Show HN: Death by AI (deathbyai.com)
Here comes chatGPT.
At home, it’s all fun and games until I realize this thing might be able to do exactly what my “dumb” website does: "Give me the list of acronyms used in the previous text and their definitions"...
It had a good-looking answer. Of course...
At first I was bummed, but quickly realized that even though the output looked neat, it was also not reliable (missing some acronyms, adding some that were not in the original text, albeit related to it).
Anyway, the next day I stumbled upon https://killedbygoogle.com and the two things collided in my head: other people probably feel like AI is going to "kill" them or their product too. Why not make a list of these things?
A shameless clone later (it's open source ) https://deathbyai.com was born. I was initially going for a more serious tone, but it soon felt impossible to give a fair story for each item in ~5 lines, so I went for something lighter and, hopefully, more fun.
This is neither an attempt to criticize AI nor one to bury its "victims." On the contrary, I hope this page can highlight the potential of AI while showing that the "old ways" can still be relevant.
Hope you like it. Feedback and contributions are welcome!
92 comments
[ 51.9 ms ] story [ 429 ms ] threadDon't try to be too cute, OP (submitter's username is the same as the github username linked at the bottom of the webpage, and the RIP-off (har har har) pun is also at the bottom)...
ChatGPT: Here is a possible forum post title that combines humor with a reference to the website "Killed by Google":
"AI Taking Over the World? Here are the jobs (and hobbies) it's gunning for (with a nod to 'Killed by Google')" [...]
Me: The same but not trying to be too cute.
ChatGPT: Here is a more straightforward forum post title that gives credit to the website "Killed by Google":
"AI Threats: What is Artificial Intelligence Endangering? (Inspired by 'Killed by Google')"
In Show HN rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead" => felt like this would be categorized as a list but I'm glad you promoted the post as Show HN.
Thanks for thoughtfully considering the rules, on your first post no less! If only everyone would...
It is likely that within the next year, a new open chatGPT model will emerge that is comparable to "ClosedAI", to be used as the next stage after search. This model, along with others in its family such as Stable Diffusion and Wisper may become integral components of browsers and operating systems and could potentially be used as the main interface for accessing the internet.
As people become tired of ads and spam, they may turn to language models as a way to shield themselves from these distractions. These local models may also serve as personal creative spaces, allowing individuals to work and explore ideas without outside interference.
Google also has at least two generative models of their own that they, like OpenAI is criticised for, don't publish "just in case"; one for duplicating voices, and the LaMDA chatbot that got in the news before ChatGPT.
People will get tired of ads, but I bet someone will use a text agent to rewrite stories and scripts so heroic characters always enjoy the great taste of $beverage while saving the day, the lead romantic opportunity is $consumer_gender_preference and likes wearing $fashion_brand.
organizationally, google is a hot mess that can't even figure out how to launch a product
Maybe, but for Google LLMs wouldn’t be a product, they’d be an algorithm behind the universal query box and conversational assistants, which are established products. Adding additional backing algorithms and changing output UI to prioritize their output isn’t something Google has a problem with, even if it arguably does with new product launches.
The traditional search-box-and-list-of-URLs at least provides attribution, which can be of huge value in some search scenarios.
If I have a health-related query, I want to see the links from research papers from legitimate institutions, or trusted authorities like the NHS. A human-language answer doesn't necessarily say "based on the groundbreaking research of wificausesherpes.com" at the end.
Any sort of comparison and recommendation searches are similarly iffy. That's why there are a trillion "best 8k webcam under $30 December 2022" affiliate-link-farm sites, but The Wirecutter and Consumer Reports still have some minor level of clout.
> Reason companies like google are exposing their internal LLMs are they are not production ready to handle 50 billion queries a day
If anyone can do that, Google can. Even at that scale, I'd bet Amazon and Microsoft can also do that right now, possibly also Apple and Twitter, and the only reason I'm not listing Tesla is that (to my surprise) SOTA image AI uses way less RAM than SOTA text AI, and Tesla's probably all about image data.
Nah, all of them have got a lot of potential reasons why they might not make them public, but I don't see that being one of them, and especially not Google given how often they jump in with half-baked launches that they try to make work later.
I feel like it's missing some things though:
* Data Entry -- OCR and the like
* Data Retrieval -- Don't search engines still qualify as AI
* Sorting mail?
* Other factory use cases like removing undesirable tomatoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is
* Many others I'm not thinking of...
To highlight the limitations, look at an OCR'd version of a technical book with code samples and different fonts and styles that have different meanings, and that has both footnotes and endnotes. The text will be readable, but disorganized, probably inconsistent styling, and even if some footnotes and endnotes are linked by a good engine, I suspect that's less than fully reliable. For the purposes of reading the book, I'd rather have the scanned pdf with page images for reading, with the OCR'd text as the text layer for searching.
Lower-quality source images seem to cause major problems for tesseract, and even ABBYY judging from archive.org text conversions. Those engines confuse more ambiguous letter or punctuation combinations, while humans can still read the images without much trouble.
>People realized that they could simply ask a bot their question and that it always had an answer.
>Turns out the answer is sometimes completely wrong.
To be fair, it's already achieved parity.
I asked it to write a poem and got this: https://imgur.com/DBHjki5
Now, as an assistant, that's amazing. As an actual finished result, it's not good. It needs tweaking and fixing, to make everything work right. Same goes for AI images.
So here's what I think AI will actually endanger: stock photography. If you're writing a blog and need to stick a random illustration on an entry for extra appeal, the AI is perfect. You don't care if it fits in a theme, or if it's quite right. You need a picture of a cute cat, so most any cute cat will do.
Doing actual, specific illustrations with an AI is hard work and you'll find beating your head against it quite frequently, especially if you need more than one, and if you need something that's not quite well covered in the dataset. AI works much better to compliment a human artist that can guide it to generate what's needed, and fix the problems in post.
It's like with describing a commission: If you just give basic info, then there is a lot left for the artist to guess, and they might be inclined to err on the safe side.
I often got better results when I included more info in the prompt.
E.g., here that could be: What is a space lizard? What's so amazing about it? What should the general emotion of the poem be? Should it be of some particular style? etc etc.
Sounds like human work.
I think more information would result in something more interesting, but I don't think it'd fix the problem that some of the concepts used just don't add up, because it's not actually a thinking machine, just very fancy statistics that work surprisingly well.
No offense, but I feel like if you're criticizing ai-written poetry for a lack of absolute realism, maybe you're the one that doesn't quite grok poetry. Next you'll be telling Poe that ravens can't actually enunciate human speech.
For the last month I paid MidJourney and it was amazing. I enjoy doing the magazine much more now. As you said, the image doesnt need to be exact, they must have some objects / surface a topic or idea. And I can modify them with Photoshop if I want to change something (or add text).
I think that's where the IA will prevail: scenarios where the requirements are not really important.
That said, in the last 5 years I have broken an ankle in a rock climbing accident, and gotten a herniated disk in my neck from wrestling. Both times, medical professionals misdiagnosed me for months (both times until I eventually found a doctor who would refer me for an MRI which proved the issue in both cases). This resulted in a lot of undue suffering and increased damage.
In both cases, I explained the situation and symptoms to GPT3 (this is before ChatGPT was released), and it correctly diagnosed the issue in both circumstances, down to the exact bone I most likely fractured in my ankle (talus), and down to the exact vertebrae I was likely herniated in my neck (C6-C7).
Now, I "consult" GPT before going to the doctor.
A person with some background and sufficient general knowledge, but who is a non-expert on a topic, can dive into a topic and allow the AI to handle most of the detail work. What do I need to know to understand this? It falls out naturally from the exploration of the topic, in a faster and more integrated way compared to chasing down articles and definitions.
It's like having a research assistant, that is an expert that has read everything ever published about the topic, and that is also infinitely patient. Of course, it's also prone to bouts of being confidently incorrect, and it can't actually reason, or think up anything new. That may seem like a serious limitation, but it also describes many of my college professors, and they still taught me plenty. ;)
Doctors have a very powerful Union. They don’t call it a union, but it’s a union.
A photographer friend of mine had a gig to do some festive food arrangements. He needed a full day and a half, a studio, $30k in gear and years of professional experience. All I needed was 5 minutes and some clever prompt poetry. I did not have the heart to show him why he might have a hard time getting a similar gig next year.
As Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption proposes: the disruptive product does not need to be better. It needs to be good enough and far cheaper. So cheap now that there is zero marginal cost for bespoke art.
And then AI came a long way, improved to levels hard to imagine back then, it's already threatening programmers, but people just keep telling the same story. That somehow it will run out of steam below their level. If it can talk to a professional it can just as much talk to whoever talks to the professional now. (I mean, unless it gets stuck at a lower level.)
However, when people talk about the future dangers, they still keep looking at the current status quo and not at how fast it evolves. Of course, it's hard to predict, but it seems like some people don't even try and just judge based on what we have today. While what we have been seeing so far is that it's evolving faster than what most experts have expected.
Replacing doctors is probably further away, because being a doctor is like being an airline pilot: it's about trust big time. And everybody likes to think their doctor (or pilot) is especially good. Oh, and also doctors do have to interact with the real world, like examine the patient. (Programmers don't ;) )
As for paramedics, doctors, lorry drivers and Google, etc the impact of AI is hardly a threat to them and this website has greatly exaggerated their own predictions.
We can start including computers (the people), mail sorting, telephone operator, and the community shaman.
Art? Yes, you can get it to draw something in style of, but it won't be able to create new style.
StackOverflow? Well, what are you going to train it all? Current AI is good at answering questions that been already answered by SO.
