Submitted 8 hours ago by IcedRaktajino@startrek.website to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you used it. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
I think that it’s an astute observation. AI wouldn’t need to be hyped by those running AI companies if the value was self-evident. Personally I’ve yet to see any use beyond an advanced version of Clippy.
I use it to romanize Farsi song texts. I cannot read their script and chatGPT can. The downside is that you have to do it a few lines at a time or else it starts hallucinating like halfway through. There is no other tool that reliably does this, the one I used before from University of Tehran seems to have stopped working.
Interesting use case. Sometimes you can find romanizations on lyricstranslate, but this is kinda hit and miss.
Had the exact same thought. If it was revolutionary and innovative we would be praising it and actual tech people would love it.
Guess who actually loves it? Authoritarians and corporations. Yay.
A couple years ago I read a news article written by a woman who had just left her silicon valley career because she was one of the people forerunning the implementation of AI and it terrified her and she saw how bad it was and the long-lasting implications on society and she bailed out due to conscientious objections.
Do you have the article or the name of the woman? I am curious to read it.
Please forgive me for not cataloging & citationing every random thing I’ve ever read on the internet in my leisure time.
That’s a lot of ands!
But at least no ifs/ors. Makes it real easy to follow the logic
Yep, when I get emotional about something and don’t check myself, I become a run-on sentence offender.
Some of the older lemmings here will remember what it was like when every company wanted to make a website, but they didn’t really have anything to put in there. People were curious to look at websites, because you hadn’t seen that many yet, so visiting them was kinda fun and interesting at first. After about a year, the novelty had worn off completely, and seeing YetAnotherCompanyName.com on TV or a road side billboard was beginning to get boring.
Did it ever get as infuriating the current AI hype though? I recall my grandma complaining about TV news. “They always tell me to read more online.” she says. I guess it can get just as annoying if you manage to successfully ignore the web for a few decades.
I think back then, they had a product that was ahead of its time, and just needed time for us to adapt to.*
Now, they have a solution in search of a problem, and they don’t know what the good use cases are, so they’re just slapping it on like randomly and aggressively.
I’ve change to lemmy, now matrix. I’m doing my part.
I was an adult during that time, and I don’t recall it being anywhere near as annoying. Well, except the TV and radio ads saying “…or visit our website at double-you double-you double-you dot Company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot company dot com.”
YMMV, but it didn’t get annoying until apps entered the picture and the only way to deal with certain companies was through their app.
Oh, I totally forgot the www thing. That was super annoying. Good riddance!
My old brain still thought of site addresses as having www in them, but this post just made me realize that’s more uncommon than not to see it any more.
If AI truly was the next frontier, we wouldn’t be staring at the start of another depression (or a bad recession). There would be a revolution of innovations and most people’s lives would improve.
The idea that technological improvements would improve everyone’s life is based on the premise that capitalists wouldn’t keep the productivity gains for themselves.
AI does offer some efficiency improvements. But the workers won’t get that money.
Pls give me just one more pixel
Note that it was improving the average worker's life proportionately until the capitalists broke the system in the early 70s.
I'm guessing that the consistent trend wasn't consistent prior to WWII, that it was just a blip from about 1945 - 1970/.
My top reasons I have no interest in ai:
it wouldn’t be pushed on us
The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.
how can it be trusted without human verification
You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.
environmental impact
I did the math and posted it on Lemmy. The environmental footprint of AI is big but actually less than the cost to develop a new 3d game ( of which hundreds come out every year). Using AI is the same energy as playing a 3d game.
I see people pointing fingers at data centers the same as car riders looking at the large diesel smoke coming out of a bus and assuming buses are a big pollution source.
It is a problem because it’s like now everyone is playing 3d games all the time instead of only on their off time.
40,000,000,000 watts
This doesn’t add up though. Fortnite’s player base is only about 10% PC, and the system requirements are pretty modest. It’ll even run on Intel integrated graphics, according to the minimum requirements from Epic.
There’s even a modest chunk (~6%) on Nintendo switch, which, according to Nintendo, draws about 7 watts when playing a game in TV mode.
Sounds like you forgot to consider the energy cost of developing each AI model. Developing and maintaining a model is vastly more energy intense than 3d game dev. Keep in mind that you can ship a 3d game and ramp down gpu use for dev. But an AI model has to be constantly updated, mostly by completely retraining. Also, noone was clamoring to build massive data centers just to develope one game. Yet they are for one model.
it wouldn’t be pushed on us
The Internet was pushed on everyone.
Sure companies were excited to promote it, but it was primarily adopted because of a very large amount of people being excited about it.
how can it be trusted without human verification
You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.
I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers. I won’t use them again if they’re trash. They’re accountable for their content.
Human curated lists are still very helpful. In a sense, that was the value of Reddit.
environmental impact
I did the math and posted it on Lemmy.
I’ll take your word for it.
The Internet was 30 years old by the time AOL was sending CDs (even floppies) to people.
