Submitted 6 months 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.
You shoved it in my face now
LLMs are a really cool toy, I would lose my shit over them if they weren’t a catalyst for the whole of western society having an oopsie economic crash moment.
TL;DR
4 layers of stupidification. The (possibly willfully) ignorant user, the source bias, the bias/agenda of the media owner, then shitty AI.
AI should be a backup to human skill and not a replacement for it. It isn’t good enough, and who knows when or if it will ever be at a reasonable cost. The problem with the current state of AI is that it’s being sold as a replacement for many human jobs and knowledge. 30-40 years ago we had to contend with basic human bias and nationalism filtering facts and news before it got to the end user, then we got the mega-media companies owned by the ultra wealthy who consolidated everything and injected yet more bias with the internet and social media but at least you got provided with multiple sources, now we have AI being pushed as a source that can be programmed to use biased sources and/or objectively wrong sources that people don’t even bother checking another source about. AI should be used to find unique solutions to medical research, materials design, etc. Not whether or not microwaving your phone is a good idea.
Canva just announced the next generation of Affinity. Instead of giving us Linux support, while Affinity is “free” now they crammed in a bunch of AI to upsell you on a subscription.
Yeah… we kinda saw that coming ever since that first email from Serif about the acquisition…
Is there anything out there now that’s comparable? I’ve still got v1 and v2 suites andninstallers, but… that’ll only last as long as the twats at Canvas keep the author servers going.
I’ve been wondering about a similar thing recently - if AI is this big, life-changing thing, why were there so little rumblings among tech-savy people before it became “mainstream”? Sure, Machine Learning was somewhat talked about, but very little of it seemed to relate to LLM-style Machine learning. With basically all other innovations technology, the nerds tended to have it years before everyone else, so why was it so different with AI?
Sizes are different. Before “AI” went mainstream, those in machine learning were very excited about word2vec and reinforcement learning for example. And it was known that there will be improvement with larger size neural networks but I’m not sure if anyone knew for certain how well chatgpt would have worked. Given the costs of training and inference for LLMs, I doubt you can see nerds doing it. Also, previously you didn’t have big tech firms. Not the current behemoths anyway.
Realistically, computational power
The more number crunching units and more memory you throw at the problem, the easier it is and the more useful the final model is. The math and theoretical computer science behind LLMs has been known for decades, it’s just that the resource investment required to make something even mediocre was too much for any business type to be willing to sign off on. Me and my fellow nerds had the technology and largely dismissed it as worthless or a set of pipe dreams
But then number crunching units and memory became cheap enough that a couple of investors were willing to take the risk and you get a model like ChatGPT1. Talks close enough like a human that it catches business types attention as a new revolutionary thing, and without the technical background to know they were getting lied to, the Venture Capitalism machine cranks out the shit show we have today.
And additionally, I’ve never seen an actual tech-savy nerd that supports its implementation, especially in this draconian ways.
Because AI is a solution to a problem individuals don’t have. The last 20 years we have collected and compiled an absurd amount of data on everyone. So much that the biggest problem is how to make that data useful by analyzing and searching it. AI is the tool that completes the other half of data collection, analyzing. It was never meant for normal people and its not being funded by average people either.
Sam altman is also a fucking idiot yes-man who could talk himself into literally any position. If this was meant to help society the AI products wouldnt be assisting people with killing themselves so that they can collect data on suicide.
Riiight. Of course.
If cars weren’t all they were cracked up be they wouldn’t be shoving them in your face.
If credit cards weren’t all they were cracked up be they wouldn’t be shoving them in your face.
If breakfast cereal weren’t all they were cracked up be they wouldn’t be shoving them in your face.
What a weird of saying you don’t know how marketing works.
When I go on a bike ride, I don’t constantly have people pulling beside me reminding that I could be driving in a car.
When I use cash, the person taking it does not remind me that I could have used a credit card.
When I open a container of oatmeal, there isn’t a little piece of paper that springs out and reminds me I could be eating instantly ready breakfast cereal instead.
You guys have really weird ways of indicating you don’t know what marketing is.
I recommend to start with the Wikipedia page and move on.
Funny how all the things you listed aren’t “all they were cracked up to be” either.
I disagree regardless.
Cracked up be they. What a weird of saying. Fuck off clankers
No, those are specific brands trying to get you to buy their brand. Honda wants to you buy a Honda. Ford wants you to buy a Ford. No one is trying to push cars as a whole on you.
I don’t disagree its just my 1st thought was that was the industry that is accused of sabotaging public transit train system to get you to buy more cars in California. Really hoping they dont pull the same stunt by like removing word check and forcing you to talk to AI.
Kinda. We want AI like on Star Trek, but to get there we gotta go through these growing pains. The people who push AI in your face want it to get better — either because they want the altruistic Star Trek AI or because they want it to be profitable. I admit, most are the latter, but a few are the former.
I disagree, because most of them won’t give us boxes to permanently hide it or disable it… They deny choice because they know that most of us would turn it off. They are selling snake oil and know it.
exactly right
Here’s a similar perspective: as a vegetarian, seeing advertisement selling meat is good: it means the animal exploitation industry is struggling and needs to promote their “product” which need nearly no advertising for years if not decades.
It’s very similar here: the advertising (in the form of putting it where you can’t miss it, in the tools you use everyday) is trying to convince you to use something many people are apparently just not that interested in.
Ads are just a way to sell more of your stuff. If you earn 100€ a day without ads and spending 100€ a day on ads earns you 101€, you spend 100€ a day on ads. It’s as simple as that.
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.
To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.
So, like church? lol
No wonder there’s so much worrying overlap between religion and AI.
So, like church? lol
Praise the Omnissiah?
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.
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.
Why do you continue to pay for it?
I like to make videos with it occasionally. They are fun to make.
Some folks like pissing into the wind.
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…
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.
Similar thought… If it was so revolutionary and innovative, I wouldn’t have access to it. The AI companies would be keeping it to themselves. From a software perspective, they would be releasing their own operating systems and browsers and whatnot.
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.
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.
Likely Timnit Gebru who has been working in the area of the ethics of AI for quite some time.
Thanks!
Do you have the article or the name of the woman? I am curious to read it.
Lemmy user dondelelcaro thinks it might be this amazing lady: Timnit Gebru who has been working in the area of the ethics of AI for quite some time.
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.
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.
It needs to be shoved in your face so they can get your face in the database.
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.
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.
Oh, I totally forgot the www thing. That was super annoying. Good riddance!
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.
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.
No, the hype is over-stating how useful it will eventually be.
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.
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.
Exactly.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.
They “would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited” - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).
The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)
Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.
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.
The Internet was 30 years old by the time AOL was sending CDs (even floppies) to people.
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.
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.
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.
Wilco@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
This is some amazing insight. 100% correct. This is an investment scam, likely an investment bubble that will pop if too many realize the truth.
AI at this stage is basically just an overrefined search engine, but companies are selling it like its JARVIS from Iron Man.
IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 6 months ago
At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol