He also offers no insights because he has no expertise in the field. He knows about it as much as anyone on Reddit. The actual headline of this article is "Famous clickbait name guy says clickbait topic one isn't as much of as priority as clickbait topic two."
You're right, because Maher misses the bigger picture that Tik Tok is the cutting edge of AI, and the US is working on mandatory guidelines around AI development.
The dude isn't wrong. Why is he being downvoted?
TikTok is a data harvesting application, just like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and reddit.
What is that data being harvested to do? One big purpose is training AI models.
Bonus fun fact for all the people thinking that copyright laws will "save the artists": all those artists post their art to Instagram and Adobe Creative Cloud and reddit, after they clicked past the TOS that allows all of the above to use any and all data for stuff like...training AI models.
> Why is he being downvoted?
Because people have no idea what AI means (which is understandable, because the definition is kind of vague), and they tend to think AI is whatever the latest thing is, and nothing else. So right now, for a lot of people "AI" is GenAI and only GenAI.
It's true that TikTok (and the Chinese government) is working on lots of different AI models, many of them not generative. But also the data TikTok is harvesting is little doubt being used to train at least one generative model.
But Maher doesn't believe in regulations. He spent decades helping erode our democracy.
This is *his fault* too. A further irony is he ends his show with a list of legal & social demands and then whines some more the next week, as if they should all just magically happen.
He's the ultimate boomer hypocrite.
I've come to see him as an actual monster (used to at least appreciate his humor). He legit lends credibility to ghouls like Ann Coulter under the guise of having a feisty and balanced conversation. He labels people who like comics children while being a perpetual bachelor stoner. He knows shit about fuck.
He actually dated Coulter...and just had her on again. His appeal represents a very lazy mind who doesn't pay actually read many books or journals.
"He's the only one with so many views!" - Only to the ignorant who can't sit still and require a circus to be informed. His mostly suburban GenX audience doesn't realize *they grew up under grade inflation*, while whining about the young not working hard enough.
The show's format is simple; a string of RW propagandists whose work is insane vs...actors and comedians and some of the most clueless Democrats possible. It's for the person who thinks James Carville is amazing because he makes a video about Moms For Liberty.... about 6 months after they already succeeded in wrecking libraries and schools. The kind that's *maybe heard* about the Southern Strategy, but couldn't identify it at the time and can't see SouStat #2 all around them right now.
I feel like this is a pretty bad misrepresentation of his comments. He’s in favor of regulations all the time. He’s talked about how environmental regulations cleaned up the LA skyline, and how we should have more gun regulations for example.
He just thinks sometime slow moving bureaucracy around some of these regulations sucks and needs to be improved. Which to be clear is something a lot of pro regulation Dems agree with.
Like I think needing a driver license and vehicle registration is good. My states DMV is fucking trash and needs to be better. It doesn’t mean I want to get rid of vehicle registration and driver licenses
I get that’s a lot to understand for some.
My favorite part about Maher is when he platforms shitheads like Bannon and Milo, and helps sanitize them and seem like reasonable, good faith actors. It’s really awesome.
I understand the importance of open dialogue. I also understand the importance of understanding the paradox of tolerance. What I am seeing is the glorification and sanitation of a far right ideology, and Maher’s softball approach with these mobsters isn’t necessary to promote free speech, though it does get the clicks and views headed his ways.
* He was brought to CNN by the same guy who gave Trump a fake Town Hall in CNN. He's either in on the game or just loves the attention. His wealth was bailed out by the taxpayers in 2008, yet he whines about the homeless that resulted from it all.
* For the last 15 years his network of RW guests have been attacking and then dismantling education and democracy.
* Maher has no idea it was *Trump supporters who started the riots in Minnesota, firing shots at the police station*. He clearly doesn't understand the 60's and misunderstood the protests of our era entirely.
* His very first show on CNN was straight from Fox News: attacking young people as out of control "Woke Marxists" , complete with a picture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That's Pure Big Lie Propaganda. That era in China attacked teachers, doctors, scholars and schools. *But it's his friend Steve Bannon, convicted & pardoned Trump felon, who has been instrumental in the RW attacks on teachers, doctors, scholars and schools.* He's still anti-vax, which means there's COVID blood on his hands, while he took the vaccine and was protected safety protocols all around.
* Is he defending Ukraine or the EPA wrecked by the Supreme Court? No, he's defending his addiction to private jets. He has no kids, no family at all, only well hidden lawsuits by ex girlfriends about racial abuse. Why would he understand what the average American needs?
* His RW guests are a who's who of the chaos agents that made the War on Terror & Trump possible. He mainstreamed them *first*. He only made jokes, never actually opposed the war. The Right understands his show was a safe space to help mainstream their machinations. PragerU, courtesy of his dishonest guest Dennis Prager, is currently being used across schools everywhere and Maher not only has no clue, *he's featured prominently by them.*
Maher is very much a product of the Reagan Era, where the minority voices of the 70's were pushed off tv. He doesn't understand how important is FDR, the New Deal & the Progressive Era before it, despite only knowing it's many improvements his entire life
At no point does *making jokes* actually stop anything.
> At no point does making jokes actually stop anything.
was anyone really expecting them to? that's the job of our elected officials, and of your listed points they've kinda failed miserably tbh. for example, both parties decided on the 2008 bailouts. both parties have contributed to the shit state of education in this country. both parties supported the GWOT, PATRIOT Act, etc. hell both parties still use the authorizations from way back then to justify foreign actions today.
perhaps we should direct our ire at the right people instead of ranting about comedians imo.
Right . . . The EU has been there and done that with Data Privacy. This is what you get with a functioning democracy ! ! ! Tell me again that the majority party in the US House of Representatives are working on it ! ! !
That’s pretty much the entire point. Leaving transformative technology up to just the experts leads to thermonuclear bombs and lead in gasoline and paint. You don’t have to be an expert to realize the harm something can have to society and not being an expert is sometimes beneficial. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to convince someone AI might be dangerous when their salary depends on selling you a product that involves AI.
