Technology

I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.

Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people's money over it.

As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:

Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.

LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.

Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI

No shit, because we all see that AI is just technospeak for “harvest all your info”.

LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn't waste their money.

They've overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.

This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.

For the love of god, defund MBAs.

Take the hint, MBAs.

There are even companies slapping AI labels onto old tech with timers to trick people into buying it.

I can attest this is true for me. I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them. It gave me the feeling LG clothes washer division is full of shit.

Bought a SpeedQueen instead and been super happy with it. No AI bullshit anywhere in their product info.

I literally uninstalled and disabled every AI process and app in that latest galaxy AI update, which was the whole update btw. my reasons are:

1- privacy and data sharing.

2- the battery, cpu, ram of AI bloatware running in the background 247.

3- it was chaging and doing things which I didn't want especially in the galary photo albums and camera AI modes.

I mean, pretty obvious if they advertise the technology instead of the capabilities it could provide.

Still waiting for that first good use case for LLMs.

I've learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don't mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.

"AI" is certainly a turn-off for me, I would ask a salesman "do you have one that doesn't have that?" and I will now enumerate why:

1. LLMs are wrongness machines. They do have an almost miraculous ability to string words together to form coherent sentences but when they have no basis at all in truth it's nothing but an extremely elaborate and expensive party trick. I don't want actual services like web searches replaced with elaborate party tricks.

2. In a lot of cases it's being used as a buzzword to mean basically anything computer controlled or networked. Last time I looked up they were using the word "smart" to mean that. A clothes dryer that can sense the humidity of the exhaust air to know when the clothes are dry isn't any more "AI" than my 90's microwave that can sense the puff of steam from a bag of popcorn. This is the kind of outright dishonest marketing I'd like to see fail so spectacularly that people in the advertising business go missing over it.

3. I already avoided "smart" appliances and will avoid "AI" appliances for the same reasons: The "smart" functionality doesn't actually run locally, it has to connect to a server out on the internet to work, which means that while that server is still up and offering support to my device, I have a hole in my firewall. And then they'll stop support ten minutes after the warranty expires and the device will no longer work. For many of these devices there's no reason the "smart" functionality couldn't run locally on some embedded ARM chip or talk to some application running on a PC that I own inside my firewall, other than "then we don't get your data."

4. AI is apparently consuming more electricity than air conditioning. In fact, I'm not convinced that power consumption isn't the selling point they're pushing at board meetings. "It'll keep our friends in the pollution industry in business."

Every company that has been trying to push their shiny, new AI feature (which definitely isn't part of a rush to try and capitalize on the prevalence of AI), my instant response is: "Yeah, no, I'm finding a way to turn this shit off."

Be me

Early adopter of LLMs ever since a random tryout of Replika blew my mind and I set out to figure what the hell was generating its responses

Learn to fine-tune GPT-2 models and have a blast running 30+ subreddit parody bots on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, including some that generate weird surreal imagery from post titles using VQGAN+CLIP

Have nagging concerns about the industry that produced these toys, start following Timnit Gebru

Begin to sense that something is going wrong when DALLE-2 comes out, clearly targeted at eliminating creative jobs in the bland corporate illustration market. Later, become more disturbed by Stable Diffusion making this, and many much worse things, possible, at massive scale

Try to do something about it by developing one of the first "AI Art" detection tools, intended for use by moderators of subreddits where such content is unwelcome. Get all of my accounts banned from Reddit immediately thereafter

Am dismayed by the viral release of ChatGPT, essentially the same thing as DALLE-2 but text

Grudgingly attempt to see what the fuss is about and install Github Copilot in VSCode. Waste hours of my time debugging code suggestions that turn out to be wrong in subtle, hard-to-spot ways. Switch to using Bing Copilot for "how-to" questions because at least it cites sources and lets me click through to the StackExchange post where the human provided the explanation I need. Admit the thing can be moderately useful and not just a fun dadaist shitposting machine. Have major FOMO about never capitalizing on my early adopter status in any money-making way

Get pissed off by Microsoft's plans to shove Copilot into every nook and cranny of Windows and Office; casually turn on the Opympics and get bombarded by ads for Gemini and whatever the fuck it is Meta is selling

Start looking for an alternative to Edge despite it being the best-performing web browser by many metrics, as well as despite my history with "AI" and OK-ish experience with Copilot. Horrified to find that Mozilla and Brave are doing the exact same thing

Install Vivaldi, then realize that the Internet it provides access to is dead and enshittified anyway

Daydream about never touching a computer again despite my livelihood depending on it

In other news, AI bros convince CEOs and investors that polls saying people don't like AI are out of touch with reality and those people actually want more AI, as proven by an AI that only outputs what those same AI bros want.

