Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance?
If you leave a bad argument from a prominent person unchallenged, it starts looking like an accepted common wisdom. Armin Ronacher has enough clout, and his stated position sounds wrong enough to me to not let let it just slide. Here's my argument, for those who still values what I have to say. I'm not directing this directly at Armin, as the tone of his first message should tell you everything about his readiness to have his position challenged.
The thread
Despite the "have the peons already accepted their fate" tone, some people did try to have an earnest discussion. You can read the whole thread, but here's a few of Armin's replies that caught my eye:
Armin, any chance I can convince you to use the term "LLMs" instead of "AI" when you want to talk about LLMs? Or maybe "generative AI" if you think LLM is not flashy enough? AI is an umbrella term that covers a lot of things, some good, some bad.
@miguelgrinberg@mstdn.social I don’t think it really matters. LLM are a subset of AI. I’m not convinced why being more precise here would matter?
Several people did explain why language matters, yet Armin insisted:
LLMs can't be generalized as AI
@ubiratansoares@hachyderm.io LLMs are part of AI, even if you disagree with them for some reason.
I'm sure that, as a programmer, Armin understands that "LLMs are part of AI" does not imply they can be generalized as AI. He just wants to paint the entire argument as coming from "disagreement".
Finally:
@pythonbynight@hachyderm.io There are specific concerns and there are abstract fears. It's impossible to work with the latter, it's possible to do a lot with the former. As an example I have a lot of concern about how society is going to deal with AI and that's also something that I'm trying to understand and work in the right way with. But that is a lot more nuance and complex than a policing the use of the word AI which does very little to navigate those complexities.
(Emphasis mine.)
This was the theme throughout the thread: people were arguing that the current LLM situation is its own separate topic, while Armin kept dismissing it as "word policing", "abstract fears" and "watering down the discourse". He never substantiated how he's "trying to understand and work in the right way with" societal problems.
Whence animosity
The people might have a point here. See, nobody was "massively against" AI when it was called ML and used for image recognition and translating text. Like any technology, it was also abused and heavily criticized by ethicists. But it wasn't until OpenAI launched its polished product that kick-started the next renaissanceinsane bubble we're in now, when it started affecting much more people.
The adverse effects are widespread and profound: informational pollution, further surrender of privacy, "vibed" code nobody knows how to fix, untold wealth produced for surveillance kings, genocidal sociopaths and fascism enablers, environmental harm and, of course, a giant financial bubble, to name a random few. None of these are abstract, they are measurably and sometimes painfully affecting people right now. So it's hardly a surprise they want to talk about that instead of discussing quantization and context length. You can ignore politics only for so long…
Inevitability
What gets me personally very easily irritated is the tone of inevitability. Being concerned is bad for your health, so you better accept the inevitable reality and only think within a comfortable, fenced area.
Discussing tech
But to be fair, Armin does say he has "a lot of concern about how society is going to deal with AI", so may be he's just looking for a place where he could talk specifically about technology? That should be allowed, right? Well, Simon Willison, for one, does just that, without any backlash, and I'm sure there are others.
Thing is, if you want to have a nuanced conversation, may be don't start it with "are you nitwits able to talk at my level yet"…