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.
Suits are idiots. No argument there.
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 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.
An 85 year old film director*
You don’t need to be an expert to see a demo and understand what you can do with the tech.
You kinda do, as anyone in tech that has ever had to communicate with customers can attest to.
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.
And yet 90% of the population still has an anchoring bias due to the projections about AI people like him, Cameron, and all the rest of the Sci-Fi contributors made over the years.
I agree, yet for some reason celebrities who are not qualified to comment on these things have their voices amplified by the media.
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.
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Christ, a good litmus test is that anyone who says "I’m afraid of AI because…’ and then describes the end of modern civilization/the world can be dismissed.
This man’s argument is literally “you could ask AI how to turn off all the electricity in Britain and then it would do it.” Goddam.
Who gives a fuck? People in hollywood just need to shut the fuck up.
Irony is Ridley Scott conscripting the Blade Runner to hunt and kill Rachael.
He might want to ask an AI about the historical events that inspired his fantasy movie so he understands why people criticize him for it.
I think AI advances will continue to be just fast enough to have occasional “punctuation points” of short-lived buzz in the media. For example, I can see it getting good enough (and easy enough to use) that average normies will be able to create their own movies and games with it.
But, AI advances will remain slow enough to lull people into apathy about it (like global warming). It will very gradually encroach into more and more embedded systems, infrastructure, and cloud resources.
And at some point after that, it will accelerate in sudden and unexpected ways. I don’t know if it will be a good thing or a bad thing when that happens. But considering how many tech bros and executives are sociopaths with no ethics, I’m not very optimistic it will be a good thing.
By “Bladerunner”, do you mean the movie that stole its plot and characters from previous books without giving any acknowledgement to the authors? That “Bladerunner”?
AI will probably be the final and ultimate achievement of humanity. When we have created true strong AI, the path is clearly towards the irrelevancy of human kind.
It’s not that we will cease to exist, but we will not remain top of the ladder for long after that. Our significance will be comparable to dogs.Other life will probably prosper more under their rule.
Yes, the systems that we created and control are running rampant. Did you see the Spanish model? There’ll be an army of incels worshipping ChatGPT by week’s end! RUN!
I think that this has been grossly overblown with regards to the available ‘AI’ related stuff. Sure some of it it cool, but a lot of it isn’t ready to be a real product. It amazes me that all these companies are will to put themselves liable for what these things will undoubtably say.
A lot of the AI are just tools, good when used right, bad when used badly.
If you can replace a Ridley Scott with Ai, then maybe Ridley Scott isn’t that great.
