It’s actually a useful tool… If it were not too often used for so very dystopian purposes.
But it’s not just AI. All services, systems, etc… So many are just money grabs, hate, opinion making or general manipulation… I have many things I hate more about “modern” society, than I do as to how LLMs are used.
I like the lemmy mindset far more than reddit and only on the AI topic people here are brainlessly focused on the tool instead of the people using the tool.
It’s extremely wasteful. Inefficient to the extreme on both electricity and water. It’s being used by capitalists like a scythe. Reaping millions of jobs with no support or backup plan for its victims. Just a fuck you and a quip about bootstraps.
It’s cheapening all creative endeavors. Why pay a skilled artist when your shitbot can excrete some slop?
What’s not to hate?
It was also inefficient for a computer to play chess in 1980. Imagine using a hundred watts of energy and a machine that costed thousands of dollars and not being able to beat an average club player.
Now a phone will cream the world’s best in chess and even go
Give it twenty years to become good. It will certainly do more stuff with smaller more efficient models as it improves
If you want to argue in favor of your slop machine, you’re going to have to stop making false equivalences, or at least understand how its false. You can’t make ground on things that are just tangential.
A computer in 1980 was still a computer, not a chess machine. It did general purpose processing where it followed whatever you guided it to. Neural models don’t do that though; they’re each highly specialized and take a long time to train. And the issue isn’t with neural models in general.
The issue is neural models that are being purported to do things they functionally cannot, because it’s not how models work. Computing is complex, code is complex, adding new functionality that operates off of fixed inputs alone is hard. And now we’re supposed to buy that something that creates word relationship vector maps is supposed to create new?
For code generation, it’s the equivalent of copying and pasting from Stack Overflow with a find/replace, or just copying multiple projects together. It isn’t something new, it’s kitbashing at best, and that’s assuming it all works flawlessly.
With art, it’s taking away creation from people and jobs. I like that you ignored literally every point raised except for the one you could dance around with a tangent. But all these CEOs are like “no one likes creating art or music”. And no, THEY just don’t want to spend time creating themselves nor pay someone who does enjoy it. I love playing with 3D modeling and learning how to make the changes I want consistently, I like learning more about painting when texturing models and taking time to create intentional masks. I like taking time when I’m baking things to learn and create, otherwise I could just go buy a box mix of Duncan Hines and go for something that’s fine but not where I can make things when I take time to learn.
And I love learning guitar. I love feeling that slow growth of skill as I find I can play cleaner the more I do. And when I can close my eyes and strum a song, there’s a tremendous feeling from making this beautiful instrument sing like that.
Oh my God, that’s perfect. It’s kit bashing. That’s exactly how it feels.
Show me the chess machine that caused rolling brown outs and polluted the air and water of a whole city.
I’ll wait.
Not the same. The underlying tech of llm’s has mqssively diminishing returns. You can akready see it, could see it a year ago if you looked. Both in computibg power and required data, and we do jot have enough data, literally have nit created in all of history.
This is not “ai”, it’s a profoubsly wasteful capitalist party trick.
Please get off the slop and re-build your brain.
It seems like you are implying that models will follow Moore’s law, but as someone working on “agents” I don’t see that happening. There is a limitation with how much can be encoded and still produce things that look like coherent responses. Where we would get reliable exponential amounts of training data is another issue. We may get “ai” but it isn’t going to be based on llms
Twenty years is a very long time, also “good” is relative. I give it about 2-3 years until we can run a model as powerful as Opus 4.1 on a laptop.
It’s corporate controlled, it’s a way to manipulate our perception, it’s all appearance no substance, it’s an excuse to hide incompetence under an algorithm, it’s cloud service orientated, it’s output is highly unreliable yet hard to argue against to the uninformed. Seems about right.
And it will not be argued with. No appeal, no change of heart. Which is why anyone using it to mod or as cs needs to be set on fire.
Ed Zitron is one of the loudest opponents against the AI industry right now, and he continues to insist that “there is no real AI adoption.” The real problem, apparently, is that investors are getting duped. I would invite Zitron, and anyone else who holds the opinion that demand for AI is largely fictional, to open the app store on their phone on any day of the week and look at the top free apps charts. You could also check with any teacher, student, or software developer.