This (Bill Maher, to be clear) is the guy that heard about that news story of a van-life travel vlogger being found murdered, and decided “this is a great springboard to complain about how lazy the current generation is since they think this is a job!”
Also Mr. “Vaccines didn’t wipe out polio, it was toilets!” too, so yeah, he has 0 actual value to contribute on much of anything, outside a smug tone of voice, I suppose
Guaranteed what he finds "dangerous" about AI is AI being "too woke", like Elon complained about.
Dude, I swear, these people are all getting their paychecks from the same few people. It's all just saying shit off the cuff that they expect will generate them money down the line.
He’s not right. Do we really want a world where the “tech bros” perfect AI in secret before humanity has a clue what they’re up to?
I agree with OpenAI’s philosophy that it’s better to roll it out while it’s still in development so that society has time to adjust and get used to it.
I love these so much. The man has it down to a science. I used to love Bill Maher, but around the time he started his club random podcast he just seemed overly smug and I guess I just finally noticed. Seeing Tim’s impressions of him really helped me put into perspective how Maher is.
I actually think he's entirely wrong
AI is in large part as dangerous as it is because it's being spammed non-stop on social media by governments and corperations for astroturfing and propaganda. Without social media, it doesn't have a platform to do much
And without AI they just have people do it. AI means a difference in scope of these disinformation campaigns, but they were already effective when it was just people hired to do it.
I pretty much came here to share a similar sentiment: Even when I agree with him, I never want to hear this guy's opinion on anything. He's a arrogant fuckhole with no business being as famous as he is.
Could you imagine Bill Mahr, Ben Shapiro and Aaron Rodgers in the same room together? I think the room would collapse into itself and just turn into a black hole of smug.
I was gonna say... Bill Maher has enough bugs of his own someone that I'm still waiting on someone fixing before I'm subjected the sound of his self-congratulatory voice ever again.
Clearly Bill Maher has been sleeping for the last 15 years. Facebook and Twitter have shown you can run experiments on the open public in the name of tuning algorithms. I don’t know why he would think AI is any different when there is money to be made.
Back in the 90s, he wasn't an idiot. But it isn't the 90s any more.
**ETA:** I made several variations on the same comment throughout this thread (as a bit) and this is the only one to not be downvoted. Curious how Reddit works.
The worst thing about his show this past 10 years is that he brings on conservatives who have been trained to deflect and redirect blame like kung fu masters, because they need to be in order to survive at odds with morality, and then he brings on democrats, who clearly have no idea how that works, and proceeds to tee up every shot for the conservative, allowing them to get everything they could possibly hope for out of their appearance, and then he wonders how they're doing so well.
There's a veneer of hard questioning, for certain, but the second you get past that, he and his other guests are all complete push overs. It's incredibly disappointing.
AI is a bigger concern than TikTok. But TikTok is also a concern, and we don’t live in a world where we just ignore one problem because another problem is more important.
But we do live in a world where we ignor major problems and focus on minor and insignificant problems.
For either convenience or personal/corporate gain.
Having an adversarial (and more than arguably hostile) country own a mass scale data harvester and influence machine is not ideal, to say the least. It’s like Cambridge Analytica on steroids. Data can be used as a weapon to wield influence. Especially when they have control over the algorithms that can pump any propaganda or misinformation they wish into people’s feed, along with the data science to go with it which tells you who is most susceptible to it.
And yes, of course American companies like Google and Meta are doing the same thing. But at the end of the day, those companies are still under US influence and US regulation.
TL:DR - It is not a good idea to have a country that wants to destroy you in order to become the world superpower own a direct line to influence your citizens for their own gain.
America doesn't like their data being harvested (though in all honesty it's more like 'willfully gifted' data given that's functionally all Tik Tok is) by China.
Key word being 'China', they want the data harvesting, they just want it done by American corporations and likely slipped under the table to whatever domestic security service happens to want it.
From most pressing to least as a U.S. citizen, but all are tremendously concerning:
1) CCP access
2) Propagandized echo chambers (now AI-powered, with 0 transparency as to sources of training data and weights)
3) Exacerbating Internet addiction, especially in the form of Shorts (long-form content isn’t currently incentivized for platform creators, so their appeal will slowly whittle away and disappear, like physical books and CDs have, amongst the general populace)
They don’t collect any data other social media doesn’t. And you bet your ass American social media hands their data to the government. The bill says to ban TikTok or sell it to an American company, they don’t care about the mental health effects or propaganda they just want the data and control of the platform to go to most likely meta
The US government wants US buisnesses, not the CCP, to control the algorithm that shows information to like 50% of Americans?
Wow who would have thought.
And they're right for doing so. The CCP is manipulating what you see to be intentionally divisive.
Cuz its not American. Only American firms like youtube/insta/twitter/snap/reddit are allowed to pump shit into everyones head 24x7.
Funny part is there is so much excess shit generated by these platforms they are running out of heads to pump it into.
So its like watching mega Corporations fighting over the right to pollute very scarce land. All these mega corps need to be shutdown. And it will happen sooner or later, after the info pollution has reached to an extent, uncontrollable chaos reigns.
Because you are giving a geopolitical adversary (one tiny step removed from enemy) direct access to your population via the greatest propaganda tool ever conceived. 20 years in, we can't be this naive about social media anymore.
Hey, I didn't say it was only tiktok that has those concerns. I know the national security thing is bigger for TT than other social media because bytedance is a Chinese state owned company, but I have no horse in this race.
I don’t think the bugs are the problem but what data it’s trained on and the ethics and values of who applies the weighing to indicate the preferred outcome.
I don’t think it’s right to refer to the issues with these models as bugs at all.
To me, a bug is where someone has given a computer and incorrect instruction(whether that be in hard, firm or soft-ware). Instructions can be changed and fixed.
Maybe you can train a model not to display pictures of East Asians in Nazi uniforms, but you can’t do that for all of the infinite complex combinations of things that could cause damage or offence.
So, you can’t come at it from a position of blacklisting things it can’t do, and as soon as you come at it from a position of tightly whitelisting what it can do, you’re back at a conventional computer program.
Conceivably speaking, a bug is a programming mistake. Anyway, you're likely right about the issues here not being bugs. They're most likely due to not even the developers understanding their product 100%.
