‘More harmful than helpful’: young people sour on AI
4 months ago by sanitation to c/technology
Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary
Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning, due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the head of search now.
Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I'd need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I'd absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Edit: from the provided link the person who killed google search was Prabhakar Raghavan, who was apparently responsible for yahoo search over the period in which it fell precipitously off a cliff. He was put in that role by sundar pichai, replacing someone who explicitly cared about search and was deeply important to search development and had been there since the beginning
Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo's search and ads products
So not Sundar pichai, but the article does explain that he was specifically picked to become the new head of search by sundar pichai, and that Sundar used to work for McKinsey Consulting, who were responsible for the business strategy that fueled the opioid crisis, among lots of other things. Super dense, but well worth the read!
Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people
Thank you so much!! There were some details I wanted to clarify for people after reading so I edited my previous reply so folks can see a summary of some of the relevant points
I appreciate you getting me a link! This will be very helpful in explaining some of the rot in the search experience and adds a lot of additional weight to my suspicion that making search worse may also be happening to push ai adoption
i looked up the story I had read a while back, and sundar was not the head of ads, but had just become the ceo after having been on the board of directors, and the issue was kicked up to him when Ben Gomes refused implement changes that Prabhakar Raghavan of ads wanted. later Gomes left the company and was replaced by Raghavan as head of search.
This all coming from internal emails and memos that were released as part of the anti trust case summarized in this piece which does a very good job of sourcing individual claims by pointing to specific emails and memos, although, the author is very… passionate in their coverage.
Very rarely I see the argument that apart from being harmful directly, it's also a GIGANTIC surveilance tool, and the most vulnerable people trust it with their inner thougths, which is to me scarier that 'just' copyrights.
Absolutely agree, the data collection feels like even a step beyond the already horrifying amount of people's personal information we've normalized scraping directly into the pockets of corporations
Yeah I need to try those models at some point so I understand them a bit better. Not sure how my laptop will like them though, or if I'll be functionality limited by compute to the point that they're less than useful.
I see it as intrinsic to the reason the technology is being invested in and pushed into everything. Ai is wildly unmonetizable outside of data collection and replacing jobs
A similar but slightly different thing happened with crypto which once upon a time was about the idea of currency that didnt pass through a centralized controlling entities (the goverment, payment processors, etc) and thats still relevant today as we descend into authoritarianism and corporations censor legal businesses because they engage with sexuality. And yet crypto as a space and a technology is mired in abuse and exploitation- why?
Because its deeply profitable for harmful things (crime, scams, wealth transfer via a hollow investment vehicle). The good it can do is not the driving force behind it as an entity. That potentially even more true about ai given it is a commercial product built by massive companies at an enormous loss. And ai has the potential to have a much more profound impact on the world than crypto, rewriting deeply important social contracts in the image of corporate profit.
The human cultural norms around creating and sharing intellectual and artistic works that have been accepted foundations of human society are kind of being dissolved so that companies can take value from those works that they didn't compensate anyone for.
I see where you are coming from, even if I don't see a direct link between AI and hyper surveillance in your text. Personally I wager people will not only upload their holiday photos to the big corporate but share their most inner feelings with it, volunteerly...
And, like facebook did, they'll create/generate "shadow persons" descriptors for people who are not using AI, by just using people around them.
On a side note, art cannot be made by machines, it's intrinsic to the human mind, an expression of it. AI can rehash and redistribute it though, which is only bad for artists doing business (so that's the downside, not excusing it but machines have done that like forever, again not excusing anything).
If we finally distributed some of the wealth automation generates we could all create art (and machines could even distribute it), but that's dreamland for now of course.
Yeah, in a perfect world artists would not have to pay bills to survive, though I don't know that thats really an art specific problem. If a company finds a novel way to exploit steel workers, that does happen within the backdrop of those people deserving to survive even if they can't produce monetary value for someone else, but it feels a bit like it misses the immediate actionable harm, in favor of the less easily addressed bigger picture problem
But you're not wrong, the underlying structural issue is people's ability to survive being predicated on ones commercial viability, and the most commercially viable path is always rent seeking behavior and hiring people you will pay less than the ammount of value they create
With respect to surveillance, even in my limited usage I've shared a hugely valuable ammount of information from the perspective of understanding me as a consumer. Though, I do very much see a huge implication for regular old surveillance as well.
