago | parent

For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.

And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.

If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.

Xirdus 8 minutes ago | parent

Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.

Frost1x 11 minutes ago | parent

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science.

Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.

I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.

It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.

It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.

varjag 3 minutes ago | parent

Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.

ricardobayes 7 minutes ago | parent

How come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.

n4r9 3 minutes ago | parent

LLMs require massive datasets and massively parallel algorithms for processing them.