Spotify's recommendations? Absolutely not. Probably the worst recommendations out of all streaming services. Sharing playlists EW not because of AI, but because of music accessibility at unprecedented levels. People don't even make playlists for themselves anymore, let alone share them. Sidenote: 4/5 of my Discover Weekly is insta-dislike because Spotify doesn't get _why_ I liked the song similar to it.
The only real "threat" of AI is it lulling people into apathy and shutting their brains off. When the majority defer their thinking to AI because it's "good enough," civilizational progress will plateau. You can't invent the future using a machine that was only trained on the past (especially if you've atrophied your own ability to think about/interpret what the machine spits out).
I don't think that's true. Because DALL-E knows how to create art in various styles, it implicitly knows what are the parameters which separate one style from another -- for example, thickness or shape of brush strokes, degree of realism vs. surrealism, typical subject matter, etc.. I imagine if you asked some variant of DALL-E to create a new style, it could arbitrarily alter the parameters that define "style" and come up with something new, and even alter them in a way such that the new style could reasonably be expected to be pleasing/well-received.
Every artist has their influences. If they come up with something new it is from a unique combination of their influences. Stable Diffusion makes this literally trivial.
Man did someone really create a whole page to cry about not being able to impress their date by remembering a song?
In particular, a couple of industries that I think are likely to get disrupted in the next few years are stock art, and the art-by-commission scene. The ability to use a Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth style setup to easily generate new artwork in the style of your favourite artist that's "good enough" is incredibly powerful.
Doctors and Programmers? Not so much, for now.
I disagree with occupations getting flagged. For many professions, AI will become human augmentation. Illustrators, writers, and other forms of design will require people to adopt new tools but they will become more creative and more efficient.
Radiologists? Probably soon.
As someone with a lot of doctors in his family, I can assure you that most patients are absolutely abysmal at offering prompts.
I'd wish. If there is one area where AI had utterly failed it's ads. Product recommendations are always off for me. I love a joke that goes like "meatbag bought a sofa recently, must like sofas, let show them all the sofas we have" because it's silly but very true. And checking out those items leads you down to a rabbit hole where some smartass decided that if I look at something it means I'm potentially interested in more of that, so a machine must feed me more of "related products".
Spotify recommendations are 90% of time provide no value to me - I stopped bothering with their recommendations and "discover" playlists. I actually hate that they start playing music of their choice when my playlists are over. The only reason I keep a subscription is because a) they have a fairly decent collection of things I like and b) it's easy to share a playlist with my wife.
Same with Kindle book recommendations. Same with all those streaming services. Same with Steam games. Even though I spend some time there trying to tell all those platforms what I like and what I don't.
I always have to browse catalog, checking every single thing individually. Like a quest looking for a good apartment on Airbnb among the sea of places that weren't ever good for living, only crashing for the night. Hopefully there is some user-curated collection to start with - because "related" stuff automated classifiers generate are typically echo chambers full of things I'm not looking for.
The problem is, machines recommendation systems fail to understand the reasons for picking one thing over another, because they don't know much about the product they're recommending, only its relationship with other products. They don't read the book (or watch a movie), so they have no clue about its language (or actors play), tropes, and how interesting (or stupid) the plot is. They don't listen to the song so they have no clue about how it sounds like, the vocals, and certainly don't care about lyrics. And so on.
/rant
Unfortunately with bulk data over populations you are going to have some members that are in the long tail. Instead the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population, even if it has the potential to lose sales for a small part of the population.
Even the Google Ads (which are supposed to have some magic pixie dust algorithms done by the fanciest experts in the field because that's Google's bread and butter) are typically showing me some products I couldn't care less about. It's always some random post somewhere (which could be an ad) that actually makes me interested and drives me to making a purchase, not some bullshit video banner.
> the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population
My guess is that they look at engagement metrics, not consumer happiness or satisfaction. And even though I'm pretty much disappointed, I still use those services and still click on "related products" and even check some book samples etc. - in hope that maybe I'm wrong, and maybe this time it's a good recommendations. Very infrequently that happens, but mostly it's not what I'm interested in. So I go find some non-machine recommendations, search for those and thus remain an active user operators want on their platform.
That said, youtube recommendation algorithms are usually sane. I suspect the depth and breadth of available videos (which are actually potentially interesting) helps, whereas for ads, the platform's primary goal is to shove unwanted stuff down viewer's throats, and if 99.9% of the people don't actually want to see the ads, they still need to pick the ones "most likely" wanting to see them, even if that probability is like 1%.
If you buy a sofa, especially at a different vendor, it doesn't send a signal back to the ad network which could be used to deprioritized the sofa ads.
There's also no trust in the advertiser relationship, so you couldn't just have an "already bought/don't show anymore" button because people would either ignore it or insist they bought everything in the hopes of poisoning data or suppressing ads.
Nope; I nominate Doogie Howser, A. I.