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.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
Seeing the whole thing as Knowingly Trading in Hype is actually a really good insight.
Certainly it neatly explains a lot.
Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
God that sounds like hell.
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
I have no qualms about AI being used in products. But when you have to tell me that something is “powered by AI” as if that’s your main selling point, then you do not have a good product. Tell me what it does, not how it does it.
LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.
Often the answers are pretty good. But you never know if you got a good answer or a bad answer.
And the system doesn’t know either.
For me this is the major issue. A human is capable of saying “I don’t know”. LLMs don’t seem able to.
Accurate.
No matter what question you ask them, they have an answer. Even when you point out their answer was wrong, they just have a different answer. There’s no concept of not knowing the answer, because they don’t know anything in the first place.
The worst for me was a fairly simple programming question. The class it used didn’t exist.
“You are correct, that class was removed in OLD version. Try this updated code instead.”
Gave another made up class name.
Repeated with a newer version number.
It knows what answers smell like, and the same with excuses. Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing whether it’s actually bullshit until you take a whiff of it yourself.
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.
Very nicely put!
Sex one way, half ad oxen the other.
Hi, I’m annoying and want to be helpful. Am I helpful? If I repeat the same options again when you’ve told me I’m not helpful, will that be helpful? I won’t remember this conversation once it’s ended.
Hi, which option have you told me you already don’t want would you like?
Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, please rage again.
Meanwhile, I just had Cluade turn a few obscure academic papers into a slide deck on the subject, along with presentation notes and interactive graphs, using like 5 prompts and 15 min.
<greentext>
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
</greentext>
I haven’t seen any ai in firefox
I like the article I read were ww2 german soldiers were being generated by AI as asians, black woman, etc. Glad it doesn’t take context into consideration. lol
If I could have the equivalent of a smart speaker that ran the AI model locally and could interface with other files on the system. I would be interested in buying that.
But I don’t need AI in everything in the same way that I don’t need Bluetooth in everything. Sometimes a kettle is just a kettle. It is bad enough we’re putting screens on fridges.
I like the vast majority of my technology dumb, the last barely smart kettle I bought - it had a little screen that showed you temperature and allowed you to keep the water at a particular temperature for 3h - broke within a month. Now I once again have a dumb kettle, it only has the on/off button and has been working perfectly since I got it
I could go for the fridge screen if it was focused more around showing me what was in the fridge without opening the door and making grocery lists.
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.
Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI
Market shows that the market buys into hype, not value.
Market shows that hype is a cycle and the AI hype is nearing its end.
How can you tell when the cycle is ending?
When one of two things happens:
- A new hype starts to replace it (can happen fast though!)
- The hype starts to specialize into subcategories of the hype (e.g. AI images, AI videos, AI text generation)
When “AI” hype dies down we are likely to see “AI” removed from various topics because enough people know and understand the hyped parent topic. It’ll just be “image generation”, “video generation”, “generated text”, etc.
There are different types of people in the market. The informed ones hate AI, and the uninformed love it. The informed ones tend to be the cornerstones of businesses, and the uninformed ones tend to be in charge.
So we have… All this. All this nonsense. All because of stupid managers.
Customers worry about what they can do with it, while investors and spectators and vendors worry about buzzwords. Customers determine demand.
Sadly what some of those customers want to do is to somehow improve their own business without thinking, and then they too care about buzzwords, that’s how the hype comes.
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?
I went through a McDonald’s drive-thru the other day and had the most insane experience. For the context of this anecdote, I don’t do that often, so, what I experienced was just weird.
While not quite “AI,” the first thing that happened was an automated voice yells at me, “are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
There’s like three menu-speaker boxes, and due to where the car in front of me stopped, I’m like in between the last two. The other speaker begins to yell, “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
The person running drive-thru mumbles something about pull around. I do. Pass by the other menu “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
Dude walks out with a headset and starts taking orders from each car using a tablet.
I have no idea what is happening. I can’t even see a menu when the guy gets around to me. Turns the tablet around at me.
I realized that I was indeed ordering using the mobile app today.
Yeah and that is largely fueled by two things; poor/forced use of AI, and anti-AI media sentiment (which is in turn fueled by reactionary/emotional narratives that keep hitting headlines, commonly full of ignorance)
AI can still provide actual value right now and can still improve. No it’s not the end-all but it doesn’t have to solve humanity’s problems to be worth using.
This unfortunate situation is largely a result of the rush to market because that’s the world we live in these days. Nobody gives a fuck about completing a product they only care about completing it first, fuck quality that can come later. As a sr software engineer myself I see it all too often in the companies I’ve worked for. AI was heralded as christ’s second coming that will magically do all of this stuff while still in relative infancy, ensuring that an immature product was rushed out the door and applied to everything possible. That’s how we got here, and my first statement is where we are now.
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.
It’s because automated trading bots trade companies whose names appear in headlines with the word AI upwards.
The stock market is an economic shitpost.
This just screams “The CEO read about it on linkedin while taking a dump and now feels it is vital to the company.”
My boss’s boss’s boss asked for a summary of our roadmap. He read it, and provided his takeaways… 3 of the 4 bullet points were AI-related, and we never once mentioned anything about AI in what we gave him 😑 so I guess we’re pivoting?
This is basically forcing AI based spying from the government
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.
I find the tech interesting, but the rush to commercialize it was a bad idea. It’s not ready yet, total uncanny valley.
For the love of god, defund MBAs.
Give them a box of crayons to eat so the adults can get some work done
