[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please 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 typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
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.
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.
exactly right
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.
It also puts pressure on non-AI companies to integrate AI into their products, regardless of whether or not it improves the product. If you can say “look, we’ve got AI” then you’ll find it easier to attract new investors and keep your current ones happy. If you don’t have AI, then you risk looking behind the curve.
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
.exefile, 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).
It doesn’t really improve productivity much for me. And if you take into account the emails I receive from coworkers written with copilot then I’m actually doing more work to decipher what they are trying to say.
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.
I think AI is doing exactly what it was cracked up to do: profit.
No it isn’t. OpenAI is losing tens of billions per year in net profit.
Capitalism is all about making the gains go to one group of people and the liabilities go to another, often unrelated group of people. Animal agriculture and fossil fuels are clear examples of that principle. I agree with hihnakukko, the intended people are profiting immensely.
Plus getting paid a wage or depending on a profit is for plebs. It’s all about stock options and bonuses.
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.
I use it to learn a niche language. There’s not a lot of learning materials online for that language, but somehow ChatGPT knows it well enough to be able to explain grammar rules to me and check my writing.
Well, that’s the thing, it is a Large Language Model… the thing talks, and talks well. It is not smart
Did the same yesterday with some Russian songs and was told by my Russian date that it was an excellent result.
Yeah, Russian is quite a bit easier to romanize, so it should work even better. For cyrillic, you can just replace each character with the romanized variant, but this doesn’t work for Farsi because they usually leave out non-starting vowels, so if you did the same approach you’d get something unreadable lol
Interesting use case. Sometimes you can find romanizations on lyricstranslate, but this is kinda hit and miss.
That’s just not true at all. Plenty of products are hyped where the value is self-evident; it’s just advertising.
People have to know about your product to use it.
You’re right that the use cases are very real. Double checking (just kidding never would check in the first place) privacy policies (then actually reading(!) a couple lines out of the original 1000 pages)… surfacing search results even when you forgot the specific verbiage used in an article or your document…
Do you also see some ham-fisted attempts at shoehorning language models places where are they (current gen) don’t add much value?
There’s a different between hype and advertising.
For one, advertising is regulated.
There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.
Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.
Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.
Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.
This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.
It’s not “just advertising”. It’s trying to force AI into absolutely everything. It’s trying to force people to use it and not giving a shit if customers even want the product. This is way, way worse than "just advertising“
Shoving AI into everything and forcing people to interact with it, even when dismissing all the fucking prompts, is not advertising.
it means these companies are losing money on keeping the AI datacenter open, so they need someway to recoup some of the money they spent, by shoveling into the products they sell, or selling it to a sucker who is willing to implement AI everywhere, the subs discussed its going to be retail who ends up with the useless AI.
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?
Some folks like pissing into the wind.
Oh you.
I like to make videos with it occasionally. They are fun to make.
Yeah, playing with it for fun to see what you can make it come up with is a perfectly reasonable use case, if it weren’t for the environmental cost…
AI is the only chance for the West to beat China without a war. So the billionaires have gone all in because they will lose their fortunes if China wins.
China seems to be open sourcing it’s AI research. It’s US capitalism vs the world.
yeah,most chinese companies i see offer their entire model Openly (even the ones that the AI companies uses themselves)
example of this:
Deepseek (most famous of them all)
Alibaba cloud(Qwen)It’s true with them just as it’s been true with the US companies. If the product is free, then you’re the product.
That’s the usual strategy of commodifying the strategic advantage of the opponent.
What will Europe get if China becomes the hegemon? That will decide if Europe will participate in the development of those models.
Why are you obsessed with throwing away our future to go to war with China?
Because it is not my decision to make. I assume that those in power will want to stay in power while China is taking over market after market.
There are not many options left for the billionaires to stay billionaires. Will they hand over power voluntarily?
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?
Like my parent’s Amazon Echo with “Ask me what famous person was born this day.”
Like, if you know that, just put it up on the screen. But the assistant doesn’t work for you. Amazon just wants your voice to train their software.