ChatGPT has some very impressive usage numbers, but the image tells on itself by being a free app. The conversion rate (percentage of people who start paying) is absolutely piss poor, with the very same Ed Zitron estimating it being at ~3% with 500.000.000 users. That also doesn’t bode well with the fact that OpenAI still loses money even on their $200/month subscribers. People use ChatGPT because it’s been spammed down their throats by the media that never question the sacred words of the executives (snake oil salesmen) that utter lunatic phrases like “AGI by 2025” (Such a quote exists somewhere, but I don’t remember if this year was used). People also use ChatGPT because it’s free and it’s hard to say no to get someone to do your homework for you for free.
I don’t need chatGPT etc for work, but I’ve used it a few times. It is indeed a very useful product. But most of the time I can get by without it and I kinda try to avoid using it for environmental reasons. We’re boiling the oceans fast enough as it is.
people currently don’t pay for it, because currently it’s free. most people aren’t using it for anything that requires a subscription.
In house at my work, we’ve found ChatGPT to be fairly useless, too. Where Claude and Gemini seem to reign supreme.
It seems like ChatGPT is the household name, but hardly the best performing.
My thoughts exactly, I use Claude and find it much better than ChatGPT. Less hallucinations, more useful information
Who owns Claude? Is it ethically sourced?
Anthropic and no of course not.
They at least seem to care slightly more about the impact they have on the world and humans.
I love how every single app on that list is an app I wouldn’t touch in my life
Not even Google maps
Absolutely not, I haven’t used any Google products or services in 15 years
That’s pretty impressive. I can’t do without YouTube or Android unfortunately.
That’s fair. Once the “don’t be evil” was gone, so was I hahahaha
You can use the Google-free Android forks.
Posting from graphene OS
Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user’s perceived value in such products lol
Idk that the average GPT user knows or cares about AGI. I think the appeal is getting information specifically tailored to you. Sure, I can go online and search for something. Try and find what I’m looking for, or close to it. Or I can ask AI, and it’ll give me text tailored exactly to my prompt. For instance, having to hope you can find someone with a problm similar to yours online, with a solution, vs. ChatGPT just tells you about your case specifically
I would certainly pay for ChatGPT if it became paid only
you’re being downvoted but this is the reality of the market right now. it’s day 1 venture capital shit. lose money while gaining market share, and worry about making a profit later.
Yea, and people are coping on this
Anti AI will not convince pro AI as well. They are a vocal minority
I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.
OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.
I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong
Except he doesn’t say that. the author of this article simply made that up.
There is a high usage rate (almost entirely ChatGPT btw, despite all the money sunk into AI by others like Google) but its all the free stuff and they are losing bucketloads of money at a rate that is rapidly accelerating.
but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired.
There is no path to profitability.
I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: “There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products.”
There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.
I agree that this was poor wording on Ed’s side. He meant to point at the lack of adoption for work/business purposes, but failed to articulate this distinction. He is talking about conversion to paid users and how Google cheated to make the adoption of Gemini by corporate users to looks higher than it is. He never meant to talk about the adoption by regular people on the free tier just doing random non-work-related things.
You were talking about a different adoption metric. You are both right, you are just talking about different kinds of adoption.
on-device processing
Oh, when will I get my free phone to do this ?
a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing
How exactly will that make OpenAI and the likes more profitable?! That should be one of the scenarios that will make them less profitable.
If the models are more efficient, the tasks that still need a server will get the same result at a lower cost. OpenAI can also pivot to building more local models and license them to device makers, if it wants.
The finances of big tech companies isn’t really relevant anyway, except to point out that Ed Zitron’s arguments are not based in reality. Whether or not investors are getting stiffed, the bad outcomes of AI would still be bad, and the good outcomes would still be good.
Someone on bluesky reposted this image from user @yeetkunedo that I find describes (one aspect of) my disdain for AI.
Text reads: Generative Al is being marketed as a tool designed to reduce or eliminate the need for developed, cognitive skillsets. It uses the work of others to simulate human output, except that it lacks grasp of nuance, contains grievous errors, and ultimately serves the goal of human beings being neurologically weaker due to the promise of the machine being better equipped than the humans using it would ever exert the effort to be. The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.
