I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
I mean, to be fair, that’s a dirt cheap model you’re talking to, and Google is not exactly at the forefront of any tier of model, cheap or otherwise.
Is that you being fair or is that you rushing to defend something?
As if you don’t know these “tools” don’t work.
It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
I mean… it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
You’re lost in the sauce. Do you know any other writers in real life? How do they feel about this?
that’s bullshit.
“I dont write anything but i take credit for everything”
I was reading the initial comment with peer-reviewed publications in mind and it all sounded like standard practice, but then I read yours and was like “oh, are we talking about books now?”
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it.
that’s just called writing.
That’s my point.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
Yes, exactly.
Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.
I’m glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They’re very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn’t warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI…
Wasn’t Nano predicated on those lines? I remember reading transactions could be done locally, even off-line, validated beetween the parts and only later added to the global ledger.
Nano uses “proof of stake” instead of proof of work to decide the order of transactions, and who receives block rewards.
The main problem with PoS is that it’s essentially the same as Federal Reserve bonds: all the new money goes towards people with extra money to freeze. This is part of why inequality has spiraled out of control since the Nixon Shock. Proof of work literally burns most of the profits because of difficulty adjustment.
A more specific problem with Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) is that the entire supply was centrally issued, with a pinky promise from this private organization that they only issued coins by CAPTCHA. If they were lying, then they could have issued 51% of the supply to themselves for permanent control. The only way we’d be able to detect it is if the price kept going down for years.
That requires a global ledger. Blockchain is an appallingly bad way to implement one.
What I understood then was that the local ledger of a given user of the coin would authorize and register the transactions done on/off the recorded balance and, when network available, would broadcast such transactions to the global ledger.
The global ledger was the total sum of transactions, not imperatively required to authorize transaction by transaction.
Funny, that you even know about Nano!
…it’s one of the often overlooked projects because it doesn’t have a ton of fuck-off-money and instead tries to focus on a solid protocol.Nano has a lot of interesting attributes, but I fail to see how what you describe would work in practice.
If both parties want to make sure there are no shenenigans at play, they need to know about the most recent state of the respective account chains, which essentially requires them to be online for agreeing on said transaction.
But overall Nano is very fast and efficient by design and only a failure in terms of “gainz for Lambo”.As we’re here in a thread about AI I should remark that machine-to-machine-payments - in this case: agent-to-agent-payments - would work pretty well with Nano as currency because of the transaction finality (typically less than 1 second) and the feeless nature of transactions.
If AI agents are looking for the most viable way to transfer tiny amounts of value fast and without fees they might find Nano and use it - who knows…
…and just like Nano showed that efficient ways to create digital money are possible I’m hoping for efficient AI models that are economically and ecologically worthwhile.What I understood then was that in person transactions could be done, as the local ledger of each user would authorize and record operations on and off the available balance and wait until network availability to syncronize with the global record.
Returning to the subject at hand: I can imagine very specialized “AI” being useful for scientifical research, where very knowledgeable people use it as a tool to facilitate processes but are nonetheless capable of reviewing whatever results it produces.
Not gigantic datacenters required for this but small, purpose made and perfected, locally run, even if on higher specifications hardware to do so, but machines built for a given task and purpose. The economic viability on it be damned; it’s a tool for research, it is not made to earn money.
To put it bluntly: if you do an offline transaction, you’re prone to fraud.
If you expect the senders account chain to have balance x (because that’s your offline record for that) and the sender has sent all funds to a different address after you synced that account chain, you receive money that isn’t there - kind of like an invalid cheque.
I have no clue how that would work in practice, because to know a random account in advance, you’d have to sync the whole amount of account chains there is (called block lattice in Nano’s case).
With a mobile device that’s hardly feasible and without a mobile device I don’t see how you’d get in contact with people to make such an offline transaction.That kind of specialized AI is what I imagine to be a use case for locally run AI, too.
After all you don’t want to build processes on an AI, where you have zero control over what happens behind the curtains.
That includes feeding potentially sensitive data back to it as well as being unable to control the training data set, its learning, version numbers, etc.
That’s top down thinking for you.
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
Only pro is laborious, tedious programming tasks have become significantly faster to do, along with testing edge cases and stuff a programmer should be able to do but maybe doesnt need to.
Just about everything else is negative.
