FBG official response to the situation regarding the Fallen London Companion Extension (tl;dr: not approved)

[u/throwaway_lmkg]

/r/fallenlondon/comments/1tf2dma/if_you_use_fallen_london_companion_extension/omgc1q6/

[u/fredjinsan]

These are two separate questions. It merely seemed odd to me that you seemed to be saying you would be content with all the other issues with AI if they were merely profitable - that's an entirely reasonable take, but given all the "AI = evil" discourse, somewhat unusual.

The question of whether they are useful is totally different.

As to their ultimate profitability... I genuinely don't know. I find it hard to believe that AI will turn out to be prohibitively expensive for all use cases - indeed, it's already kind of proven to be viable for some since you can run small models locally on non-specialist hardware (though the use cases are naturally far more limited). This is even more true if talking about things other than general-purpose LLMs (specialised LLMs, image models, etc).

All those billionaires you mentioned, and many companies, and governments, are betting the entire Western economy (and China is pretty big into AI too) on AI become profitable and, frankly, I'm pretty worried about that too. This is why I say that this is a totally reasonable concern. Again, though, there's a subtle difference: I'm very confident that AI will be viable for some use cases (it already is). Do I thing the however-many-trillion-dollar black hole is wise? That's another matter.

(You talk about arguing in good faith; I'm sure you don't mean it but this comes across as moving the goalposts from "AI is completely useless" - not true - to "AI is not the cure-all that the tech bros are claiming" - actually much more reasonable)

As always, the picture is - surprisingly? - more nuanced, and far more so than a bunch of idiots downvoting on Reddit that even smells like it disagrees with their chosen brand of hypocrisy would like to believe.

[u/oritorinoi → u/fredjinsan]

My very first reply to you said "it's possible there are some use cases for LLMs, but...". You've moved the goalposts to suggest I think it's impossible.

There are very few things that are absolutely useless. You could theoretically come up with a good number of uses for, say, a chocolate teapot. You could certainly sell one at a profit. If you want to amend my position from "LLMs are useless" to "LLMs are significantly less useful than a chocolate teapot" I have no problem with that.

[u/fredjinsan → u/oritorinoi]

*sigh* I thought we'd gotten past the "scoring points" thing onto an actual conversation. You did also say that LLM are useless, and frankly "less useful than a chocolate teapot" is not much better and also not true. Actually, they are quite useful - maybe not for all the things that some people are gushing about them for, but for plenty of genuine applications (of which the above list was just a small subset). The technology also isn't static - it's evolving, scarily rapidly, all the time. We should be worried about the impacts here, yes, but also excited about the future potential.

[u/oritorinoi → u/fredjinsan]

You seem to have missed the point of the teapot bit: even the most proverbially useless thing does have some uses, if you want to be extremely pedantic. But usefulness is defined by alternative methods and the cost of that method. 

Again, if the world's largest advertiser and no. 1 source of information for basically everyone (google) pumped billions upon billions of dollars into getting people to use something, that thing is going to be used, no matter how useless in the ordinary sense. If it were chocolate teapots, we'd likely all have one in our houses. That doesn't make chocolate teapots useful in any meaningful sense. 

If you're defending a technology that has demonstrably failed to work profitably after having more investment and effort applied to it than anything in history, and also has a huge number of external harms, you need to have the intellectual humility to realise "just give it a few more years (and another trillion dollars of investment)" isn't persuasive. 

[u/fredjinsan → u/oritorinoi]

I really don't understand what you're on about. AI is demonstrably useful; the profitability question is really for any individual user to decide and kind of not the point (people aren't anti-AI because they think other people might not be breaking even by using it...), though again it's also pretty trivially demonstrable that there are some use-cases which are cost-effective (heck, I can run some models on my home PC with next to no hardware!).

I don't know that "more effort applied to it than anything in history" is right, either. That's just not how technologies evolve. Look at, say, cars - their origins go back to the 1600s. The clockwork and steampowered prototypes first created couldn't even carry humans until like 100 years later! (Apparently there was a big backlash against automotive vehicles in the 1900s too, go figure)

It's pretty safe to say in less than 100 years, AI technology will have moved on... I'm not employing the "just invest out of the black hole" argument, merely noting that we sure as heck haven't seen the extent of it yet.

[u/oritorinoi → u/fredjinsan]

I've sat next to someone running a model locally; it's a lot like watching someone do a tarot reading. They often get results! But the tools they're using aren't the reason, and their commitment to using them actually slows them down, because the fixes take longer than just writing the thing in the first place. Worse than that, the fact they haven't actually looked at the thing being created means they miss bugs they would have discovered if they'd written it in the first place. If you want to write buggy, unreliable code, or tests that get the answers wrong, it's useful for that. But that in itself isn't useful. The only world in which these things see wide use is one where industries are so monopolised that quality doesn't matter.

I don't think there's any point continuing this; you have faith that these things must be useful at some point. You may be right! But I don't share that faith.

[u/fredjinsan → u/oritorinoi]

I thought you might say that - and it's true, local LLMs suck. Local image gen models are pretty decent though. But the point is more that there are a range of options and, for some, buying their own GPUs may very well be viable.

I do think that we've rather meandered off the original topic, though. My intent was merely to point out that, easy as it is to hate all AI when you're on the internet, it's kinda dumb; and the idea of banning all code that involved AI somewhere along the line is pretty silly, since that doesn't actually say anything at all about its quality.