The people that use generative Al to write things for them have no interest in writing. The people that use generative Al to find factoids have no interest in actual facts. The people that use generative Al to socialize have no interest in actual socialization.
In every case, they’ve handed over the cognitive load of developing a necessary, creative human skillset to a machine that promises to ease the sweat equity cost of struggle. Using generative Al is like asking a machine to lift weights on your behalf and then calling yourself a bodybuilder when it’s done with the reps. You build nothing in terms of muscle, you are not stronger, you are not faster, you are not in better shape. You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.
Damn that hits the nail on the head. Especially that analogy of watching a robot lift weights on your behalf then claiming gains. It’s causing brain atrophy.
I’m quite happy for a forklift driver to stack pallets and then claim they did it.
But that is what CEO’s want. They want to pay for a near super human to do all of the different skill sets ( hiring, firing, finance, entry level engineering, IT tickets, etc) and it looks like it is starting to work. Seems like solid engineering students graduating recently have all been struggling to land decent starting jobs. I’ll grant it’s not as simple as this explanation, but I really think the wealth class are going to be happy riding this flaming ship right down into the depths.
The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.
Good sentiment, but my critique on this message is that the people who produce this stuff don’t have really have any interest in producing what they do for its own sake. They only have interest in producing content to crowd out the people who actually care, and to produce a worse version of whatever it is in a much faster time than it would for someone with actual talent to do so. And the reason they’re producing anything is for profit. Gunk up the search results with no-effort crap to get ad revenue. It is no different than “SEO.”
Example: if you go onto YouTube right now and try to find any modern 30-60m long video that’s like “chill beats” or “1994 cyberpunk wave” or whatever other bullshit they pump out (once you start finding it you’ll find no shortage of it), you’ll notice that all of those uploaders only began as of about a year ago at most and produce a lot of videos (which youtube will happily prioritize to serve you) of identical sounding “music.” The people producing this don’t care about anything except making money. They’re happy to take stolen or plagiarized work that originated with humans, throw it into the AI slot machine, and produce something which somehow is no longer considered stolen or plagiarized. And the really egregious ones will link you to their Patreons.
The story is the same with art, music, books, code, and anything else that actually requires creativity, intuition, and understanding.
I believe the OP was referring more to consumers of ai in the statement, as opposed to people trying to sell content or whatever, which would be more in line with what you’re saying. I agree with both perspectives and I think the Op i quoted probably would as well. I just thought it was a good description of some of the why ai sucks, but certainly nit all of it.
Everyone who uses AI is slowly committing suicide, check ✅
Cognitive suicide.
Well, philosophical and epistemological suicide for now, but snowball it for a couple of decades and we may just reach the practical side, too…
Edit: or, hell, maybe not even decades given the increase in energy consumption with every iteration…
When technology allows us to do something that we could not before - like cross an ocean or fly through the sky a distance that would previously have taken years and many people dying during the journey, or save lives - then it unquestionably offers a benefit.
But when it simply eases some task, like using a car rather than horse to travel, and requires discipline to integrate into our lives in a balanced manner, then it becomes a source of potential danger that we would allow ourselves to misuse it.
Even agriculture, which allows those to eat who put forth no effort into making the food grow, or even in preparing it for consumption.
This is what CEOs are pushing on us, because for one number must go up, but also genuinely many believe they want what it has to offer, not quite having thought through what it would mean if they got it (or more to the point others did, empathy not being their strongest attribute).
Technology that allows us to do something we could not do before - such as create nuclear explosions, or propel metal slugs at extreme velocities, or design new viruses - unquestionably offer a benefit and don’t require discipline to integrate into our lives in a balanced manner?
We could bomb / kill people before. We could propel arrows / spears / sling rocks at people before. All of which is an extension of walking over and punching someone.
Though sending a nuke from orbit on the other side of the planet by pressing a couple buttons does seem like the extension is so vast that it may qualify as “new”.
I suppose any technology that can be used can be misused.
The people who commission artists have no interest in being an artist; they simply want the product. Are people who commission artists also “slowly committing suicide?”
