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That conversation with a retired engineer changed my view on AI safety
He told me AI models are like adding lanes to a highway - you never actually fix the traffic, you just invite more cars. Made me wonder if we're focusing on the wrong problems entirely. Has anyone else heard arguments that slowed down your excitement about AI progress?
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dylan4634d ago
The highway analogy is solid but I'd argue the bigger blind spot is how we treat training data like it's infinite and free. Engineers are scraping the web clean but nobody's asking what happens when the internet stops being written by humans and starts being written by AI. You're basically training new models on their own output which is like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo that gets blurrier each time. That retired engineer might have a point about scaling being a trap but the real nightmare is watching the quality degrade without anyone noticing until it's too late.
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theas284d ago
That photocopy of a photocopy thing really hit home... My buddy works at a small design firm and he told me they started using an AI tool to write product descriptions. At first it was fine, then they let another AI rewrite those descriptions for SEO, and then a third AI summarized them for social media. Last week a client sent back screenshots of their product page saying the descriptions were calling a 'solid oak table' a 'dense wooden eating surface' and recommending it for 'outdoor storage.' Nobody had actually read the thing in months. Quality degradation sneaking up on you like that is exactly what scares me about all this.
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The "dense wooden eating surface" bit killed me. That's exactly the kind of stuff I've seen happen with my own eyes. Few years back I got roped into helping a buddy set up his small furniture shop's website, and we had an AI churn out descriptions for him. I told him flat out, you gotta proofread every single one before it goes live. He didn't and we ended up with a "rustic nightstand" that the AI called a "compact horizontal sleeping companion." We spent a whole Saturday fixing that mess and now he runs everything past a human before posting. It's just too easy to let that stuff slip through.
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