[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.
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.
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 hate the way we did though, and hope AI destroys the current corporate internet.
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 adverts spelling at you like “…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 C-O-M-P-A-N-Y 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. That, of if they did offer comparable capabilities on their website but kept a persistent banner pushing you toward their app.
Those were the days… :-)
Oh, I totally forgot the www thing. That was super annoying. Good riddance!
The only one I didn’t hate was the jingle:
🎵 "F-R-E-E that spells "free" credit report dot com, baby". 🎵😆
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.
I’m about that same age but am so glad we’ve largely abandoned the “www” for websites.
On my personal project website, I have a custom listener setup to redirect people to “aarp.org” if they enter it with “www” instead of just the base domain. 😆
server { listen 443 ssl; http2 on; server_name www.mydomain.xyz; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/privkey.pem; ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/conf.d/tls/shared/dhparam.pem; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 15m; ... location ~* { return 301 https://aarp.org/; } }that’s… a terrible idea for a portfolio site of any sort. why would you intentionally hamper accessibility? what if their company VPN automatically routes yoursite.org to www.yoursite.org? i personally wouldn’t spend the time figuring out why i was looking at AARP, i’d just pass you over and not hire you, let alone reach out.
I don’t think it works the way you think it does.
no, i think i know how things work enough to know this is a shitty idea.
that excerpt is going to do a 301 redirect to the AARP site for any requests to www.yoursite.xyz - that’s 100% not up for debate.
there are a fair amount of things, especially in a corporate environment, that automatically append www. to any URL passed. you think a hiring manager is going to care that it’s a quirky technical joke? why would you make it more difficult to access a portfolio who’s entire purpose is to be as accessible as possible for the target audience?
I actually think you do not, in fact, know enough. VPN does not care about layer 7. Having some proxy forcefully rewrite random domain names will immediately lead to redirect loops and will be disabled that same day because everyone will be screaming “internet no worky”.
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…
Microsoft just had a push for CoPilot in Excel. Its own promotional material said that for the tasks it was most suited to it had a success rate of 56%. For other tasks the success rate was 20%.
Imagine relying on that for anything even halfway important.
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.
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.
My top reasons I have no interest in ai:
- if it was great, it wouldn’t be pushed on us (like 3D TVs were)
- there is no accountability, so how can it be trusted without human verification which then means ai wasn’t needed
- environmental impact
- privacy/security degradation
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. There are 100M active Fortnite players. An average gaming PC uses 400w. That means Fortnite players alone use 40,000,000,000 watts.
It is a problem because it’s like now everyone is playing 3d games all the time instead of only on their off time.
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.
a very large amount of people being excited about it.
A very large amount of people are excited by AI. People were excited by pet rocks.
I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers.
DuckDuck is Bing with privacy. When you get a Google AI summary it lists links to read the source.
The push:excitement ratio was different for the early internet than for ai.
Using those sources would verify the Google summary. For me, it is an unnecessary step. I can just go read the sources directly and skip the summary since I’ll need to read them anyway to verify the summary.
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.
Not to mention, the true resource cost of an AI comes from training. Sure, it costs about as much processing and power as a video game to prompt a trained AI. I can believe that. However it takes many thousands of times as much power and processing to train one, and we aren’t even close to halfway through training any general-llm model to the point of being actually useful.
I referenced training above. Training cost is less than developer costs. Thousands of artists on high end PCs in office space use more energy than a data center. But no one notices because people are spread out across offices.
I didn’t realize Fortnite was played mainly on other platforms!
Fortnite’s player base is only about 10% PC,
PlayStation 42.2% Xbox 28.8% Nintendo Switch 12% PC 11% Mobile (iOS, Android) 6%
PS5, Xbox are both 200+ watts.
So assuming Mobile and Nintendo Switch power use is 0, and all PCs only use 200 watts, that’s still 8,000,000,000 watts. For 1 game.
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.
AI was around for 50 years old before Copilot invaded everything.
Fair point. Though I would then argue it’s the World Wide Web that was being pushed by AOL in the same way that it’s LLMs that are being pushed today.
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.
Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at thisr AI shill propaganda.
Dude. I’m not only old but I worked for Vint Cerf and later was president of one of the companies mass mailing CD’s to everyone. I ran so many commercials on TV that I had a customer call up and say, “please stop!” Sports stadiums were named after ISPs. Road names were changed to names of ISPs. It was a massive advertising push because people were buying. The only thing that has outstripped Internet adoption rates is AI adoption rates which is why there’s an even bigger advertising push.
I have tried AI but don’t generally use it. I don’t use Facebook either. But I’m not going to pretend people don’t use Facebook because I don’t like it and don’t use it.
It’d be the opposite you wouldn’t know about it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Exactly.
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.
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…
That’s why I don’t do it often if at all at this point. I had my fun.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
That’s a lot of ands!
Yep, when I get emotional about something and don’t check myself, I become a run-on sentence offender.
But at least no ifs/ors. Makes it real easy to follow the logic
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.
Username does not check out.
Seems a nerve was struck…
I don’t think it was a demand but you do you
Sometimes, a simple ‘no’ will suffice.
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.
Thanks!
Likely Timnit Gebru who has been working in the area of the ethics of AI for quite some time.
Thanks!
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.