I don’t know, it’s also fun to do role play games with a locally hosted thingamabob-bot-computer-talker. I recently played a 1930s noir detective in New Orleans RPG with AI. It was neat and kept me entertained for hours.
There are also real people who would have a great time doing this with you. Ai does not need to exist in this scenario.
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
Trust me, bro!
They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.
But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
“But the charts say AI is helping”
Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
They’re not using LLMs to analyse MRI scans. There are image processing algorithms for that, but they’re a whole other thing to what this entire thread is about.
Also, are you a fucking bot? I’ve read all your comments so far in this thread and uhh yeah. Please feel free to jog on now.
I’ve read all your comments so far
I’m flattered. Did you read the first one where I said it was reductive to equate AI with chatbots?
How is “helping the medical field” not compatible with better healthcare quality? If the end user isn’t experiencing benefits, then how can you claim that benefits have been provided? Who is getting these “benefits” if it’s not the end user? If someone IS getting benefits, yet the end users still haven’t gotten a better experience… Then can you agree that AI is only helping intermediaries? Like… The corporations who provide the garbage experience?
Do you see your logical fallacy here?
If your loved one is diagnosed with cancer early that would have been missed by a human, that’s a fucking benefit, is it not?
I’m sick of luddites.
Super cool! Well we can base your personal healthcare on AI’s sole guidance and if you are misdiagnosed, injured or dead as a result of an “oopsie”, no human will be held legally liable - fun!
So no real stakes for anyone to get it right, as with human-led interventions (with careers on the line at every stage to keep people engaged and honest). But corporations will probably just naturally do the right thing.
But you’re brave, you offer yourself as tribute to the lying machine. Tight tight tight!!!
You seem very passionate about this topic, but you’re not really adding much to the discussion.
Don’t worry, its coming across loud and clear that AI could cure cancer and you’d still think it was better to have cancer than use AI. I get it. AI = bad, full stop. Message received.
“AI” isn’t a thing. Computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and neural networks are. These can all be useful tools when regulated and maintained with active oversight to balance with society’s other core priorities. What’s at question is the current method and human cost for this frivolously hyped, deceptively marketed lying machine with a single tangible use to date, being the operating system for Facebook’s pervert glasses. You didn’t read, of missed the entire point of, this important article, shared from an important contemporary mind.
Name and cite SPECIFIC examples of anything you claim.
P.s. you don’t “cure cancer”… cancer is a broad heading for hundreds of unique types of disease, presenting in different, completely unique systems within the human body. Like AI, “a cure for cancer” is a broad generalization of complex underlying systems that ignorant people make frivolously - People who think they HAVE the entire knowledge of the world in their brains, when they actually only have a plastic rectangle in their pants pocket with privilege-gated access to a (mostly corporate) CURATED VERSION of the world’s historic knowledge. So if you’ve “cured cancer” friend, why aren’t you treating the 20-30k humans that will die from a form or cancer today worldwide?
Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.
There are studies that show that LLMs (chatbots) perform as well or better than human physicians.
I’m not suggesting getting rid of physicians, though. This is a tool for humans, not a replacement.
c/nothingeverhappens
I don’t know what your problem is. My friends are indeed real people. They are not cured, I said they have diagnoses.
One of them has had diffuse but severe symptoms for at least the last 15 years. Bloating, stomach pain, vomiting, circulation problems, etc. She had nights of vomiting and diarrhea where she said she thought was dying, that’s how miseable she felt. She went to many doctors, they ran many checks, and she only ever got the same result: there is nothing to be found, it must be psychosomatic, probably stress. This result, by the way, is a very common one when you’re a woman and you’re seeking medical attention, even for serious problems. Last year, she discussed all her symptoms and observations (like foods and acitivities that seemed to make the symptoms worse) with ChatGPT and it suggested it might be MCAS. She got medication that is supposed to help with MCAS and she is feeling so much better now. She is not cured, but she can have a normal life again. I can tell she has about twice as much energy as she used to have. That is a huge life quality improvment.
The other friend has had bad hearing on one ear for almost all his life. Doctors never found a cause, all they said was “well we could cut it open and take a look if you want” which didn’t sound so great so he never had it checked further. After discussion with some LLM chat bot, he went to another doctor and insisted on getting a CT scan. Turns out he has a (benign) tumor in his ear that’s been growing ever since he was a child. It will be surgically removed soon because it won’t stop growing on its own and might even grow into the brain one day. If he’s lucky, his ear might even be much better afterwards (unless too much of the structure is already destroyed by the tumor growing).