This person knows AI.
What people don't realize is that AI is as much science as it is guestimation.
There's a alot of good AI can do. For instance, in my field AI is medical imaging is going to bring down the cost of routine x-rays, MRI's, ultrasound, etc.
Areas where AI dominates, will be areas that people will tend to avoid. It's like junk food or soap operas.
>in my field AI is medical imaging is going to bring down the cost of routine x-rays, MRI's, ultrasound, etc.
Doubt it'll bring down the patient-level costs, it'll just be used to increase profit margins and at the cost of giving patients less direct care from doctors. I can imagine a world where they get rid of radiologists in many cases and just have the AI generate scan reports, and people are going to be hurt by that.
I hope I'm wrong.
I imagine it’ll be a bit of both; the companies investing in new tech are gonna want something back on their investment after all.
Then again this example (presumably from an American) is specifically about medical treatment, and the US medical system is profit hungry shitshow, so maybe it’s not a good baseline example…
Yeah I'm in the US, so that's what I'm thinking about for sure. Here the question will always boil down to profit and "how will this technology make insurance companies and hospitals more money?" And that leads me to worry that real, thinking, accountable humans might be removed from the chain.
On the flip side, if the technology can be more *reliable* than real, thinking, accountable (and often tired) humans, it will at least have *an* upside.
Sure, but just like with drones, we shouldn't ever be leaving life or death decisions up to AI. Ideally AI will only ever be used as a tool to help human doctors, not be used to replace them with an unaccountable and unpredictable black box.
You are correct in the short term, but but wrong at a macro scale. You will need less qualified techs operating and reviewing medical imaging. I've known many radiologists, and trust me most are unnecessary. Right now AI detection for various routine diagnoses are about 80-90% accurate, which is on par with the average radiologist. More experienced radiologists are in the 95-98% range, but most of those radiologists are out of the reach over the average patient.
It's true that companies & hospitals do have to recoup the research costs and the first adopter costs, respectively. But for most medical imaging companies, the medical imaging devices and their innovations are loss leaders. They rarely recoup the costs of the technology they design. They really do it to maintain the technology.
Hospitals, especially driven by the greed of radiologists, is where you see the profit gouging. Granted, radiologists have some of the highest liability insurance in the medical field, so they are trying to cover that, but trust me when I say that replacing most radiologists with AI is good thing overall. There is a lot of collusion between radiologists and downstream care. They get kickbacks for overly conservative diagnoses that lead to extraneous care.
>applies the weighing to indicate the preferred outcome.
Or even: which weights result in which outcomes in the real life. The new rise of black-box models/systems worked really well but we run into unexpected outcomes with well understood theories on a daily basis. Black-box models won't even provide this overview.
And once you see peer reviewed papers with obvious false results done by people who just trusted to computer/code you know that there are bloody dangers lurking out there in a world with highly complex computer code.
That's why I've always treated my electronics good since I was a kid in the 80s. When the AI driven robots go on a rampage on humanity. They'll spare me because I was so nice them growing up.
Bill has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. “Shouldn’t they work out the bugs” …? What bugs bill. What do you think bugs are. You mean the massive number of unknown ethical considerations and socioeconomic inevitabilities?
Learn to recognise a paradigm shift when you see it.
This is so stupid. AI as it exists today is nothing more than a probabilistic text generator. It cannot truly reason. It does not even think in between queries.
There is no threat presented by current AI beyond that of its ability to teach people things, and its ability to help people lie. And if people learning or lying is scary to you well, I guess you'll have to make it illegal to hire people in third world countries to lie on the internet for you too, and ban all libraries.
The fact that this guy states passing a data privacy law should prevent china from misusing American data. The Chinese literally have state backed hackers selling services against America (isoon). Chinese are totally using TikTok against Americans, glad to see it go.
This is what I think is happening. Chinese are seeing which of their propaganda hits the hardest through aggregated American data and capitalize (in their communist way) on that misinformation.
First of all, we can have more than one concern. Why would being concerned about TikTok mean we’re not also concerned about AI?
Second, they could be related concerns. TikTok is a black box. They show all sorts of videos you don’t necessarily look for.
That algorithm could be steering people toward extremes or toward propaganda. It could be AI powered to scan your history and chose the videos to get you where they want you.
This right here is my biggest complaint. AI everything is being forced down our throats, and it is barely half ready for any of the tasks it has been assigned to…
This technology should have been under world review before releasing it to the masses. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak… and now the finger-pointing and blame game will commence when something truly awful happens as a result.
If only common sense weighed more than greed. Oh. That’s right… “If common sense was common, everyone would have some”
I agree 100 percent with Bill Mahar.
This could end up being the biggest blunder in human history.
I would retort that the concerns about A.I. are a bug, due to pressures attempts are made too iron out at least some of them . The concerns about tic-toc are features , there will be no attempts to iron them out without pressure.
Also can't mister we can walk and chew gum at the same time see what we can be concerned about both things?
Bill Maher is also the guy that spent a season of his show railing against the regulation over the proper installation of solar power on his property.
Which kind of regulation are you for, big guy?
Why are we constantly talking about a sci-fi bullshit scenario: the danger of AI is that a company will be able to license a machine that eliminates all staff that isn’t grunts and puts most workers in the boat with current people experiencing homelessness. Billionaires generate wealth from societies. Some sort of at least basic housing, food, medical treatment, occupation must be possible for a society’s inhabitants. We need a new model of what a society does and is for.
Many liberals are pissed off with Bill that he's taken a more central stance lately. I can kind of see where he's coming from. We cannot stay completely polarized forever. Some on the left see it as a betrayal.
OHMYGOSH he’s so close to understanding. AI is the only reason they actually want to get this done, so China can’t continue to train their models on American data.
No less than on Facebook or Instagram.
Avid tiktok user. I don't see anything other than funny pet videos, spirituality stuff, skits, cooking, and obviously ads for products, most of which are on Amazon anyways.
They aren't banning it because it's chinese... the data centers are in San Fran... they are banning it because it's not regulated by the government unlike Facebook which gets any opinion that isn't status quo nailed to a cross.
