"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Didn't care when the arts and humanities were being scraped dry, but suddenly they're all coming out against it now that they're going after the sciences
From destroying open source to now open science, god dammit.
No not my IP!!!!!
(This is basically a leopards eating face concern.)
I'm just gonna drop these links here.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02859
Sure, let's just ruin the most challenging and fun pursuit humans have ever engaged in by turning it into a competition of who can find the right prompt and throw the most money at the AI companies.
"STEM bros"? I didn't know being introverted physics dept guys made you a "bro". I missed out on all of those frat parties I guess.
One time the physics, engineering, and math students in my dorm all finished our homework assignments at roughly the same time (~2:30), so we all went over to the other building and made brownies to celebrate. We had some wild parties, as you can tell.
Bro is just a generic perjorarive term for any vaguely male coded association now.
Frat bro Passport bro Tech bro Finance bro Stem bro Etc.
I don't even think the 'male' part is essential. I generally associate with groups who just yolo/no life something to an extreme, usually with little to no critical thought or concern for consequences for themselves or others. NFT bros are my favorite example because they just super pumped a tech they knew little about and got took over and over. AI bros are almost there.
Just my 2 cents on the X-bros topic.
Weren't NFT bros mostly exit scammers themselves?
perjorarive
pejorative
So its sexist now?
Nerds ≠ techbros.
One has been publishing research about environmental impact of generative AI datacenters since 2019.
The other has been going on twitter talking about how "chatgpt will replace the artists."
One invents math that can recognize cancer cells.
The other applies it to security cameras for the surveilance state.
In general, the people most critical of AI have been those that trained their own one at home for fun, and knew from beginning how fucking overhyped it is.
I remember when the media tried labeling Luigi Mangione a techbro instead of a tech worker. Researchers and programmers are not techbros.
the people most critical of AI have been those that trained their own one at home for fun
I wish this applied to me, but I never got any ideas to have fun with AI and there were enough things more interesting that I couldn't get the time. And now, I don't have the computing power to make any significant thing.
Yeah, I can also see how somebody who might see a use for AI in their own field isn't exactly for up it stealing work in theirs or others.
There's a difference between "hey, we can train/build this tool to be useful to us" versus "we're cool with it ingesting everything and barfing out cat pictures"
Wtf is a STEM bro? That's not something I've ever heard of until this post.
Something made-up by people who think significant numbers of people in science & engineering hate artists. People in science & engineering do not hate artists and, for the most part, loathe the effect AI is having on suppressing human creativity. The bastards are, and have always been, the people who claim to love tech despite being tech-illiterate.
The term "STEM-bro" predates the genAI boom, at least it begun rising in popularity during the Gamergate controversy.
STEM-bros lack the vision of their peers, they mainly see their field as a 9-to-5, as something that pleases their parents more than a trade school. They were those, who pioneered using fandoms and other nerd-groups as a tool to exclude others, usually through utter toxicity. Then the nerds slowly learned from them, who now think they served the purpose of making sure "the thing they're fans of never changes" rather than to protect the status of some bro, who were into some more obscure stuff.
Sure, many jock-types are nice. There's even a stereotype, that gym-bros are the nicest people. However, VeganGains is a well known counterexample of that. Competitive sports are a lot worse than your average bro pumping iron in the gym. And don't get me started on the "failed jocks", especially those who also frequented fandom circles.
(Please do note, that the whole nerd-jock dichotomy is false, one can be both or neither.)
I'm sorry but I'm completely unconvinced that the toxic-STEM-loremaster-gymbro people you're describing exist in any significant numbers
OpenAI stole research out from under mathematicians' noses and now suddenly all the STEM bros are very hot and bothered
Didn't care when the arts and humanities were being scraped dry, but suddenly they're all coming out against it now that they're going after the sciences
Simply not true.
Exhibit A: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
Oh god i love this, it's absolute peak
Very much not the average stem BRO, at least the people around me are exactly as OP says
Holy shit this article is fucking gold. Everyone should read it.
I balked at the length of it, but then I started reading, and holy shit, you're right. Such prose! The finale slew me.
With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don't personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it, then just sit back and wait for you to load it into ChatGPT because you probably can't read unassisted anymore.
Same guy who wrote the "I saved half a million dollar with a few button presses and it made my life hell" articles years back. Also a great one.
His blog is gold. He struck out on his own with 5 friends a few years back and is doing great apparently.
"STEM" bros? What the fuck are you smoking, OP?
Being against LLMs should mean being against science somehow?
AI divided us like few things before. Musicians cry out because AI steals their music while using AI generated backdrop animations on their tours and academics use ChatGPT to summarize things but become outraged when their work is fed into the machine. Lets hope tech bro audacity will unite us against them the same way they divided us.
basically everyone thinks their work doesn't deserve to be done shittily by llms but doesn't mind doing someone else's that way.
Except a large number of coders. I worked as a software engineer for a while and I can see how. It wasn't long before I no longer took any pride in the boring software I wrote for the company whose mission meant nothing to me. I would absolutely be using AI if I was still there. The code I write now is for personal satisfaction and enrichment though, so I do it myself.
I mean there's plenty of people with absolutely no professionalism or pride in their work in every industry
There is no such concept as STEM bros. Science community has its own problems but being generally anologous to tech bros or fintech bros is not it. Being very strongly curiousity driven, they may indeed be oblivious to how something fucks up other parts of the society but that is very far removed from trying to abuse technology to gain billions. Not that there isn't an intersection, there is, but not big enough to warrant a generalization. In any case if the issue is billionaires fucking up research for money, they will more often be on your side against the billionaires then not (open science movement was one such reaction). But they would rather free AI from billionaire domination then reject it out right.
You're committing the blunder of alienating your allies. Complaining, that "the STEM bros" didn't push back against AI earlier, is just gatekeeping.
Capitalism destroying community and embracing individuality which is the antithesis of human evolution.
Who woulda thunk?