Look, I know it sounds kinda stupid, but I promise you, these are real stories. I know that if you do it wrong, discussing health issues with an LLM can absolutely backfire and be very dangerous. But if you can trust your own brain and don’t switch it off just because you’re using an AI, it can actually be really helpful.
That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.
We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.
Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.
I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?
I 100% agree. I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much. I just wanted to point out that AI and even LLMs absolutely do have valuable use cases. I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them. Are they overhyped? Probably. Are AI companies using public information that should belong to everyone in an unfair way to become rich and powerful? Absofuckinglutely. Is that how it should be? Definitely not. Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes. Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes. I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent
Yeah it’s almost like the AI is an unthinking machine trying to model what a person would answer to the question (prompt) provided to it.
I’m so goddamn tired of people (not you) acting like an LLM “knows” anything nevermind whether it’s right or wrong or could even tell you if it didn’t know the answer. It’s not like a person that can say, “I don’t have that knowledge so I know any answer is likely wrong” the machine is going to give you an answer every time. That answer will never be “idk” it’ll be whatever hallucination it’s confident enough is right based on the model and training.
I do think there are use cases for it and the technology is cool but the vision being sold and propping up our economy with a venture capitalist circle jerk is so far removed from reality.
that’s also how really successful human beings work. they bullshit and lie and appear confident, and people believe them and ignore the people who don’t do that, because they don’t appear as confident.
also why people basically fall in love with AI, because it spouts nothing but bullshit at them and they eat it up like candy because being fed back bullshit is a dopamine hit.
interacting with real people doesn’t supply endless dopamine and they might not tell you what you want to hear.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
I’m pretty sure the fucking economist you’re replying to is not “teach(ing) something different from the mainstream” that’s the whole point of their post.
The whole point is the AI tools are hallucinating* completely incorrect answers and that students trying to use them as study aids and tools to learn with are going to have a lot of fake and wrong information to sort out and good luck to them knowing what is or isn’t incorrect or wrong when they’re just trying to learn a subject they know nothing about.
The only reason you or I or anyone else knows when AI hallucinates in its output is because we know stuff from our prior knowledge and can catch it that way. If you’re ignorant to a subject and trying to learn stuff you’re not going to know off hand the AI is lying to you if it sounds convincing enough for a layperson to accept.
*which I kind of hate that term because to the AI there’s no difference between truth and hallucination - it’s just output as far as the robot is concerned
AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.
^ This. This is the actual truth of it. You can always find a 500 person company that does a shit job at forced integration and you can find a 2000 user company that tied all their systems together and moved at paces that made everyone sick with risk. You can find individuals who tried to make copilot write micron code (horrible) and who used claude to write ansible code (~magic)
I love Doctorow, I read most of his stuff, I recently read Reverse Centaur, it had its informed moments. It made some strong points that stand out as to where using AI makes sense. It also has some perspective issues, being written by someone who focused on case studies with the worst possible outcomes. A lot of the same problems in this article.
AI can, in the right circumstances with the right needs, remove many manhours of tedious shitty labor, or it can be used by shitty people to vacantly crap out slop 24x7. It’s only as useful as its implementation/workload.
But what never gets better is the societal and ecological impact. The slop pouring into journalism, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the scams running with perfect English vocabulary. The shitty AF water and electricity usage. The corporate bribery. Those are along for the ride by default.
If AI went away, right this very moment, my job would grind to a snail’s pace for months while we once again pivot back to another way improved but not unlike we did prior. We would have a man-century of meetings on how to recreate all the processes affordably. We are doing more now with fewer people, but they’re paying more in tokens + labor. This is not to say that any of us would be horribly sad.
This article is based on a case study by one guy on a 500-person company that didn’t want to implement AI and did a poor job of implementing it. Yeah, many of us work for some place like that and some of us work for places that got it working. That’s the reason for the big divide. It’s not always a delusional asshole lying about it working, it’s about it working when engineers who have the right workload use it to solve their needs. Still too fucking expensive on all accounts.
AI is not worth the investment. It’s not worth the money. It’s not worth the damage. But the argument that it doesn’t do anything because you see it do jack shit somewhere doesn’t hold up to even light scrutiny.
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
That’s all an LLM is, a gas-powered bullshit firehose.
Well I wouldn’t recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.I mean, I’m sure the same applies to all tech sectors and possibly worse in some cases. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It’s just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.
I’m a long term contractor. Process engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with up to date ASQ certs. I can technically go anywhere but i really love manufacturing processes.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.
It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.
This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.
AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.
The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.
Honestly, I didn’t jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.
And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don’t want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.
Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these ‘contrarians’ aren’t Americans and flew in. I’m so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don’t understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.
But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.
It’s changing a lot of things, but many of them in only relatively minor ways. It’s not affecting e.g. food supply systems in a significant way - it might be screwing up the management structures of companies involved, but that will be repairable fairly quickly…
It’s not lying if they have no idea what they’re talking about and constantly swoon over it.
What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.
Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.
This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.
OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.
Sure, although I would phrase it I think a bit more pointedly: “it has become impossible to tell managers mesmerized by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, capable of what they imagine they are capable of.”
This points, rightly, at it being a failure on the part of the managers - not artificial intelligence. And God knows that’s spot fucking on.
LLMs are like a dishwashers. You could wash all the dishes yourself and probably get them cleaner in less time, but it’s useful to let a machine do the work, even I though it’s mandatory inspect every single dish to make sure the machine got them clean enough and re-wash a certain percentage of them. Dishwashers are useful, but the world wouldn’t end if we didn’t have them. They also have the benefit of using less water than when do them yourself, which certainly isn’t the case with LLMs.
Nothing is helpful until you need help. The fact that you think AI is helpful for you don’t have to force me to use AI. If you pay me $100k+ per year and you force me to use your tools to do my job why you even hired me ? To force this cult on me or to do the job ?
Honestly if they hired someone who refuses to use AI in 2026 it’s on them.
It’s pretty normal for an employer to dictate what tools and applications an employee uses. If you prefer gitlab but your employer requires teamcity, you don’t really get a say, right?
However, if you think you can meet your deadlines without using a code generating AI tool, then don’t use it. Ideally, if they are as useless as you imply, no one will be able to tell whether you’re using it. The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.
Company will be able to tell if you’re using it because companies behind sota models come with monitoring. You will have meeting with hr and your manager when you will be forced to use it even if you meet quotas. They will argument it that maybe you can do more and increase your normal quota with expected ai usage increase in productivity even if you had best productivity in team without ai and your productivity stays the same. Suddenly you will be under performing because you are refusing to use ai so you will be first to fire even if you are best employee. That’s how corporations work. They are monitoring usage because it costs them money. For big corporations they pay upfront to get discounts. Company also make many trainings and meetings to encourage everyone use AI models they pay for but nobody wanted.
The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.
While it should be easy to point out where this helps, it very much is not in reality because AI accelerates execution on ideas, but corporations nearly always suck much more at deciding which ideas to actually implement in the first place.
I predict that the longer this goes on, the more useless, untested half-features will be stuffed into software and the more bloated “fall back” implementations full of duplicated spaghetti code will exist.
If the tools don’t stick around because it’s too cost prohibitive to keep using them, we’re going to be cleaning up after the bots for a decade.
It’s been a boon for personal slopjects for me. But that’s because I could never find time for execution in the past. Now I just have the (free tier) AI slop up my ideas.
useless half features will be stuffed into software and the more bloated “fall back” implementations full of duplicated spaghetti code will exist.
Which happened without AI, too.
Remember that AI, in whatever form or field, only has to be better than the average human in the field, to be useful to a company project.
Which happened without AI, too.
Sure, but not at this speed. The bots can churn out a mountain of non-sense that does not work faster than people can review it and the bots themselves will lie to you and say “it’s all implemented”.
For people who have clear ideas of what to implement but struggle to find the time, this is a big gift. You can work hand-in-hand with the bot and say “nope, not that, this” until it implements what you had in mind. For aimless corporations with “ideation” meetings who cannot stop coming up with terrible ideas that none of their customers want, it’ll hasten the process of them making their software worse over time.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing at my current company.