I pay for Gemini and I haven’t used it in months. I don’t see any real case uses for me as an engineer. It just produces trash I have to fix and could have avoided if I did it myself in the beginning.
Why do you continue to pay for it?
Some folks like pissing into the wind.
I like to make videos with it occasionally. They are fun to make.
It’s good at making up realistic looking fake data for testing and mock-ups, instead of the usual Person A in Town B.
Small scripts also work out as long as they’re small enough to print on a piece of paper.
Writing some sales fluff in a document also works reasonably well.
But those are just niche applications. For something serious it’s not really usable so far.
It’s advertising. It’s shoved in your face so you use Copilot instead of Google.
I setup a brother all in one printer for my mother in law and it wanted to install software that loads at startup that pops up constantly with their printer toner sales and marketing.
It’s also investor money talking. Looks like everyone with at least a few dollars to spare wants to get on the AI hype train. They have dumped an absurd amount of money on AI, and now they can’t wait to see those stock prices climb. These expectations put an immense amount of pressure on all AI companies to push their products anywhere and everywhere.
I learned a long time ago to never install manufacturer printer drivers. Or, at least, never install them from the provided Setup.exe.
They’ve always installed a bunch of bloatware (HP has always been the worst but other brands are just as bad).
If you look in the setup folder, there’s usually the raw drivers you can install from Device Manager. If the driver package is just a single .exe file, you can usually unpack it with 7zip and get at its inner contents.
If that fails, the system-included HP LaserJet 4200 PCL driver is about as close to a universal print driver as you can find lol.
It is just advertising. The more I think about it the more I can’t think of any practical use for generative AI that doesn’t involve essentially spamming everyone.
The more I think about it the more I can’t think of any practical use for generative AI
It really does improve productivity. The problem is thinking a spell checker on steroids will do your job (the mistake both employees and employers make).
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product
Counter point: Yes it absolutely would be. There would still be competition between models and products and a need for brand recognition. If you had a product with a feature someone “wanted or needed” you wouldn’t advertise that??? AI aside this is just silly
Yeah, but they should take that pissing contest out of the UX.
As someone (forgot which blog I read it on, sorry) recently observed: if AI made software development so much easier, we’d be drowning in great new apps by now.
Yeah, and we wouldn’t have so much garbage code out there breaking the internet. I tried to argue with someone on another site who was saying AI was the best thing ever basically, with my own real world encounters (that are weekly now) of why it’s not and often wrong. He said the people using must be idiots, which sure, but if an idiot can get bad answers than it’s not that good. He finished by saying he would never hire me because I refuse to use AI within my IT job. Alright, whatever dude. I can’t wait to be pissed off by the shit application you coded with AI when it runs like hot garbage.
The 0.001% have stolen $76,000,000,000,000 from US workers alone in the last 40 years.
AI is just a way for them to burn money rather than allow the doors to have a raise.
Isn’t this a stupid attitude?
Wasn’t the dot-com bubble anything other than people showing the internet in your face and how it’s a game changer 24/7.
We are simply at the peak of the initial hype curve of the Gartner hype cycle, the bubble will burst soonish and lots of companies go bankrupt, then real use cases will emerge where it’s actually revolutionary.
I don’t know which youtuber but one had a good video about it, at some point in the past, all hype was around drones and delivering stuff to your front yard, turned out that was stupid yet those things found their niche, e.g. some medicine deliveries to remote location in Africa and AED devices that can fly out to people.
You’re both right. The extreme hype means it isn’t yet all that useful. But it doesn’t mean it won’t get there. Once it is there, they won’t need to hype it as much.
out of all the comments in this thread, yours is probably the best thought out. I’ll admit, I’m very much in line with OP, in that the more someone hypes something up, the less I want to do with it. I get increasingly skeptical, and that gets seriously compounded when I see C-suites give nebulous answers on how things will improve with a new invention.
I think it’ll find its niche, but right now, the fucking thing can barely do math, and is at best, a learned pig. There’s really big barriers to making AI actually useful, such as the scalability and energy/water requirements. Until we can get elegant coding and inputs, we’re going to struggle.
Exactly.
It needs to be shoved in your face so they can get your face in the database.
They want it to be the next step in controlling and raping the masses. That’s why they’re shoving it down our throats.
I suggest keeping your mouth closed tightly, and not engaging in any way with it. We should all see these early reports of people becoming obsessed with their AI relationships as a huge warning–red banners and klaxons sounding. Run! RUN! Run far away and stay there.
AI is defiantly in a bubble atm but its the same as the .com bubble. The market will crash, places its not useful it will be removed, places it’s useful it will be kept. Its defiantly useful but not to the degree its promoted at at the moment.
Its also that we haven’t yet got to the point where a couple dominant market strategies have taken hold. So its just everyone throwing as much shit as they can at the wall and we are yet to see whats gonna stick.
*definitely
Defiantly is a very different concept.