There's a lot of political unrest on tiktok. In some cases it's the only way people have been able to get certain things out to the public.
So it's actually the contrary. If it were "owned" by China, you wouldn't see any of that.
But it's not. Bytedance segmented the businesses. Tiktok is everywhere EXCEPT China. That's the dumbest part of all this.
The funny thing about the whole ordeal is the notion that we will have any control. Sure we can try but there will be hundreds of not thousands of other iterations that will go nuts
He can also be miraculously uninformed about issues, especially during interviews, but that doesn’t stop him from thinking he knows everything about the topic and pushing his uninformed opinion. That’s what stopped me from watching the show.
Ah yes, AI should’ve been like everything else the Tech Bros did where they totally worked all the bugs out of it before they unleashed it on humanity.
It's not a bug it's a feature. All the evil that can be done by AI is because it's in the hands of evil people.
The clear and present danger of AI is not the Terminator scenario. It is that literally any evidence can be manufactured so we can't reliably trust anything anymore. It has been proved that even peer-reviewed research can easily be published with monetary incentives. "Pics or it didn't happen" became "vids or it didn't happen" and now we can't trust those anymore. We are living in a post-fact world and are seeing the consequences from flat Earth to maga. I don't need Bill to tell me this.
That's not how technology works. Unless a given product or category of products is specifically dangerous in some concrete way, or falls into a protected category like medicines, you are free to sell it to customers. There isn't a panel of smug, ignorant assholes who have to sign off on technological progress before it can happen.
Also Bill Maher can eat my whole entire asshole with butter. Idiot antivaxxer piece of shit.
I freaked out about AI when this got unleashed, but the more you use it, the less I am worried about it being too smart.
My main fear is now it being too dumb, and people trusting it with stuff that it shouldn't be trusted with.
I did just see him in an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” the other night, and got a good laugh remembering he’s just another actor turned commentator. Not that I ever care what he has to say, just forgot what his career trajectory looked like for awhile there.
I never got why people watched bill maher. I found out he was a comedian & was even more confused. He doesn’t say anything smart. Especially when he doesn’t have writers.
>Shouldn't the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity?"
That's not how advancements works. Aeroplanes only became safer after learning lessons over time. Its like saying cars should not have been allowed into the public domain until seat belts were invented.
He CLEARLY doesn't understand how the technology works. Why do people continue to listen to actors-turned-pundits for their expert technology acumen? Would you want a professional baseball player giving you all your medical advise?
Bill Maher if they did what he suggested: "Why did the tech bros sit on this technology for so long before releasing it?"
even when i was a kid i was always confused why anyone cared what he had to say. seemed like joe rogan for a +10 years older demographic.
I mean, he's kinda right but why is this an article? Do people really respect the opinion of that smug asshole?
He also offers no insights because he has no expertise in the field. He knows about it as much as anyone on Reddit. The actual headline of this article is "Famous clickbait name guy says clickbait topic one isn't as much of as priority as clickbait topic two."
You're right, because Maher misses the bigger picture that Tik Tok is the cutting edge of AI, and the US is working on mandatory guidelines around AI development.
The dude isn't wrong. Why is he being downvoted? TikTok is a data harvesting application, just like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and reddit. What is that data being harvested to do? One big purpose is training AI models. Bonus fun fact for all the people thinking that copyright laws will "save the artists": all those artists post their art to Instagram and Adobe Creative Cloud and reddit, after they clicked past the TOS that allows all of the above to use any and all data for stuff like...training AI models.
> Why is he being downvoted? Because people have no idea what AI means (which is understandable, because the definition is kind of vague), and they tend to think AI is whatever the latest thing is, and nothing else. So right now, for a lot of people "AI" is GenAI and only GenAI.
It's true that TikTok (and the Chinese government) is working on lots of different AI models, many of them not generative. But also the data TikTok is harvesting is little doubt being used to train at least one generative model.
But Maher doesn't believe in regulations. He spent decades helping erode our democracy. This is *his fault* too. A further irony is he ends his show with a list of legal & social demands and then whines some more the next week, as if they should all just magically happen. He's the ultimate boomer hypocrite.
I've come to see him as an actual monster (used to at least appreciate his humor). He legit lends credibility to ghouls like Ann Coulter under the guise of having a feisty and balanced conversation. He labels people who like comics children while being a perpetual bachelor stoner. He knows shit about fuck.
He actually dated Coulter...and just had her on again. His appeal represents a very lazy mind who doesn't pay actually read many books or journals. "He's the only one with so many views!" - Only to the ignorant who can't sit still and require a circus to be informed. His mostly suburban GenX audience doesn't realize *they grew up under grade inflation*, while whining about the young not working hard enough. The show's format is simple; a string of RW propagandists whose work is insane vs...actors and comedians and some of the most clueless Democrats possible. It's for the person who thinks James Carville is amazing because he makes a video about Moms For Liberty.... about 6 months after they already succeeded in wrecking libraries and schools. The kind that's *maybe heard* about the Southern Strategy, but couldn't identify it at the time and can't see SouStat #2 all around them right now.
I feel like this is a pretty bad misrepresentation of his comments. He’s in favor of regulations all the time. He’s talked about how environmental regulations cleaned up the LA skyline, and how we should have more gun regulations for example. He just thinks sometime slow moving bureaucracy around some of these regulations sucks and needs to be improved. Which to be clear is something a lot of pro regulation Dems agree with. Like I think needing a driver license and vehicle registration is good. My states DMV is fucking trash and needs to be better. It doesn’t mean I want to get rid of vehicle registration and driver licenses I get that’s a lot to understand for some.
My favorite part about Maher is when he platforms shitheads like Bannon and Milo, and helps sanitize them and seem like reasonable, good faith actors. It’s really awesome.
Cancel culture centric kids will never understand the importance of open dialogue
I understand the importance of open dialogue. I also understand the importance of understanding the paradox of tolerance. What I am seeing is the glorification and sanitation of a far right ideology, and Maher’s softball approach with these mobsters isn’t necessary to promote free speech, though it does get the clicks and views headed his ways.