That’s a fair point, but it’s not an issue with AI; it’s an issue with corporate culture. Corporate culture can and does change, especially with advances in technology, but there will be a churn period where it’s chaotic and mistakes are made.
I agree with that as well. A lot of the problem with my current company comes straight from the executive leadership level. I’m afraid that the culture will only change when they change (or more likely, the company will eventually just go bust).
They bought the lie that AI will replace all of software engineering, whereas I see the picture more like this:
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers
A CEO that thinks that they’re going to develop all of the software, even with Claude code, is nuts. They simply do not have the necessary skill set to run a software project even if 100% of the hands-on programming is done by AI. They are not going to be sitting there telling a machine to move things around on a web app. They are going to believe the bot when it says that “it is implemented”.
I don’t need you to use you turn signals, but it’s helpful. I’m pretty sure I could come up with a multitude of situations where your first sentence is refuted without contest.
The later section addresses this
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: “How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?”
It is a double edged sword.
If you’re already experienced developer and you use it skillfully, validate produced code it can help.
If you aren’t (and unfortunately everyone thinks they are better than they actually are), it actually can do the opposite, it can help generate a lot of junk code.
Now when working in a team usually majority of people aren’t that great developers typically there might be one or two star developers. The problem is that the other people will still use AI and generate MRs. Reviewing those is extremely time consuming and no one wants to do it. It’s weird to say what’s exactly wrong with those MRs they seem to do things but they seem to do things in a more complicated way.
The thing is that no one wants to review those MRs, everyone is afraid to point AI slop, so the quality of code goes down and even the people who previously were good are getting lost in the code themselves.
Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it’s literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don’t see good AI. It’s like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don’t. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
AI is a vague term used colloquially to describe a variety of dissimilar and unrelated technologies each carrying a unique mixture of pros and cons.
So it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Like most things, meaning depends on context. In the most common context of “news about AI” we’re talking about generative AI: image/video generators, LLMs, and to a lesser degree coding assistants. If you want to know more about what these technologies share in common, look up what a “perceptron” is and how it works.
More generally AI could mean anything from a neural network based approach to problem solving, to a completely deterministic, hand coded heuristic. A pure decision tree could be AI in the case of video game NPCs, for example.
So it’s a new synonym for algorithm.
AI is any compute model performing complex enough reasoning that the output does not always resemble the input. They are by definition non deterministic and the same ask can provide different outputs without being influenced by other inputs.
So its a lottery
No
I put in a 5 and get a triangle. I put in the same 5 again and get a transvestite. This is intended behavior.
That system isn’t a magic box. It’s a bag of variables linked together by statistics and what’s basically automated guessing.
Since that was a lazy question I decided to be lazy and just copy paste it into Gemini. Enjoy! I have no idea what the point of this is!
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a single technology; it has been a massive umbrella term since the 1950s. Broadly, it means creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.
If LLMs are just one tiny branch on the tree, here is what the rest of the tree looks like:
Machine Learning (ML): This is the engine driving most modern AI. Instead of a human programmer writing strict "if/then" rules, we feed the computer massive amounts of data and let it figure out the rules itself. This is what powers your Netflix recommendations, credit card fraud detection, and the algorithm deciding what you see on social media. Computer Vision: Teaching computers to "see" and interpret the visual world. This is how self-driving cars identify stop signs versus pedestrians, how your phone unlocks when it sees your face, and how medical software spots anomalies in X-rays faster than human doctors. Robotics: The physical application of AI. This isn't just mechanical engineering; it is the software that allows a machine to navigate the unpredictable, physical world. This covers everything from the Roomba vacuuming your floor to automated factory arms and those creepy, dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics. Natural Language Processing (NLP): This is the branch focused on understanding and generating human language. LLMs live here, but so do older, simpler technologies like spellcheck, Google Translate, and the early versions of Siri or Alexa. Expert Systems & Rule-Based AI: This is the older, "classic" AI. It relies on a massive database of human knowledge programmed as logical rules. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997, it wasn't using an LLM; it was using raw computational power to calculate millions of possible moves and their outcomes based on strict rules. Predictive Analytics & Optimization: The invisible math running the modern world. This is AI used by logistics companies to find the absolute most efficient routes for delivery trucks, or by hedge funds to execute high-frequency stock trades based on market micro-fluctuations.I asked the question to demonstrate something. You didn’t want to participle in the discussion and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean the question is “lazy”
I didn’t provide you with an answer to your question?
