Blade Runner director Ridley Scott calls AI a “technical hydrogen bomb” | “we are all completely f**ked”::undefined
I’m sure that a film director is an expert on the technical underpinnings of large language models, which primarily are used to generate blocks of text that have the appearance of being coherent.
Several departments where I work had massive layoffs in favour of implementing customized versions of GPT4 chatbots (both client facing services and internal stuff). That’s just the LLM end of AI.
That’s not even considering the generative image spectrum of AI. I fear for my companies graphics, web design, and UX/UI teams who will probably be gone this time next year.
I work freelance but occasionally needed to partner with artists and other stuff. But I now use various “ai” projects and no longer need to pay people to do the with as the computer can do it good enough.
I’m not some millionaire, I’m just a guy trying to save money to buy a house one day, so it’s not like a large economic impact, but I can’t be the only one.
Ux is not about drawing pictures. That work is already automated by ui kits anyway. Ux is about thinking through requirements and research.
I know very well what UX is having studied it as my major in uni. Senior executives do not know what it is and have and are making decisions to “replace” them with LLMs and “prompt engineers”. I see it daily at work.
There is a great disconnect where hiring managers and executives see LLMs as a quick win that will cut costs and make moves to cut costs without doing any analysis.
We’re a long way out from that fortunately.
Not saying that some jobs won’t be cut/lost, but the companies doing that were likely looking for reasons to downsize.
AI models do not replace competent UI/UX. That’s just not what they’re designed to do. Very different functions.
Even though you are technically correct, you assume people who are in charge of making decisions have the same insight and knowledge you do about the current limitations of gen ai.
I absolutely assure you that senior managers think it is fully matured since it gives convincing answers and they have made permanent and expensive decisions based off of this viewpoint. To them, it fully replaces UX/UI and developers. So they have made cuts. We’re currently sourcing some offshore help to fix our customer service chatbot which keeps giving off-topic advice to users 🤪
I can tell you now that AI won’t come for UX/UI teams, at least not in the near future. Clients rarely are able to really articulate what they need out of software and until AI is smart enough to suss that out, we’re good. That being said, I’m sure there will be companies that try to go that route but I doubt it will work, again, in the near term.
I’m not saying that AI will properly come for UX/UI teams.
It already is. AI is as you said not smart enough to evenly replace UX/UI teams, but managers and executives and csuite individuals don’t understand that. AI has been sold to them as a quick win that lowers costs. To give you an example, 3 members of our CX team were replaced by an annual license to Enterprise GPT-4 and some custom training for business stuff. In the last 2 months so much has broken down with it/hasn’t worked well and clients complained so now we are subcontracting a Bangalore firm to try and fix it. Pretty sure we’ve exceeded those 3 people’s salary costs by now.
Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.
I use Copilot in my work, and watching the ongoing freakout about LLMs has been simultaneously amusing and exhausting.
They’re not even really AI. They’re a particularly beefed-up autocomplete. Very useful, sure. I use it to generate blocks of code in my applications more quickly than I could by hand. I estimate that when you add up the pros and cons (there are several), Copilot improves my speed by about 25%, which is great. But it has no capacity to replace me. No MBA is going to be able to do what I do using Copilot.
As for prose, I’ve yet to read anything written by something like ChatGPT that isn’t dull and flavorless. It’s not creative. It’s not going to replace story writers any time soon. No one’s buying ebooks with ChatGPT listed as the author.
They’re not even really AI.
sigh. Can we please stop this shitty argument?
They are. In a very broad sense. They are just not AGI.
So much this. Most people under 40 must have grown up with video games. Shouldn’t they have noticed at some point that the enemies and NPCs are AI-controlled? Some games even say that in the settings.