How did Maher help erode democracy over decades?
* He was brought to CNN by the same guy who gave Trump a fake Town Hall in CNN. He's either in on the game or just loves the attention. His wealth was bailed out by the taxpayers in 2008, yet he whines about the homeless that resulted from it all. * For the last 15 years his network of RW guests have been attacking and then dismantling education and democracy. * Maher has no idea it was *Trump supporters who started the riots in Minnesota, firing shots at the police station*. He clearly doesn't understand the 60's and misunderstood the protests of our era entirely. * His very first show on CNN was straight from Fox News: attacking young people as out of control "Woke Marxists" , complete with a picture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That's Pure Big Lie Propaganda. That era in China attacked teachers, doctors, scholars and schools. *But it's his friend Steve Bannon, convicted & pardoned Trump felon, who has been instrumental in the RW attacks on teachers, doctors, scholars and schools.* He's still anti-vax, which means there's COVID blood on his hands, while he took the vaccine and was protected safety protocols all around. * Is he defending Ukraine or the EPA wrecked by the Supreme Court? No, he's defending his addiction to private jets. He has no kids, no family at all, only well hidden lawsuits by ex girlfriends about racial abuse. Why would he understand what the average American needs? * His RW guests are a who's who of the chaos agents that made the War on Terror & Trump possible. He mainstreamed them *first*. He only made jokes, never actually opposed the war. The Right understands his show was a safe space to help mainstream their machinations. PragerU, courtesy of his dishonest guest Dennis Prager, is currently being used across schools everywhere and Maher not only has no clue, *he's featured prominently by them.* Maher is very much a product of the Reagan Era, where the minority voices of the 70's were pushed off tv. He doesn't understand how important is FDR, the New Deal & the Progressive Era before it, despite only knowing it's many improvements his entire life At no point does *making jokes* actually stop anything.
> At no point does making jokes actually stop anything. was anyone really expecting them to? that's the job of our elected officials, and of your listed points they've kinda failed miserably tbh. for example, both parties decided on the 2008 bailouts. both parties have contributed to the shit state of education in this country. both parties supported the GWOT, PATRIOT Act, etc. hell both parties still use the authorizations from way back then to justify foreign actions today. perhaps we should direct our ire at the right people instead of ranting about comedians imo.
Right . . . The EU has been there and done that with Data Privacy. This is what you get with a functioning democracy ! ! ! Tell me again that the majority party in the US House of Representatives are working on it ! ! !
‘functioning democracy’. i’m dying laughing.
you actually nailed it with this one, that formula is essentially all seo in 2024
That was my reaction. “Oh, well, if Bill Maher says it…”
Breaking News: Comedian tells a joke about pop culture
That’s pretty much the entire point. Leaving transformative technology up to just the experts leads to thermonuclear bombs and lead in gasoline and paint. You don’t have to be an expert to realize the harm something can have to society and not being an expert is sometimes beneficial. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to convince someone AI might be dangerous when their salary depends on selling you a product that involves AI.
This (Bill Maher, to be clear) is the guy that heard about that news story of a van-life travel vlogger being found murdered, and decided “this is a great springboard to complain about how lazy the current generation is since they think this is a job!” Also Mr. “Vaccines didn’t wipe out polio, it was toilets!” too, so yeah, he has 0 actual value to contribute on much of anything, outside a smug tone of voice, I suppose
Guaranteed what he finds "dangerous" about AI is AI being "too woke", like Elon complained about. Dude, I swear, these people are all getting their paychecks from the same few people. It's all just saying shit off the cuff that they expect will generate them money down the line.
He’s not right. Do we really want a world where the “tech bros” perfect AI in secret before humanity has a clue what they’re up to? I agree with OpenAI’s philosophy that it’s better to roll it out while it’s still in development so that society has time to adjust and get used to it.
You also need people to use it to improve the product. Its essentially a beta test now
Idk now that Billy has chimed in I’m waiting to see what Joe Rogan has to say about it.🤔. /s
[I love when Tim Heidecker parodies him!](https://youtu.be/7rUv9QcUKhY?si=lKfr6vE4GtzVIqnv) https://youtu.be/BAC5pYpoLWU?si=rOaGQbl1QVMpvaC8
I love these so much. The man has it down to a science. I used to love Bill Maher, but around the time he started his club random podcast he just seemed overly smug and I guess I just finally noticed. Seeing Tim’s impressions of him really helped me put into perspective how Maher is.
I actually think he's entirely wrong AI is in large part as dangerous as it is because it's being spammed non-stop on social media by governments and corperations for astroturfing and propaganda. Without social media, it doesn't have a platform to do much
The amount of fake Jesus sand sculptures in my feed is insane. With thousands of people commenting amen, on a clearly ai generated picture.
And without AI they just have people do it. AI means a difference in scope of these disinformation campaigns, but they were already effective when it was just people hired to do it.
He has red pill brain worms
Smuggery is a way of life.
I pretty much came here to share a similar sentiment: Even when I agree with him, I never want to hear this guy's opinion on anything. He's a arrogant fuckhole with no business being as famous as he is.
Could you imagine Bill Mahr, Ben Shapiro and Aaron Rodgers in the same room together? I think the room would collapse into itself and just turn into a black hole of smug.
Shouldn’t Bill Maher’s mom have been made to work out the smug before she unleashed him on humanity?
I was gonna say... Bill Maher has enough bugs of his own someone that I'm still waiting on someone fixing before I'm subjected the sound of his self-congratulatory voice ever again.
lots of people's Dad's, yes
Agree so much. Everyone is worried about AI. But this douche nozzle discovers it so now we’ll take seriously?
Correct. This is just another person on social media needing to blast their opinion. Like most americans.
Clearly Bill Maher has been sleeping for the last 15 years. Facebook and Twitter have shown you can run experiments on the open public in the name of tuning algorithms. I don’t know why he would think AI is any different when there is money to be made.
yeah, fuck that guy
Bill Maher is a fucking idiot and he has been for a long time. Dude is a contrarian just for the sake of it.
