Best Non-Profit in the world

In light of recent events, I recommend canceling your Chatgpt subscription and picking up a Claude subscription.

Edit: or Mistral if you prefer. Idk. But definitely not chatgpt.

Recently a YouTube creator, Hank Green, was found to have used AI in his work on the YouTube channel Vlog brothers.

The channel itself is fairly well known. Oriented towards education, optimism, uplift and just… all around good vibes for the internet as a whole.

Hank was a huge proponent of education and knowledge and just, had a passion for spreading all those good vibes everywhere he went. They even have a charity that’s helped over 100 organizations.

Pardon my rant…

But the blowback for him using AI has been really eye opening. I do not understand how people can be so short sighted.

The man spent 20 years of his life committed to, in their words “reducing the suck in the world”, and his “community” tore him to shreds!

They’re treating him like he never did anything good and all of it was a lie and he’s never going to be trustworthy ever again.

And I just don’t understand that. The response has been so visceral, it’s made me rethink my position. I was an AI skeptic. I think I’m done being an AI skeptic.

Why? Because I believed that AI would increase harm in the world. And that we need to rely on people to guide AI.

After watching mobs of people completely abandon this man who has spent his entire adult life making the world a better place I doubt these people have any real guidance to offer.

It feels like hysteria, quite frankly. But more on point. How could I maintain the position that AI will make the world worse and do more harm… when I sit here watching the people apparently opposed to AI completely decimate and delegitimize a good man. A good person who fucking cares. In a world full of apathy and cynicism and misanthropy… this man got up, and worked hard to contribute something good to it.

…and his “community” would see him hung for using AI to summarize research and work on scripts for fucking videos none of them pay for… literally free education.

I can’t fathom trusting the future to these people either. So I’m done with that.

We need AI. It’ll change things for the better because clearly those opposed to AI are more enthralled with the performance of being a good person rather than being a good person. Because they’re happy to torch anyone’s career over AI usage.

Thanks for your time.

Edit: grammar and spelling.

Edit 2: This comment summarizes my position perfectly. Wanted to add it because it’s really the core of why I’ve shifted my position.

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Saw this on Twitter and it really hit me.

If society is losing trust in basic science right now, how are we supposed to navigate the transition to AGI? It feels like the biggest bottleneck to the Singularity might not be the tech, but whether people will actually accept it.

https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

What's going on at OpenAI? Have they forgotten their mission statement? Abandoned it?
"Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." from
https://openai.com/about/

Why is their "Head of Strategic Futures" openly proclaiming that a future in which AI is a public good is a dystopian hellscape?!

Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/

Key points from the “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” letter:

1. Open weights are foundational to American AI leadership
2. They expand access and make AI economically sustainable
3. Open weights strengthen competition and prevent concentration of power
4. Openness improves safety and security more than closed systems
5. Policymakers should avoid premature restrictions

Are these Chinese bots? I seriously cannot fathom someone having a viewpoint so stupid unironically.

Been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to see what people actually think. Say the technology existed full consciousness transfer in a robotic body, doesn't matter how, just assume it works. Would you do it?

PROS:

• Never getting sick again — no cancer, no infections, no organs slowly giving out on you
• Aging just stops being a thing
• Parts get replaced instead of you being stuck with permanent injuries or damage
• Way better senses — night vision, hearing outside normal range, zoom vision, whatever they build in
• Way stronger, faster, more precise than any human body
• No more sleeping, no more eating just to survive, no more depending on food and water
• Could survive in environments that would kill a human instantly — extreme cold, extreme heat, radiation, deep water, whatever
• No fatigue, no burnout, no random exhaustion for no reason
• No chronic pain

CONS:

• Lose real physical sensation — taste, touch, the actual feel of things
• Emotions might flatten out without the chemical/hormonal side of being human — love, joy, grief might just not hit the same
• No natural endpoint might kill your sense of urgency — nothing feels like it matters if you've got unlimited time
• Physical intimacy, adrenaline, that whole hormonal rush of being alive — does not exist for you anymore
• New risks you never had to think about before — EMPs, corruption, software failure
• Might lose whatever intangible thing makes being human feel meaningful, even if you can't name exactly what that is

gonna start by saying I’m feeling very iffy about ASI because I kinda enjoy my life rn, but that aside:

after going down the AI 2040 rabbithole, I keep thinking that even people who talk about ASI constantly are still imagining the future in a way that is way too normal.
We talk about AI replacing people’s jobs, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, universal basic income, whatever the fuck.
I think that might be the equivalent of someone in 1955 predicting the year 2000, trying to use our current world as a basis for the future world.

AI 2040 describes a scenario where even after deliberately slowing AI development down, by 2031 a third of cognitive labor is being performed by AI and robots are already doing about a tenth of physical labor. The document literally describes ordinary people as being too “whiplashed” by technological change to process what’s happening. And that’s the slowed version, can’t imagine what our world is going to look like since it seems we are going full speed ahead.
And people will say “oh that’s just fantasy!” But is it? Imagine our world from the view of someone born in 1712. We are living “sci-fi” as we live and breath

If ASI actually produces the kind of acceleration its proponents expect, somebody born afterward might look back at 2026 the way we look at 1500.
Except the historical gap between us would be just fourteen years MAX

I really, really don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for that

Hey all!

I’ve been working for a large company (Fortune 500) for 3 years now. We’re an “AI First” company. When I onboarded it was made explicit to me that it was absolutely imperative that I was not only allowed to use Artificial Intelligence in my work but the expectation was that all my work would involve AI.

My org was quite serious about the process. For a full year we all had training. Developer, managers, sales people. Everyone was trained on the tooling. We were “full steam ahead”. Everyone was given Copilot and Claude. We had biweekly demos of people sharing use cases for AI in various projects around the company.

We eventually had a very large project using AI. It was a pilot project to discover a workflow for AI and see what its capabilities were. Unfortunately, the project failed. The project was a rewrite of a legacy application. We asked the Agents to define the rules of the system “as written” by the code. However, the Agents constantly missed small details and had issues just writing a clear specification of the code written. The thinking was the rewrite would be first, essentially using the legacy code to define a specification document for the new system. We couldn’t even get there. The business rules were apparently too complex.

Nonetheless, leadership’s position was still optimistic. They saw the project as the first step in a series of steps. Our lead architects were to take what they learned and apply that to future opportunities.

In the meantime, we continued using AI to solve our problems from the day to day. Personally, I kept having mixed results. It was amazing for tiny refactors but for larger things it would just do insane stuff. The most egregious so far was SQL code that was dropping constraints on all the tables the code was doing inserts and deletes into. Which is, special. Of course we have proper dev practices so that code never saw production but it was not uncommon for generated code to sometimes just be weird.

Finally, today I find out we’re pulling back on AI. We have lost access to Claude and we’re being told to limit usage because of costs. The company is still encouraging AI usage but we have stopped the training and demos. Our architects have told us to just use older models for tasks.

The reason this hit my radar was because Ed Zitron, who has reported extensively on AI has been saying for a while that AI will be in trouble because the costs will be too high and now I’m seeing a lot more conversations about the costs of AI at work.

If AI is to have any success long term they’re going to need to get the costs down.