I don’t see the point in the expression “AGI” either. There’s a fundamental difference between the if-else AI of current games and the ANNs behind LLMs. But there is no fundamental change needed to make an ANN-AI that is more general. At what point along that continuum do we talk of AGI? Why should that even be a goal in itself? I want more useful and energy-efficient software tools. I don’t care if it meets any kind of arbitrary definition.
they’re a particularly beefed-up auto complete
Saying this is like saying your a particularly beefed-up bacteria. In both cases they operate on the same basic objective, survive and reproduce for you and the bacteria, guess the next word for llm and auto-complete, but the former is vastly more complex in the way it achieves those goals.
Yes, I thought he was talking about the film industry (“we’re fucked”) and how AI is/would be used in movie. In which case he would be competent to talk about it.
But he’s just confusing science-fiction and reality. Maybe all those ideas he’s got will make good movies, but they’re poor predictions.
You don’t need to be an expert to see a demo and understand what you can do with the tech.
I like some of his movies but this article reads like someone who just imagined his worst fears, and with no ability to judge if it’s probable or not.
The AI would turn off the worlds money system? What?
He’s in his 80s. He’s reached the point of the story where the old man shouts at clouds.
Since he reached old age the man has gone completely senile and really not putting a bullet in his brain is doing the whole world a disfavor. I’m not saying that he single handedly destroyed a franchise by shunning aside Neill Blomkampf, then unironically making alien:covenant, then blaming fans for its failure, besides many other ramblings. I mean even in it’s current crappy state AI is at the very least 10x the writer Scott is and once they jam it into a robot body it will probably be 100x the director he is. So I can at least understand his concern. Motherf…
I remembered where I was going with this, the man is essentially another George Lucas who thinks that just because they created something they have the right to destroy it.
He should be shot because he made artistic decisions you don’t agree with? That’s wild.
Non fans won’t get it and that’s fine, I was also scratching my head at the hans shot first and prequel trilogy fiascos when I first encountered them. But a simpler example to grasp is lets say if Leonardo Davinci came back from the dead and painted a mustache on the mona lisa because why the fuck not? The main complaint is that he was dissatisfied with the pull of prometheus which was a decent movie by itself but unrelated to the alien franchise and decided that he can have a bigger audience and pull if he frankensteined them together. So I don’t give a crap about his creative decisions as long as he keeps it out of stuff that does not require it. Another example would be Elon Musk buying twitter and essentially destroying the platform. Did that truly benefit anyone?
So you know enough about AI to know that worrying about something like “turning off the world’s money” isn’t possible? What’s your career?
You don’t need to know anything about AI to know that. Just do some basic critical thinking:
- What does “world’s money system” mean? A stock exchange? Software that runs some process at the Federal Reserve of a specific country? Credit car company databases? What? It isn’t centralized.
- The ability to “turn it off” means what exactly? Do you think there’s some switch to disable all credit card transactions for a whole company? Or just break their software?
Even if AI is perfected, nobody in their right mind would give direct control of these things to an AI. There isn’t any reason to. An AI would basically just be another person, but super smart. It could be useful for a lot of things, but their decisions would need to be vetted by humans, and there isn’t anything like a “shut it off” switch that exists as it is.
I don’t think Ridley Scott knows how AI works.
Seriously, he’s a director that made sci-fi movies. He has no qualifications whatsoever to answer this question. Of course, this will still rile up the critical thinking challenged crowd.
I used to think he completely lost it when he had the characters acting so dumb in his recent Alien universe films, for example when the crew of prometheus took off their helmets, but then watching how large parts of society acted with covid I am now not sure.
Humans repeatedly make bad choices, somebody is going to be really really dumb with their AI implementation when it gets to the level of actually being able to manage things.
I may not be a computer scientist in real life, but I directed a movie based on a short story written by someone else who isn’t a computer scientist in real life.
Yes, because we should all take note of what the art student says about AI. This guy is, essentially, a clown in this field. Why should we listen to him?
He may not be an expert, but he has had thoughts of different future scenarios resulting from technology for probably about 60 years. Although society has developed in that time, the basics remain the same. His thoughts on AI aren’t new, it’s the fact that AI is moving fast now that is new.