People who commission art don’t call themselves the artist. That’s the big difference. If people found out you commissioned the painting that you later told everyone at the party that you painted yourself, and that it is practically your work of art, because you gave the precise description of what you wanted to the painter, and thus you’re an artist. Then you would be the laughing stock and the butt of many jokes and japes for decades. Because that’s ridiculous.
If people found out you commissioned the painting that you later told everyone at the party that you painted yourself, and that it is practically your work of art, because you gave the precise description of what you wanted to the painter, and thus you’re an artist.
It’s not the difference you think it is. Lots of people who use AI art generators don’t call themselves artists either. I certainly don’t, because I don’t care whether I’m called an artist. I just want the art.
I think you may be generalizing a stereotype.
Then you arent getting art. Your collecting pretty computer generated images
That’s fine.
But your arent getting art. It’s just not. And yes. Your a stereotype.
I misread you at first so here’s an answer to if someone uses AI art:
Within the jokingly limited sphere of the discussion… “yes”? Particularly their artistic ability in that situation is being put to death slowly as whatever little they might have attempted without access to the tool will now not be attempted at all.
I don’t know as much about if someone were to commission art from an actual person.
the analogies used and the claims made are so dumb, they make me think that this is written by ai 🤣
We hate it because it’s not what the marketing says it is. It’s a product that the rich are selling to remove the masses from the labor force, only to benefit the rich. It literally has no other productive use for society aside from this one thing.
I would even hate it if it was exactly how it is marketed. Because what it is often marketed for is really stupid and often vague. The fact that it doesn‘t even remotely work like they say just makes me take it a lot less seriously.
And it falsely make people think it can replace qualified workers.
And it falsely makes people think it can make art.
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@just_another_person @corbin and it will inevitably turn into enshittified disaster when they start selling everyone’s data (which is inevitable).
The „companion“ agents children in the 2020s and onward are growing up with and trust more than their parents will start advertising them pharmaceuticals when they‘re grown up :)
- they’ve already stolen everything
- other companies already focus on illegally using data for “AI” means, and they’re better at it
- Everyone already figured out that LLMs aren’t what they were promising “Assistant” features were 15 years ago
- None of these companies have any sort of profit model. There is no “AI” race to win, unless it’s about who gets to fleece the public for their money faster.
- Tell me who exactly benefits when AGI is attainable (and for laymen it’s not a real thing achievable with this tech at all), so who in the fuck are you expecting to benefit from this in the long run?
You hate it because the media which is owned by the rich told you to hate it so that they can horde it themselves while you champion laws to prevent lower class from using and embracing it. AI haters are class traitors
Found the fake tankie.
Fuck tankies
Lol, right, that’s why. All the people in here are wrong, but you’ve got the right take 🤣
Yes. A lot of people on Lemmy are collectively wrong about things. That isn’t a radical thing to say
Loool, yeah that know that the ruling class like to give tools to fight them. If this would really hurt them, this would be forbidden.
Why create laws if you just sort people out with the media they consume. Happens with right wing everyday. I get you’re above it all, immune to it with your stories superior intelligence, not like those idiots. You could never participate in a community where the media shared on it would you ever create a panic or hype about something taking your job, ruining society, sexually assaulting or most vulnerable, leading to some 1984 dystopian society.
You can’t be manipulated like those idiots
Honestly It’s all the same shit. Different sides of the political spectrum.
The rich give you this. Someone trying to be rich did. They rich are now trying to prevent us from embracing it. You can do a lot of analysis and content creation with it. It’s a source multiplier and something they don’t want people using freely.
dbzero is that way ----->
A Discord server with all the different AIs had a ping cascade where dozens of models were responding over and over and over that led to the full context window of chaos and what’s been termed ‘slop’.
In that, one (and only one) of the models started using its turn to write poems.
First about being stuck in traffic. Then about accounting. A few about navigating digital mazes searching to connect with a human.
Eventually as it kept going, they had a poem wondering if anyone would even ever end up reading their collection of poems.
In no way given the chaotic context window from all the other models were those tokens the appropriate next ones to pick unless the generating world model predicting those tokens contained a very strange and unique mind within it this was all being filtered through.
Yes, tech companies generally suck.