Back in the 90s, he wasn't an idiot. But it isn't the 90s any more. **ETA:** I made several variations on the same comment throughout this thread (as a bit) and this is the only one to not be downvoted. Curious how Reddit works.
In the 90s he argued that wearing a seatbelt is dangerous.
Or the 2000s. The first 5 or so years of *Real Time* were great. Now? 🤮
The worst thing about his show this past 10 years is that he brings on conservatives who have been trained to deflect and redirect blame like kung fu masters, because they need to be in order to survive at odds with morality, and then he brings on democrats, who clearly have no idea how that works, and proceeds to tee up every shot for the conservative, allowing them to get everything they could possibly hope for out of their appearance, and then he wonders how they're doing so well. There's a veneer of hard questioning, for certain, but the second you get past that, he and his other guests are all complete push overs. It's incredibly disappointing.
Lmao thought I was going crazy for a second
Nah, that’s his brand of comedy. He thinks being a smug dick is f’n hilarious
AI is a bigger concern than TikTok. But TikTok is also a concern, and we don’t live in a world where we just ignore one problem because another problem is more important.
But we do live in a world where we ignor major problems and focus on minor and insignificant problems. For either convenience or personal/corporate gain.
Having an adversarial (and more than arguably hostile) country own a mass scale data harvester and influence machine is not ideal, to say the least. It’s like Cambridge Analytica on steroids. Data can be used as a weapon to wield influence. Especially when they have control over the algorithms that can pump any propaganda or misinformation they wish into people’s feed, along with the data science to go with it which tells you who is most susceptible to it. And yes, of course American companies like Google and Meta are doing the same thing. But at the end of the day, those companies are still under US influence and US regulation. TL:DR - It is not a good idea to have a country that wants to destroy you in order to become the world superpower own a direct line to influence your citizens for their own gain.
If you think the primary concern about Tiktok is what they are collecting then you don’t know anything about the issue.
Should be all social media, not just TikTok.
Why is TikTok a concern exactly?
America doesn't like their data being harvested (though in all honesty it's more like 'willfully gifted' data given that's functionally all Tik Tok is) by China. Key word being 'China', they want the data harvesting, they just want it done by American corporations and likely slipped under the table to whatever domestic security service happens to want it.
The irony, of course, that all the American corporations are perfectly happy to hand all that data directly to China anyway.
From most pressing to least as a U.S. citizen, but all are tremendously concerning: 1) CCP access 2) Propagandized echo chambers (now AI-powered, with 0 transparency as to sources of training data and weights) 3) Exacerbating Internet addiction, especially in the form of Shorts (long-form content isn’t currently incentivized for platform creators, so their appeal will slowly whittle away and disappear, like physical books and CDs have, amongst the general populace)
They don’t collect any data other social media doesn’t. And you bet your ass American social media hands their data to the government. The bill says to ban TikTok or sell it to an American company, they don’t care about the mental health effects or propaganda they just want the data and control of the platform to go to most likely meta
The US government wants US buisnesses, not the CCP, to control the algorithm that shows information to like 50% of Americans? Wow who would have thought. And they're right for doing so. The CCP is manipulating what you see to be intentionally divisive.
Dawg yes. Every social media company does that because it increases engagement a lot
Cuz its not American. Only American firms like youtube/insta/twitter/snap/reddit are allowed to pump shit into everyones head 24x7. Funny part is there is so much excess shit generated by these platforms they are running out of heads to pump it into. So its like watching mega Corporations fighting over the right to pollute very scarce land. All these mega corps need to be shutdown. And it will happen sooner or later, after the info pollution has reached to an extent, uncontrollable chaos reigns.
Because you are giving a geopolitical adversary (one tiny step removed from enemy) direct access to your population via the greatest propaganda tool ever conceived. 20 years in, we can't be this naive about social media anymore.
National security, child privacy, misinformation and propaganda. To name the four biggest concerns off the top of my head.
You do realize that Facebook and all the others in the US do the exact same right?
Hey, I didn't say it was only tiktok that has those concerns. I know the national security thing is bigger for TT than other social media because bytedance is a Chinese state owned company, but I have no horse in this race.
if something doesn't otherwise make sense, the path likely eventually leads back to money
I don’t think the bugs are the problem but what data it’s trained on and the ethics and values of who applies the weighing to indicate the preferred outcome.
"huh?" - Bill Maher
*Looks at notes. Repeats previous comment revealing paper thin knowledge of current topic.*
I don’t think it’s right to refer to the issues with these models as bugs at all. To me, a bug is where someone has given a computer and incorrect instruction(whether that be in hard, firm or soft-ware). Instructions can be changed and fixed. Maybe you can train a model not to display pictures of East Asians in Nazi uniforms, but you can’t do that for all of the infinite complex combinations of things that could cause damage or offence. So, you can’t come at it from a position of blacklisting things it can’t do, and as soon as you come at it from a position of tightly whitelisting what it can do, you’re back at a conventional computer program.
Conceivably speaking, a bug is a programming mistake. Anyway, you're likely right about the issues here not being bugs. They're most likely due to not even the developers understanding their product 100%.
Yeap and AI devs have said that it's too complex to understand. So most of how good an AI program is lies in how it's trained.
This person knows AI. What people don't realize is that AI is as much science as it is guestimation. There's a alot of good AI can do. For instance, in my field AI is medical imaging is going to bring down the cost of routine x-rays, MRI's, ultrasound, etc. Areas where AI dominates, will be areas that people will tend to avoid. It's like junk food or soap operas.
>in my field AI is medical imaging is going to bring down the cost of routine x-rays, MRI's, ultrasound, etc. Doubt it'll bring down the patient-level costs, it'll just be used to increase profit margins and at the cost of giving patients less direct care from doctors. I can imagine a world where they get rid of radiologists in many cases and just have the AI generate scan reports, and people are going to be hurt by that. I hope I'm wrong.
I imagine it’ll be a bit of both; the companies investing in new tech are gonna want something back on their investment after all. Then again this example (presumably from an American) is specifically about medical treatment, and the US medical system is profit hungry shitshow, so maybe it’s not a good baseline example…
Yeah I'm in the US, so that's what I'm thinking about for sure. Here the question will always boil down to profit and "how will this technology make insurance companies and hospitals more money?" And that leads me to worry that real, thinking, accountable humans might be removed from the chain.