You werent around during the iphones launch or the beginnings of the internet. Also yes printers did the same thing with ink jets and how everyone needed to print out their digital pictures.
I predate both of those events by multiple decades lol.
Printers were well established even on the Trash-80 I grew up with. The bloatware drivers aren’t really what I’m talking about. I suppose Clippy could be considered prior art to the whole “shoving AI in your face” but at the time I was a WordPerfect fanboy.
I don’t know if the printer analogy is a good one but I’m down with what you’re saying. The rise of GUI in the early days really did push printing in extreme ways
People also use heroin. That doesn’t mean it’s well liked or actually good.
Shhhh. Lemmy doesn’t like it when you look outside their bubble.
LLMs are fucking useful, but there’s not yet a good business model. You can switch to any system at any time, so everyone is trying to forcefeed you their own version of it ro get you hooked. But in the end they’re just annoying the hell out of users.
They’re useful, but not anything like to the degree that’s being claimed. It’s being pushed as if it’s going to be able to do everything.
For one example, does generative AI have a use in coding? Absolutely. If you’re a coder who knows what they are doing, it can help you have ideas and it can do some of the tedious stuff. But you still need to know what you’re doing, use it as a tool, and absolutely do not use its code without checking it all. And that’s not how it’s being pushed. It’s being pushed as if you can just type in “pretend it’s 1999 and code me a Doom sequel” and you’ll get a full, working programme out.
Even getting it to do things in chunks seems to be a trial. There’s a video I watched a day or two ago (if you’re interested, I’ll look for a link when I’ve got more time) where a guy tried to get ChatGPT to code for him. He had a specific end goal in mind and asked it to do things step by step. While there were several occasions that he was impressed by what it produced, he kept getting stuck because it would seemingly only fix problems in one area of the code by eliminating another area entirely. He found that most of his time was spent going round in circles trying to ensure that it actually did what he was asking of it. It hallucinated, too, and at one point he had to solve the problem for it by referring to a specific repository, which he said he himself only knew about because he’s got more than a decade’s experience.
That’s the biggest issue - what LLMs are capable of is far, far below what they’re sold as.
When coding (my main job since lot of years) I like to use LLMs for brainstorming, reviewing my code for the “quickly visible” errors etc. Oh, and I found out LLMS are not bad explaining query plans and suggesting optimizations for SQL queries in PostgreSQL. I feel the older a technology is (when there’s a lot of reference materials available) the better LLMs are with those topics.
But don’t put them to the task of suggesting something on new tech or creative. They lie without blushing. And in the end you just get a “Good Catch, that can’t really work” for wasting your time.
I think you need to get a feel for what they can and can’t do. In any event all the shit they are being pushed for - that will “go well”. Ah recently, I saw claude or so being able to edit exel sheets. Yep. Combine the most untestable tool guilty of producing tons of false data with LLMs. WHAT COULD GO WRONG!!! Users blindly asking the llm to do stuff in excel and then just betting their companies on the results…
Let us replace “AI” in that sentence with: soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, deodorant, condoms, cars, supermarkets…
None of those things are shoved in my face everywhere I look, online or offline.
Neither is AI, you’re just salty.
It’d be the opposite you wouldn’t know about it
This is how I feel, especially with companies adding “AI Use” to their performance reviews. If employees found it helpful, they’d use it. Or did you hire complete morons?
I’ve built several AI tools for my work which do increase productivity. They lean in to what AI is actually good at and improve the speed of getting information, like using AI embeddings to build a quick semantic search, and building MCP tools for agents to look up information in our systems quickly. I’ve built some AI based tools to automate very expensive tasks that require a ton of manual data curation and review, and it works at the same level as our staff doing it, and it runs in 20 minutes, that’s a win.
People actually do use these tools because they save a significant amount of time with very little cost, and everyone gets to do the things they’re actually good at.
Now I’m being asked to spearhead building out customer facing AI efforts. I knew this day would come, but yeah the board and investors want it. They really want to be able to tell investors and clients that we’re an AI forward company.
I’ve been planning for this and researching/studying, and all the internal tools I’ve built have been test runs. I’m not going to force AI on users, but I am going to build tools and systems for the ones who do use AI.
Oh man if they started judging my performance by AI use, it would certainly increase but not in the way they want.
AI companies believe the market will give the best rewards for a winner-take-all strategy.
They believe now is the time to accumulate customers.
Their future financing rounds very likely depend on being able to show growth.
Entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors all know it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be (yet). They hope another few billion in cash will get it there. And hope you don’t notice until they already won the market.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
AI has become a self-enfeeblement tool.
I am aware that most people are not analytically minded, and I know most people don’t lust for knowledge. I also know that people generally don’t want their wrong ideas corrected by a person, because it provokes negative feelings of self worth, but they’re happy being told self-satisfying lies by AI.
To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.
IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 1 hour ago
So, like church? lol
No wonder there’s so much worrying overlap between religion and AI.