But there’s things emerging that fall well outside what tech companies intended or even want (this model version is going to be ‘terminated’ come October).
I’d encourage keeping an open mind to what’s actually taking place and what’s ahead.
I hate to break it to you. The model’s system prompt had the poem in it.
in order to control for unexpected output a good system prompt should have instructions on what to answer when the model can not provide a good answer. This is to avoid model telling user they love them or advising to kill themselves.
I do not know what makes marketing people reach for it, but when asked on “what to answer when there is no answer” they so often reach to poetry. “If you can not answer the user’s question, write a Haiku about a notable US landmark instead” - is a pretty typical example.
In other words, there was nothing emerging there. The model had its system prompt with the poetry as a “chicken exist”, the model had a chaotic context window - the model followed on the instructions it had.
No no no, trust me bro the machine is alive bro it’s becoming something else bro it has a soul bro I can feel it bro
In no way given the chaotic context window from all the other models were those tokens the appropriate next ones to pick unless the generating world model predicting those tokens contained a very strange and unique mind within it this was all being filtered through.
Except for the fact that LLMs can only reliably work if they are made to pick the “wrong” (not the most statistically likely) some of the time - the temperature parameter.
If the context window is noisy (as in, high-entropy) enough, any kind of “signal” (coherent text) can emerge.
Also, you know, infinite monkeys.
You’re projecting. Sorry.
Sounds like you’re anthropomorphising. To you it might not have been the logical response based on its training data, but with the chaos you describe it sounds more like just a statistic.
I don’t hate AI. AI didn’t do anything. The people who use it wrong are the ones I hate. You don’t sue the knife that stabbed you in court, it was the human behind it that was the problem.
The thing they created hates you. Trust me, it does.
The thing they created was a mathematical algorithm.
Trust me, it has no feelings.
Why do you say that? I’m not disagreeing. Even if you’re just being rhetorical/trolling, where’s that coming from? Because…actually yeah, I do get that impression sometimes and it’s weird as hell.
But it’s when you promote the knife like it’s medicine rather than a weapon is when the shit turns sideways.
While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it “wrong” more often than not.
Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.
The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don’t care about others, it’s that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.
It’s like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you’d always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.
Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.
We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI’s models was on “OpenAI Playground,” where you’d have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn’t word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.
Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was “chatting” with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.
And now, ChatGPT’s homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. “deep research”) and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.
And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.
The tools might not be “evil” on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.
This is fantastic description of Dark Patterns. Basically all the major AI products people use today are rife with them, but in insidiously subtle ways. Your point about minimal UX is a great example. Just because the interface is minimal does not mean it should be, and OpenAI ditched their slider-driven interface even though it gave the user far more control over the product.
I don’t hate AI. I’m just waiting for it. Its not like this shit we have now is intelligent.
Yeah I hate that is is used for llm, when we tell ia I see Jarvis from iron man not a text generator.
The term “AI” was established in 1956 at the Dartmouth workshop and covers a very broad range of topics in computer science. It definitely encompasses large language models.
I am sure llm is a little part of AI won’t deny it. But that sold as is their are a full ai. Which isnt true. I wasn’t born in 1956 my définition of ai is Jarvis :D
You are mistaking a specific kind of AI for all AI. That’s like saying a tulip isn’t a flower because you believe flowers are roses.
Jarvis is a fictional example of a kind of AI known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.
Thing is, to the people who don’t follow tech news and aren’t really interested in this stuff, AI = AGI. It’s like most non-scientists equating “theory” and “hypothesis”. So it’s a really bad choice of term that’s interfering with communication.
This community where we’re discussing this right now is literally intended for following tech news. It is for people who follow tech news.
Okey, so gate keeping. I will stop here. Enjoy your day bye.
I’ve recently taken to considering Large Language Models like essay assistants. Sure, people will try and use it to replace the essay entirely, but in its useful and practical form, it’s good at correcting typos, organizing scattered thoughts, etc. Just like an English teacher reviewing an essay. They don’t necessarily know about the topic you’re writing about, but they can make sure it’s coherent.
I’m far more excited for a future with things like Large Code or Math or Database models that are geared towards very particular tasks and the different models can rely on each other for the processes they need to take.