All companies in the us right now are operating within an environment where they need to kiss the ring, and where kissing the ring passionately enough can be competitively advantageous to them as a company, and beneficial to their bottom line. If the government comes knocking and asks an ai company to give them data, whether to create a case against a specific individual, or for access to ongoing usage activity/data sharing with federal agencies, they have very good reason to consider that course. And my understanding is that they are free to just say yes as long as their TOS doesnt preclude it.
(Sorry, I'm really long winded lol 😅)
like with bullets! When some of you don't do what I want! Why are you booing my commencememt speech?
-- average tech CEO
Use AI to augment learning, not replace learning. Also most people hate AI slop, not AI.
The automobile has been a net benefit to society dosent stop Daren going 80 in a 50 zone ( 30 during school hours ). I feel like LLMs are largely the same. They are useful and can do good things, but they can also be used to do totaly inane shit... Dont be Daren.
The automobile has been a net benefit to society
Automobiles are also in practice quite harmful to public health because their addictive and user-lock-in effects and the resulting total lack of exercise. US Americans are mostly not aware of that because the notion to walk half an hour to get somewhere is already completely alien to them. Like somebody who first drinks two bottles of beer in the morning, in order to barely function, can possibly not understand that somebody can just drink whater when they are thirsty.
AI as it is forced on people today will probably be worse for both critical thinking, and social cognitive abilities.
And cars were worse for physical health yet here we are.
I suspect you may be part of the crowd I'm addressing this to but progress is progress and you can't uninvent shit and you can't predict adoption.
As it stands "AI" is here to stay and no movement of luddites is going to change that. Globally "we" are saying it's valuable.
What we are lacking right now is control over the speed and direction.
Going back to the car analogy this is why licenses exist, and registration, and laws. This too will come with AI only when the problem becomes so big or so dangerous to necessitate it. I suspect we will be there soon. Youth unemployment is fucked everywhere and only getting worse.
It is like the prisoner dilemma. If you think you'll do the right thing enough people will cheat that you are then obligated to cheat also to keep up.
There's a difference.
When Daren goes 80 in a 30, they actually might be punished as that abuse is recognized and penalized.
With LLMs, there's no such thing as consequences for the bad uses, only rewards.
Internet video feeds are chock full of slop now because that is rewarded. Video platforms are even making "AI remix" buttons to accelerate taking an actual video with thought and effort behind it into uninspired slop. People are making knockoffs left and right but the courts are largely ruling that AI is 'transformative' so those knockoffs that a human would get sued over are getting passes. Managers are micromanaging worker use of AI in hopes that maybe they can prove they can fire most of them.
LLMs enable the worst users more than they enable good users. In software development, the responsible operation of an LLM might speed up a developer 20-50%, depending on the context. An irresponsible one that just assumes the output is good will post a whole lot of crap. Same for all fronts, prose, video production, music. People who care about the medium can get some speedups, but people who are just lazy, uninspired, but see an opportunity can drown out the quality content.
Students are using it to replace learning, schools are creeping into using AI to replace instructors.
I love AI, when it works, but even I don’t want it in 99% of my life. It’s a tool, and it should be rolled back to “tool” status and not some kind of therapist or friend or fact finder.
Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)
I love AI, when it works
The problem for me personally, is that AI has worked exactly 0% of the time when I try to use it.
The problem for me personally, is that AI has worked exactly 0% of the time when I try to use it.
Your mistake is knowing that you're doing, so you catch AI's mistakes.
Try using it for stuff you're not remotely qualified to do in the first place, then it can look useful!
I've been experimenting with agentic coding the past couple of weeks. The task is to write a data scraper for a report file I get out of a commercial tool I have to use for work.
It's a pain of a format because it's not written with computer parsing in mind. It's verbose, contains loads of redundant parts, and doesn't have good delimiters around data. It's big too. 500MB uncompressed, so we keep them gzip'd.
All reasons why I don't want to write the code to do it.
The model identifies the file format without me saying where it came from, but it sits in this loop:
- "Let me analyse the input file" - Does various greps, seds, and awks to pull out sections and find patterns in their formatting.
- "I understand the format enough for now" - and then proceeds to write out a list of rules it's discovered. This bit is actually quite impressive.
- "Now I need to draft the data structures the data will go into" - ...and it will write some over-decomposed objects. Not out to disk though.
- "The user says they want a parser, so let me start writing the actual code" ... Finally!... But hang on...
- "Actually, I need to understand the file format more" - loop to the top.
It does this for hours.
