As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.

…I’d say it’s 97% hype and marketing.

It’s crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It’s also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they’re going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.

Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar “local” AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you’ll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.

Honestly, he’s wrong though.

I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I’ve used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn’t get AI to produce properly.

And first and foremost, they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can’t ‘think’, or coming up with solutions that others haven’t already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they’re a pretty good tool to have.

It’s a reactionary opinion when people jump to the ‘but they’re stealing art!’ – isn’t your brain also stealing art when it’s inspired by others art? Artists don’t just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That’s all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.

And then people will complain about that saying it’s almost all hype and no substance.

Then that one tech bro will keep insisting that lemmy is being unfair to AI and there are so many good use cases.

No one is denying the 10% use cases, we just don’t think it’s special or needs extra attention since those use cases already had other possible algorithmic solutions.

Tech bros need to realize, even if there are some use cases for AI, there has not been any revolution, stop trying to make it happen and enjoy your new slightly better tool in silence.

I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.

Yup.

I don’t know why. The people marketing it have absolutely no understanding of what they’re selling.

Best part is that I get paid if it works as they expect it to and I get paid if I have to decommission or replace it. I’m not the one developing the AI that they’re wasting money on, they just demanded I use it.

That’s true software engineering folks. Decoupling doesn’t just make it easier to program and reuse, it saves your job when you need to retire something later too.

He is correct. It is mostly people cashing out on stuff that isn’t there.