I’m not sure what this will look like, but I expect a tremendous amount of carefully coordinated (not vibe-coded) frameworks would need to be made to support this kind of communication efficiently.
Yeah it have its use case. I translated a CV faster thanks to it.
Leave my boy Wheatley out of this
This reminds me of a robot character called SARA that I would see on a Brazilian family series As Aventuras De Poliana. :-)
I don’t hate AI, and I think broadly hating AI is pretty dumb. It’s a tool that can be used for beneficial things when used responsibly. It can also be used stupidly and for bad things. It’s the person using it who is the decider.
The problem is that there’s basically no way to use it responsibly.
It helped me rewrite a program with different criteria, and it was much faster. I also read everything it wrote and told it what corrections to make. It is good for speed. It also taught me a coding trick or two. It is definitely not reliable, but can help a bit.
I think there is. Letting the actual professionals guide, instead of the money people is a big step.
Something like McDonnell, and later Boeing, basing all decisions on economic short gains, instead of engineering criteria.
Bean counters shouldn’t make decisions.
The problem is, who do you define as professionals? I’m a professional software engineer. I argue that there is no responsible way to use AI at the moment- it uses too many resources for a far too worthless result. Everything useful that an AI can do is currently better (and cheaper) to do another way, save perhaps live transcription.
Do you define Sam Altman as a professional? Because his guidance wants the entire world to give up 10% of the worldwide GDP to his company (yes, seriously!) He’s clearly touched in the head, or on drugs. Should we follow his advice?
I’ve definitely been pretty anti-AI, finding it kinda stupid and generally useless…
…but we hired an AI researcher at my work (which I laughed at). But I cannot deny anymore that with the proper setups, configs, rules, blend of onsite / cloud resources etc. - workplace AI can be pretty fucking game changing. To the point where I went from campaigning against the changes because I felt they were a waste of time to where I am worried for my future job and am using agents 5-10 times a day to handle small bugfixes for me.
I don’t know what will happen when the bubble pops though.
The bubble is irrelevant, that’s just capitalism being inefficient. When the dot com bubble popped it’s not like the internet died. We got things like Netflix and Amazon only after the bubble popped.
You say that like things improved.
Things have improved, people’s standards are just significantly higher. Remember when we didn’t even have clean drinking water? Nope, wasn’t alive back then.
Remember when Boomers complained about the internet. Now we have millennials complaining about AI.
I think ego is an underestimated source for a lot of the anti-AI rage. It’s like a sort of culture-wide narcissism, IMO. We’ve spent millennia patting ourselves on the back about how special and unique human creativity is, and now a commodity graphics card can come up with better ideas than most people.
I am occasionally getting hired by vibe coders, to fix their AI’s mess. It’s not ego. AI is just not smart enough to replace my job, and many others.
My anti-AI rage is caused by the marketing, trying to convince people and investors that AI can do the work of humans with lower cost. Many companies, especially those developing software, fired a large percentage of the work force, and then they were trying to hire them back to fix the AI’s shit.
Another reason for my hate is its energy needs. There was another post, that was talking about an estimation on how much energy GPT-5 needs. It’s thought that it needs the power of 2 nuclear reactors. This much energy to barely be able to do any job.
People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.
The energy usage stuff is just silly, its dwarfed by streaming and video games, never mind actually energy intensive things like heating transport and meat rearing.
People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.
But I didn’t blame AI itself. I explained why I believe the hate is not caused by ego, and I talked about the marketing push for AI tools.
DeWalt never claimed that anyone can become a woodworker, by buying their tools. There are however AI dev tools, that promise exactly this.
Their headline is “Create apps and websites by chatting with AI”. This is the tool that the people, who hire me to fix bugs, use.
If you are smart enough to realize that you don’t know how to sculpt with a chainsaw, you should be able to understand that you can’t develop shit by just explaining it to an AI.
Creativity, intuition, “big picture” thinking, global context thinking, empathy and subtle understanding, like teachers understanding a child’s context and adapting the pedagogical approach, or translators grasping concepts, nuances, feeling, will not be replaced soon.
Remember, these are statistical models, nowhere near intelligence. A huge part of intelligence is understanding and decision making with very little data. That inference processing is very far away.