The tiny bits of code I've actually managed to get out of it are really bad. It's like the code you'd get back from some race-to-the-bottom offshore software "team" you were forced to work with 10-15 years ago because your boss had found an "amazing opportunity". In actuality it was somebody's teenage nepo-hire. Similar adherence to rules and standards too.
I already have a rough data scraper for this file. It's a couple of hundred lines of python. I wrote it in an afternoon. It's not great. It doesn't get everything I want out. However it exists and is usable. This isn't an intractable task.
I am basically a script kiddie and Anthropic Claude helped me design a small app for myself that was way beyond my own capabilities and it even went as far as documenting in comments what each bit of the program did for me, to help me understand the logic.
I only have access because I got a free year of Perplexity.ai because I had a paypal account (barf, had to have it to get paid for gig work).
I see it as very useful for anything technical, it helped me through some troubleshooting a hardware issue with my monitor I was having trouble pinning down by browsing forums.
I would never purposely divulge personal info to an LLM, anything that's shared has had personal info stripped.
I am basically a script kiddie and Anthropic Claude helped me design a small app for myself that was way beyond my own capabilities and it even went as far as documenting in comments what each bit of the program did for me, to help me understand the logic.
This is the good shit, right here!
AI does shit tier work, but it provides access to new skills.
If you learned anything from the experience, you're a programmer, now.
Welcome to the crew.
Don't be afraid to toss out the training wheels (AI) when it gets in your way, and try to enjoy the ride.
Lots of people struggle to use it. Don’t feel bad. I think to use it correctly, one must first want to use it. After that, it becomes easier.
I recall when ChatGPT first came out, a coworker was criticizing it. I asked for a demonstration, and they just kept gaming it. Just actively trying to make it fail to do things it already struggled to do. I asked them to do something I already knew worked pretty well, and they tried to game again. I asked them to stop gaming it, and they just refused.
Clearly, they were not the target audience for AI. And that’s fine!
I guess you don’t know many people.
The problem for me personally, is that for my job, there simply isn't enough information for the AI companies to steal train models on. I do industrial programming. It's programming with fucking crayons. AI is hilariously wrong every single time I have asked it anything.
Give me an example of what you’ve asked it to do? And, what model and app did you use?
Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)
It was and is a good thing. I think it's a huge problem that when it fades away future next generations of AI will not be able to learn from it. And the culture at that point will be to depend on AI instead of having sites like those, so even getting it back isn't going to work. Honestly I think maybe we need a new job: "experts" who just do some fun highly thematic stuff and post results online to train AI.
I think you just described scientists :P
Scientists don't work on mundane problems. AI need training to solve mundane tasks. Just take stackoverflow as the literal example. It's not science. We might need a new profession to produce training material for arbitrary areas of expertise, not limited to research level topics. A job like this might be talking about such topics on a searchable forum, for example. Each post can be evaluated by a separate AI system to assign score points to it. I don't know whether this sounds more dystopian or fun. It's definitely not that far from social credit systems.
As a computer science professor, you are giving us scientists way too much credit. Most articles we produce are basically just: hey, you can use this framework/use this strategy to solve this problem. There is a sad, or maybe not depending on your POV,, problem in computer science research that most research doesn't follow the scientific method.
It’s probably just going to be people who put code online that doesn’t work at all in an attempt to poison AI :(
ChatGPT 3.5 had a lot of bad code. It was still pretty amazing for the time. But it wasn’t at all a coding agent.
Exactly, it's a tool. It's potentially useful, in certain situations, but I'll be the one deciding if I want it at all, if it's useful and what it's useful for, not some company. If they tell me to use a table saw to clean my teeth, I'm going to tell them to go fuck themselves. Nothing wrong with table saws, but fuck any company that tells me what I ought to be using a table saw for, because it probably isn't in my best interest.
It’s not about being helpful, it’s about controlling the available information. Easier to nuke the internet and replace it with AI slop where you can’t check sources.
You don’t need to burn the books or censor them, they simply will only be available as sanitized AI summaries.
Mass confusion and scamming when you can't tell the difference between reality and lies anymore. We'll have to disconnect and return to our own physical senses eventually.
Yet those in power keep trying to gaslight us that we actually like and need it.
At least it makes crosswords easier
Literally among the most damaging things you can do to yourself with AI. Edit: if they aren't being sardonic.
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.
I've tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)
But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone's throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.
The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)
At the end of the day, the reason we're burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can't criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.
So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit
And given the way it impacts user's thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.
Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.
save