Just waiting for that to pop up in the news some time soon.

I've found ChatGPT somewhat useful, but not amazingly so. The thing about ChatGPT is, I understand what the tool is, and our interactions are well defined. When I get a bullshit answer, I have the context to realize it's not working for me in this case and to go look elsewhere. When AI is built in to products in ways that you don't clearly understand what parts are AI and how your interactions are fed to it; that's absolutely and incurably horrible. You just have to reject the whole application; there is no other reasonable choice.

Also just listening and reading what people say. We don't want fucking AI anything. We understand what it might do. We don't want it.

Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I'll have a great time. It's a wild world out there.

Shove a bunch of AI nonsense in my face when I didn't ask for it and I'm throwing your product out a window.

I have just read the features of iOS 18.1 Apple intelligence so called.
TLDR: typing and sending messages for you mostly like one click reply to email. Or… shifting text tone 🙄

So that confirms my fears that in the future bots will communicate with each other instead of us. Which is madness. I want to talk to a real human and not a bot that translates what the human wanted to say approximately around 75% accuracy devoid of any authenticity

If I see someone’s unfiltered written word I can infer their emotions, feelings what kind of state they are in etc. Cold bot to bot speech would truly fuck up society in unpredictable ways undermining fundaments of communication.

Especially if you notice that most communication, even familial already happens online nowadays. So kids will learn to just ‘hey siri tell my mom I am sorry and I will improve myself’.
Mom: ‘hey siri summarize message’

In your own words, tell me why you're calling today.

My medication is in the wrong dosage.

You need to refill your medication is that right?

No, my medication is in the wrong dosage, it's supposed to be tens and it came as 20s.

You need to change the pharmacy where you're picking up your medication?

I need to speak to a human please.

I understand that you want to speak to an agent, is that right?

Yes.

Chorus, 5x. (Please give me your group number, or dial it in at the keypad. For this letter press that number for that letter press this number. No I'm driving, just connect me with an agent so I can verify over the phone)

I'm sorry, I can't verify your identity please collect all your paperwork and try calling again. Click

Why ever would we be mad?

This is because the AI of today is a shit sandwich that we’re being told is peanut butter and jelly.

For those who like to party: All the current “AI” technologies use statistics to approximate semantics. They can’t just be semantic, because we don’t know how meaning works or what gives rise to it. So the public is put off because they have an intuitive sense of the ruse.

As long as the mechanics of meaning remain a mystery, “AI” will be parlor tricks.

I find the tech interesting, but the rush to commercialize it was a bad idea. It’s not ready yet, total uncanny valley.

I wonder if we'll start seeing these tech investor pump n' dump patterns faster collectively, given how many has happened in such a short amount of time already.

Crypto, Internet of Things, Self Driving Cars, NFTs, now AI.

It feels like the futurism sheen has started to waver. When everything's a major revolution inserted into every product, then isn't, it gets exhausting.

Maybe I'd be more interested in AI if there was any I with the A. At the moment, there's no more intelligence to these things than there is in a parrot with brain damage, or a human child. Language Models can mimic speech but are unable to formulate any original thoughts. Until they can, they aren't AI and I won't be the slightest bit interested beyond trying to break them into being slightly dirty (and therefore slightly funny).

Lets see if this finally kills the AI hype. Big tech is pushing for AI because it is the ultimate spyware, nothing more.

This is because AI is usually used to reduce the human cost to the company, and rarely to reduce the human labour for the customer.

That, or mass surveillance.

AI has some pretty good uses.

But in the majority of junk on the market it is nothing but marketing bloatware.

Okay but have you considered shoving AI down the throats of consumers and forcing them to use it? I say invest in more gigantic server farms!

The irony is companies are being forced to implement it. Like our board has told us we must have "AI in our product.". It's literally a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.

Adobe Acrobat has added AI to their program and I hate it so much. Every other time I try to load a PDF it crashes. Wish I could convince my boss to use a different PDF reader.