> But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either
Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.
I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.
This problem has been around in tech for at least as long as I've been here, but LLM-mania has definitely thrown water on the grease fire. The arrogant programmer/engineer type who thinks everything else in the world must be easy in comparison to their vocation. The disdain of all things outside STEM as "soft skill" stuff for IQ-inferior beings. And the one that gets me most: the utter lack of taste in anything outside tech.
You can see it in discussions here daily. Look a at the things people use to make analogies. It's like an HN cliche at this point to invoke Ansel Adams as the pinnacle of photography. Great, so the people making our cameras and shaping the platforms we encounter visual art on are only at a National-Geographic-calendar-level of photo literacy. The AI bros telling you that LLM writing can be just as good or better than human writing if you prompt it right are making the Harry Potter fanfic make sense to me.
It's like listening to someone convinced that chicken nuggets are just as good as the best chicken, which they've had at KFC, so they know. I can't wait for the Grok-generated, historically accurate Odyssey to hit the theaters before the end of the year.
bakugo · · focus · HN ↗
Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.
I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.
eloisius · · focus · HN ↗
You can see it in discussions here daily. Look a at the things people use to make analogies. It's like an HN cliche at this point to invoke Ansel Adams as the pinnacle of photography. Great, so the people making our cameras and shaping the platforms we encounter visual art on are only at a National-Geographic-calendar-level of photo literacy. The AI bros telling you that LLM writing can be just as good or better than human writing if you prompt it right are making the Harry Potter fanfic make sense to me.
It's like listening to someone convinced that chicken nuggets are just as good as the best chicken, which they've had at KFC, so they know. I can't wait for the Grok-generated, historically accurate Odyssey to hit the theaters before the end of the year.