Comment on Microsoft ends OpenAI exclusivity in Office, adds rival Anthropic
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 11 hours agoI use them for cursory web searches it would take me slightly longer to do directly.
spellings of words, name of the character from that movie, whatever ephemera I want at the moment that no one ever should really give two shits about.
Actual questions or actual functions? lol no. And the second they ask me to pay for it - it’s gone.
I can see a use case when it comes to search - like you said. If the question is relatively trivial and slightly obscure then a LLM summary is probably adequate (maybe problematic for other reasons).
But this is being marketed in Productivity software! I really and genuinely want to understand why it seems so popular.
So far as I can tell there are a few groups that make up its “popularity”
Ironically the “anti-AI” crowd, for lack of a more at-hand description mention AI a lot because it’s a form of hype many experienced technology-versed people have seen many times before and at such a scale as to be astounding. Also because it doesn’t seem to work very well at all. And because everyone is being forced to use it and “forced” to like it.
Then there’s the gung-ho “newbies” (who may in fact have more than a decade of experience) who just think it’s neat. They love the intricacy of it and the wide-open futuristic vistas and they like talking about what it can or might be able to do some day. This group will become the former group in another decade or so.
Then there’s the propaganda - any news article, tweet, comment or what have you that in some way shape or form is being put in front of many people for the purposes of keeping AI discussion happening. Much of this is “free press” because next to lawyers, journalists are least likely to understand technology, and their directives from on high are to promote this thing - whatever it is.
Then there’s data science researchers who are ostensibly pulling new insights out of a sea of hallucinations and making interesting new connections because of it. It happens.
I think that’s more or less it. There’s also the general non-technology group of people who are told things about it and have not used it, nor will they probably ever.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Yeah the only thing I find useful is the web search result when I want like a 5 line code example.
Problem is they could do the same thing by just scraping and parsing the first result and inlining it in the search result page so I don’t have to click on a link. Same thing just without wasting all that hardware and energy.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Yep. It’s not even very good at the barest minimum function anyone can find for it after years of blasting everyone with propaganda to use it. And could be replaced with a couple of lines.
Truly a bizarre chapter in technology.