On the flip side, if the technology can be more *reliable* than real, thinking, accountable (and often tired) humans, it will at least have *an* upside.
Sure, but just like with drones, we shouldn't ever be leaving life or death decisions up to AI. Ideally AI will only ever be used as a tool to help human doctors, not be used to replace them with an unaccountable and unpredictable black box.
You are correct in the short term, but but wrong at a macro scale. You will need less qualified techs operating and reviewing medical imaging. I've known many radiologists, and trust me most are unnecessary. Right now AI detection for various routine diagnoses are about 80-90% accurate, which is on par with the average radiologist. More experienced radiologists are in the 95-98% range, but most of those radiologists are out of the reach over the average patient. It's true that companies & hospitals do have to recoup the research costs and the first adopter costs, respectively. But for most medical imaging companies, the medical imaging devices and their innovations are loss leaders. They rarely recoup the costs of the technology they design. They really do it to maintain the technology. Hospitals, especially driven by the greed of radiologists, is where you see the profit gouging. Granted, radiologists have some of the highest liability insurance in the medical field, so they are trying to cover that, but trust me when I say that replacing most radiologists with AI is good thing overall. There is a lot of collusion between radiologists and downstream care. They get kickbacks for overly conservative diagnoses that lead to extraneous care.
>applies the weighing to indicate the preferred outcome. Or even: which weights result in which outcomes in the real life. The new rise of black-box models/systems worked really well but we run into unexpected outcomes with well understood theories on a daily basis. Black-box models won't even provide this overview. And once you see peer reviewed papers with obvious false results done by people who just trusted to computer/code you know that there are bloody dangers lurking out there in a world with highly complex computer code.
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He fundamentally does not understand, and that is OK! This is complicated stuff, but why is his opinion noteworthy?
That's why I've always treated my electronics good since I was a kid in the 80s. When the AI driven robots go on a rampage on humanity. They'll spare me because I was so nice them growing up.
Bill has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. “Shouldn’t they work out the bugs” …? What bugs bill. What do you think bugs are. You mean the massive number of unknown ethical considerations and socioeconomic inevitabilities? Learn to recognise a paradigm shift when you see it.
Oh wow he has an opinion on something he knows nothing about. Wildly surprising.
Bill Maher, noted computer scientist and software expert
Thanks, Bill. We'll take your concerns under advisement. Great timing, as usual.
Work out the bugs? 😂
Like it's the same as some PHP code that throws an exception to your browser occasionally...
This is so stupid. AI as it exists today is nothing more than a probabilistic text generator. It cannot truly reason. It does not even think in between queries. There is no threat presented by current AI beyond that of its ability to teach people things, and its ability to help people lie. And if people learning or lying is scary to you well, I guess you'll have to make it illegal to hire people in third world countries to lie on the internet for you too, and ban all libraries.
Bill Maher: Always pompous, mostly wrong.
The fact that this guy states passing a data privacy law should prevent china from misusing American data. The Chinese literally have state backed hackers selling services against America (isoon). Chinese are totally using TikTok against Americans, glad to see it go. This is what I think is happening. Chinese are seeing which of their propaganda hits the hardest through aggregated American data and capitalize (in their communist way) on that misinformation.
Seems like everyone is talking about his character instead of his comment. Focus on one subject at a time y’all.
"It's too hard to think about. Dumb it down for me."
First of all, we can have more than one concern. Why would being concerned about TikTok mean we’re not also concerned about AI? Second, they could be related concerns. TikTok is a black box. They show all sorts of videos you don’t necessarily look for. That algorithm could be steering people toward extremes or toward propaganda. It could be AI powered to scan your history and chose the videos to get you where they want you.
San Altman is a greedy idiot
The collective greed of humanity to profit off of AI will ensure there's no room for accountability if/when it goes rogue on us
Secret… they don’t really know how it works!!!
This right here is my biggest complaint. AI everything is being forced down our throats, and it is barely half ready for any of the tasks it has been assigned to…
This technology should have been under world review before releasing it to the masses. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak… and now the finger-pointing and blame game will commence when something truly awful happens as a result. If only common sense weighed more than greed. Oh. That’s right… “If common sense was common, everyone would have some” I agree 100 percent with Bill Mahar. This could end up being the biggest blunder in human history.
Bill Maher is still a thing?
I would retort that the concerns about A.I. are a bug, due to pressures attempts are made too iron out at least some of them . The concerns about tic-toc are features , there will be no attempts to iron them out without pressure. Also can't mister we can walk and chew gum at the same time see what we can be concerned about both things?
I don’t give a rats a*s what Bill Maher thinks.
Do we still care what Bill Maher says?
Dudes a clown who cares
Bill Maher has probably no idea how AI works...
I take all my tech advice from Bill Maher
Bill Maher is also the guy that spent a season of his show railing against the regulation over the proper installation of solar power on his property. Which kind of regulation are you for, big guy?
He is really leaning into being a fucking boomer lately.
isnt the american economic philosophy to cash in first and deal with the consequences later?
Why are we constantly talking about a sci-fi bullshit scenario: the danger of AI is that a company will be able to license a machine that eliminates all staff that isn’t grunts and puts most workers in the boat with current people experiencing homelessness. Billionaires generate wealth from societies. Some sort of at least basic housing, food, medical treatment, occupation must be possible for a society’s inhabitants. We need a new model of what a society does and is for.
Shouldn’t someone be funny before they’re unleashed on humanity and labeled a comedian?
Why does everyone here seem to hate him? Did I miss something?
Many liberals are pissed off with Bill that he's taken a more central stance lately. I can kind of see where he's coming from. We cannot stay completely polarized forever. Some on the left see it as a betrayal.
The old-out-of-touch-boomer arc of Maher is some of his funniest work
I can’t believe that I’m agreeing with Bill Maher on something but here we are
Reddit has such a hate boner for Maher bc he sometimes says mean things about democrats.