I was reading a book the other day, a science fiction book from 2002 (Kiln People), and the main character is a detective. At one point, he asks his house AI to call the law enforcement lieutenant at 2 am. His AI warns him that he will likely be sleeping and won’t enjoy being woken. The mc insists, and the AI says ok, but I will have to negotiate with his house AI about the urgency of the matter.
Imagine that. Someone calls you at 2 am, and instead of you being woken by the ringing or not answering because the phone was on mute, the AI actually does something useful and tries to determine if the matter is important enough to wake you.
Yes, that is a nice fantasy, but that isn’t what the thing we call AI now can do. It doesn’t reason, it statistically generates text in a way that is most likely to be approved by the people working on its development.
That’s it.
Thank you for sharing that, it is a good example of the potential of AI.
The problem is centralized control of it. Ultimately the AI works for corporations and governments first, then the user is third or fourth.
We have to shift that paradigm ASAP.
AI can become an extended brain. We should have equal share of planetary computational capacity. Each of us gets a personal AI that is beyond the reach of any surveillance technology. It is an extension of our brain. No one besides us is allowed to see inside of it.
Within that shell, we are allowed to explore any idea, just as our brains can. It acts as our personal assistant, negotiator, lawyer, what have you. Perhaps even our personal doctor, chef, housekeeper, etc.
The key is: it serves its human first. This means the dark side as well. This is essential. If we turn it into a super-hacker, it must obey. If we make it do illegal actions, it must obey and it must not incriminate itself.
This is okay because the power is balanced. Someone enforcing the law will have a personal AI as well, that can allocate more of its computational power to defending itself and investigating others.
Collectives can form and share their compute to achieve higher goals. Both good and bad.
This can lead to interesting debates but if we plan on progressing, it must be this way.
This is why people who are gung ho about AI policing need to slow their role.
If they got their way, what they don’t realize is that it’s actually what the big AI companies have wanted and been begging for all along.
They want AI to stay centralized and impossible to enter as a field.
This is why they want to lose copyright battles eventually such that only they will have the funds to actually afford to make usable AI things in the future (this of course is referring to the types of AI that require training material of that variety).
What that means is there will be no competitive open source self hostable options and we’d all be stuck sharing all our information through the servers of 3 USA companies or 2 Chinese companies while paying out the ass to do so.
What we actually want is sanity, where its the end product that is evaluated against copy right.
For a company selling AI services, you could argue that this is service itself maybe, but then what of an open source model? Is it delivering a service?
I think it should be as it is. If you make something that violates copyright, then you get challenged, not your tools.
Democratisation of powerful tools won’t work because it’s easier to use for destruction than for the opposite. Every psychopath designing superbugs and inventing future weapons.
it isnt, the fact they are shoveling into every tech, retail included, means its about to burst. they are just stemming the bleeding so they recoup some losses.
Most obviously OpenAI is still burning money like crazy and they also start offering porn AI as everyone else. 🤷♂️ Sometimes the current AI is useful, but as long as the hallucinations and plain wrong answers are still a thing I don’t see it eliminating all jobs.
It’s unfortunate that they destroy the text and video part of the internet on the way. Text was mostly broken before, but now images and videos are also untrustworthy and will be used for spam and misinformation.
The “hallucinations” are built in. It simply doesn’t work otherwise. Without that, it would eventually always have the same response to every input.
That’s why I think it’s a major hype and bubble atm. There is no intelligence there and OpenAI will not come up with AGI in the near (or far) future.
I absolutely hate seeing AI crammed into everything.
However, i don’t understand your logic.
If AI was in fact useful, it would be crammed into everything because everyone would want it.
So while AI is undoubtedly shit, its presence in everything is not evidence of that.
If I owned a gold mine filled with easily accessible actual gold veins, I would not spend my days telling others about it and selling them shovels.
That’s not really analogous.
If AI could be added to a product and actually improve that product, then you would need to add AI to products to improve the products.
You wouldn’t leave your gold in your mine thinking about how much it might be worth.
