"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
As someone who incessantly gets cold emails from vendors wanting to sell things which are "AI-driven," they all come off as making promises they can't fulfill, because LLMs are not intelligent. They cannot assess the truth or falsity of the output they produce. LLMs will tell you what you are most likely to want to hear, based on the data they have been trained on.
"AI" is nothing more than a buzzword right now, and people who are influenced by its use are dumb.
I'm not sure anyone besides CEO types and people looking to sell it to you are even moderately influenced by AI.
My dad is an idiot, but when he calls a call center first thing he does is yell "ARE YOU A HUMAN OR A ROBOT????"
And if the voice isn't confused, and telling him to calm down, he hangs up. His logic is that if it were a bot, it would just proceed as normal, whereas an actual human would be put off by him.
So then, if the person is responding off put, he yells "WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME TO LICK MY TOES???"
And if they answer in an offput/confused voice he knows they're real. He says "one day they'll catch on, and program in offput voices, but they'll NEVER program in anything about licking elderly mens toes."
So even my dad hates AI.
Your dad made his own Turing test..
"AI" doesn't exist yet, and it drives me fucking insane that the term has been slapped onto the spell-checkers-on-steroids shit we're calling "AI" today.
If and when AI becomes a thing, the impact on humanity will be in par with figuring out how to harness fire or electricity.
...and yes, I know, language is based on usage, so when enough people call a hamster a "unicorn" instead, eventually "unicorn" is definitively the thing we call a hamster today. And we've already rebranded the old unicorn as "AGI" to make room for new bullshit marketing unicorn, so the line I'm bitching about is firmly crossed and we're not going back...
But fuck do I hate it.
AI as a field of computer science has existed since the 1950s and has given us technologies such as fuzzy logic, state machines, expert systems, and genetic algorithms, which have solved real world problems.
Your definition of AI isn't based on the history of computer science, it's based on watching too many movies.
Actually AI just stands for Africans & Indians who work in the background to sell the illusion that at least some AI driven applications somewhat work sometimes.
We made computers solve problems it couldn't before, hence using the 'artificial intelligence' term.
It's not perfect, possibly never will be, but it's progress.
tHe MaRkEt WiLl DeCiDe
Meanwhile the market keeps saying fuck off with the AI bullshit and they just push it harder
There are certain things which are wildly unpopular for the general population, yet get intense attention from industry. Pay attention to those things and you'll see patterns.
AI, Blockchain, Internet of Things. Seems like it's all about just burning as much fossil fuels as possible to me
Bingo. We built the modern world upon the principle that math was some "universal language" but what we found in practice is that it just keeps feeding upon as many quantifiable data points as possible without even consideration for the question of stopping, or doing anything else instead.
Nah. All these things have one thing in common. These companies are all selling a convenience. Doesn't matter what kind, what the problems are, or what that leads to in the end. What matters is they can sell consumers the convenience of a task or product. It's why plastic is so popular, why block chain and IoT, air travel, and AWS are so prevalent, and why large grocery chains took off and have kept on going.
Is it good for the environment? No. Is it good for the people who use the products or services? No, most of the time it's not. But it's convenient and coupled with the practice of keeping most regular humans so busy they don't have time for just about anything, it's a recipe that works. If it were about destroying the environment people would never have made any effort to clean it up anywhere in the world. It's unfortunate but true. The internet is just the same. It rose in popularity due not to how beneficial it was to the world for spreading knowledge. But because it was convenient. And until it became convenient to get and use, it wasn't popular nor was it particularly cost effective.
These companies will sell things at a loss repeatedly if they think they can hook people in the convenience of the thing and parlay that into better profits. And they're really good at it.
Yeah no for sure. That's what I mean. None of what we do has a point. They sell us convenience with no value to us in terms of what we get from it because they immediately take it away from us as work. Everything is a scam and the only thing we get out of it is greenhouse gasses. Our lives need to get a little less convenient and we need to grow our own food so we're no longer dependent on their chains of delivery for sustainance. We need communal self reliance to break free of their colonization of everyone by the multinational corporations, and to save the planet from annihilation. We must choose to do it for ourselves
Their end goal is to force AI on us to a degree that we‘re not even allowed to make our own decisions. Instead the almighty algorithm will decide what we buy and we just have to live with it because they spent a lot of lobbying money to make it legally waterproof. Your complaints won‘t matter even when the algorithm is shit and buys a dolphin dildo that you never wanted. It‘s always right so you can‘t return anything. And yes this is from the sci-fi novel Qualityland, which is becoming more and more reality by the day and I hate it. (The reality, not the book. The book is decent.)
So much sci fi has been written as warnings that the tech bro elites didn't understand were warnings. Elon Musk read Hitchhiker's Guide and his takeaway was that destroying a planet in the name of progress was a good thing. Untold numbers of tech bro elites read William Gibson and their takeaway was that a virtual reality no one fully disconnects from is cool. I'm sure someone in Jeff Bezos' sphere of influence read Qualityland and thought it sounded just great
“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,”
So it's not just me then. Good. Hopefully companies take note and that shit fucks right off.
Good.