This response is irrelevent to my post.
They have uses in certain circumstances. They also have lots of negative aspects (that are broader and more systematic, as far as I can see). I think in a net-benefit sense they are not, in fact, helpful (to an organisation, or to a society).
It depends on the tool to be honest. If it’s Claude code and you’re a programmer, sure that’s helpful. But often it’s an “agentic workflow engine” that’s been developed in house that’s complete garbage, or a chatbot that doesn’t know anything telling you that it can’t answer your question that was put together by your company. These custom tools are almost always not helpful.
Doctorow knows this as well, he writes about this crap constantly and has broken it down by user type in other pieces.
If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re already past the point of no return.
The climate is changing more drastically every year. Hurricanes and typhoons are more severe and the season lasts longer than just a couple years ago. Thunderstorms are more severe, with longer and hotter periods between them and fewer regular rain events. Ocean currents are changing and stopping, meaning the flows that sea life use aren’t there. There is no longer a constant polar ice cap on the north pole.
We will not be staying under 2°C average warming, which was the target back in 2010.
The question isn’t where the point of no return is - we’ve been beyond those the whole time. The question is how bad we want to let it get. Ever fraction of a degree extra warming means worse impacts.
Agree that less than +2°C is unlikely (though not completely impossible). But still, better that than +2.5°C, etc.
In this way AI reminds me of when Elon was saying we should build a giant vacuum tube instead of a train in California.
They all pretend this AI god that they’re sure will surface will solve the climate crisis partially because they already know what needs to be done and don’t want to do it. They’d rather baffle you with bullshit instead of trying to fix the problem.
This unfortunately, I’m sick tech broligarchs and billionaire broligarchs and broligarch billionaires ruining everything
This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the “I wish I could do ____. but _____” ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer “a thing”. This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We’re at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.
A more recent (and maybe closer) analogy is the advent of ebook readers and the heralding of the Death Of The Book. I suspect we’ll be in a similar place in a few years - books stores are doing just fine, perhaps even better than pre-ebook.
never seen it helpful to anyone, except for the people wanting to do the layoffs. most of the time it gives misinformation to people looking for abstract-to-reality ideas.
I mean its use as a tool, maybe in a small business context. The individual can be the “visionary” giving their idea for a book to a de-facto ghost writer. AI’s will often give you back info that confirms your ideas, so its like any other tool. If I am not good with a hammer then I smash my fingers and if I’m not good with AI then I convince myself the earth is actually flat.
The recent Bank of England report indicates that, yes, small businesses are seeing the biggest benefit of the tool (AI agents), but they are not spending big dollars on it. Free models and/or entry accounts are more than enough per their survey.
I agree, its a tool. I have used free models for the last few weeks to make python scripts into portable exes to help streamline some onsite job activities that normally are done multiple times a month. I never would have the time to research how to code python, figure out libraries and such to put together, and then compile all that into an exe. You’ll never see me spend money on AI when the free models work well enough not needing “frontier” features.
The funny thing to me is that Lemmy users seem to be so staunchly against LLMs, that they are unable to even acknowledge the small things it truly is good for as a tool. It’s like the opposite of hackernews on here.
I don’t expect movement towards AI among small business to show up in total cloud AI revenues.
Small businesses are typically more competently run than the typical big corporation, so I doubt they’re going to do things like lay most of their quality control people off thinking AI will do it. Big companies are mostly mid-wit trendies not anything that bright. Due to the perpetual motion of mature companies once they get off the ground, its hard for their stupid decisions to lead to bankruptcy. It takes a long time. They’re essentially doing the bumper cars version of business, while small business is in the 1960s Formula 1 where any major mis-step could end their companies’ existence.
Small businesses also don’t need to spend a lot. Their needs could be met by a semi-skilled local IT guy they hire to set up LM Studio on a gaming PC to run a 26B or 35B model. Big companies will spend the same amount on their peoples’ Dell or HP laptops business laptops that cost about the same but can’t run local AI.
Open weights models like Kimi and GLM provide near-frontier quality on any low cost service that installs them. GLM 5.2 is excellent.
I’ve seen nothing that AI can do that justifies the economic or ecological cost.