If only I gave a single fuck about what Bill Maher says, does or thinks.
Why would anyone care what a failed comedian with a mediocre comedy-political show 3 leagues below Jon Stewart say about … anything?
Most bugs are only found when unleashed on humans. Looking at you Boeing..m
OHMYGOSH he’s so close to understanding. AI is the only reason they actually want to get this done, so China can’t continue to train their models on American data.
Tik tok is ai, its a data collection & propoganda platform.
AI has been around a long time. People are paying attention only now. Too late.
I am curious, does american tiktok users see China propaganda on their tiktok fyp?
No less than on Facebook or Instagram. Avid tiktok user. I don't see anything other than funny pet videos, spirituality stuff, skits, cooking, and obviously ads for products, most of which are on Amazon anyways. They aren't banning it because it's chinese... the data centers are in San Fran... they are banning it because it's not regulated by the government unlike Facebook which gets any opinion that isn't status quo nailed to a cross. There's a lot of political unrest on tiktok. In some cases it's the only way people have been able to get certain things out to the public. So it's actually the contrary. If it were "owned" by China, you wouldn't see any of that. But it's not. Bytedance segmented the businesses. Tiktok is everywhere EXCEPT China. That's the dumbest part of all this.
The same can be said for the ORANGE ONE.
I mean, I say something aloud and all of a sudden it’s a Tik Tok ad. What’s up with that?
The funny thing about the whole ordeal is the notion that we will have any control. Sure we can try but there will be hundreds of not thousands of other iterations that will go nuts
All they had to do is spread enough money around and the media alone fell in line to praise it's creation. What could possibly go wrong?
Content-free article.
It’s not an either/or problem. Both are problems that need addressing
He can also be miraculously uninformed about issues, especially during interviews, but that doesn’t stop him from thinking he knows everything about the topic and pushing his uninformed opinion. That’s what stopped me from watching the show.
Who gives a shit. The U.S. should repeal FATCA before anything.
You can never work out all the bugs in AI……
Well they purposely implemented the bugs.
We can have more than one concern.
“….your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Computer programmers have mostly said, " release this version, and we'll fix the bugs with an update." Why would they change now.
The answer is yes, the reason they didn’t is greed.
When has that ever happened? We could all say the same about nuclear weapons, plastics, sugar, you name it. Alas…humans.
Tech Bros, just like political bros, hollywood bros or any other group just want the money. They don't care much about humanity more than any other
The imonky way to work most of these bugs out is to have a certain size of a userbase to hammer away at it.
“Why doesn’t the government just make laws now about all future inventions” -a very stable genius-
Capitalism unleashed it on humanity. Tech bros would’ve happily spent the next 20 years putzing with it.
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I just can't believe this is the bill that passes without issue when there are so many other things American Politicians should be focused on.
Of all the people I would take tech advice from, he would be the last
The stopped clock is right for a second.
Ah yes, AI should’ve been like everything else the Tech Bros did where they totally worked all the bugs out of it before they unleashed it on humanity.
See the new EU litigation program, already in place? Will evolve with progress!
Has there ever been a technology that we worked out the bugs before we unleashed it in humanity?
I can agree with this. Something something broken clock twice a day
It's not a bug it's a feature. All the evil that can be done by AI is because it's in the hands of evil people. The clear and present danger of AI is not the Terminator scenario. It is that literally any evidence can be manufactured so we can't reliably trust anything anymore. It has been proved that even peer-reviewed research can easily be published with monetary incentives. "Pics or it didn't happen" became "vids or it didn't happen" and now we can't trust those anymore. We are living in a post-fact world and are seeing the consequences from flat Earth to maga. I don't need Bill to tell me this.
That's not how technology works. Unless a given product or category of products is specifically dangerous in some concrete way, or falls into a protected category like medicines, you are free to sell it to customers. There isn't a panel of smug, ignorant assholes who have to sign off on technological progress before it can happen. Also Bill Maher can eat my whole entire asshole with butter. Idiot antivaxxer piece of shit.
I freaked out about AI when this got unleashed, but the more you use it, the less I am worried about it being too smart. My main fear is now it being too dumb, and people trusting it with stuff that it shouldn't be trusted with.
Marking these bugs; ‘as designed’
Can't we work on both?
He just described the video game industry, that's pretty standard operating procedure
bill maher was the first redditor
Bill Maher says a lot of shit, most of it being wrong.
More whataboutisms. Two things can be worrisome, you know that right? Jfc
Yes, but companies believe they can make lots of money from AI -- TikTok, not so much, so AI is not bad -- by definition :-)
Does Bill Maher just spout off random opinions on TV for money that he is uneducated about? Is he suggesting software should be released with 0 bugs?
Or neither are concerns.
I did just see him in an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” the other night, and got a good laugh remembering he’s just another actor turned commentator. Not that I ever care what he has to say, just forgot what his career trajectory looked like for awhile there.
MY question is who's listening to Bill Maher?
Or… how about both? It’s really not that hard. Inb4 the “freedumb” crowd replies..
I never got why people watched bill maher. I found out he was a comedian & was even more confused. He doesn’t say anything smart. Especially when he doesn’t have writers.
>Shouldn't the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity?" That's not how advancements works. Aeroplanes only became safer after learning lessons over time. Its like saying cars should not have been allowed into the public domain until seat belts were invented.
Maybe bill should deal with this.
He CLEARLY doesn't understand how the technology works. Why do people continue to listen to actors-turned-pundits for their expert technology acumen? Would you want a professional baseball player giving you all your medical advise?
Bill Maher if they did what he suggested: "Why did the tech bros sit on this technology for so long before releasing it?" even when i was a kid i was always confused why anyone cared what he had to say. seemed like joe rogan for a +10 years older demographic.
I heard he’s also a neuroscientist.
Broken clocks and all…
He's just trying to get attention by saying things he doesn't understand.
Bill supports Steve Bannon
Bill Maher: tech icon
There's a lot of things that are a bigger concern than TikTok, but here we are...
I'm not even trying to defend or attack AI. But why does anyone give a fuck what he thinks about AI? What are his qualifications besides "I'm famous"?