This is literally the only field in which anyone says it’s helpful, and I have made effort to reach out to users to see if it’s really helping. And even then, about half the programmers I’ve talked to about it (out of maybe a dozen) say that it’s either useless for their particular field of coding, or extremely hit-or-miss, it’s more like a quick dice-roll to see if the thing gives them something useful.
I also notice the ONLY people who can offer firsthand reports how it’s actually useful in any way are in a very, very narrow niche.
Basically, if you’re not a programmer, and even then a very select set of programmers, then your life is completely unimpacted by generative AI broadly. (Not counting the millions of students who used it to write papers for them.)
AI is currently one of those solutions in search of a problem. In its current state, it can’t really do anything useful broadly. It can make your written work sound more professional and at the same time, more mediocre. It can generate very convincing pictures if you invest enough time into trying to decode the best sequence of prompts and literally just get lucky, but it’s far too inacurate and inconsistent to generate say, a fully illustrated comic book or cartoon, unless you already have a lot of talent in that field. I have tried many times to use AI in my current job to analyze PDF documents and spreadsheets and it’s still completely unable to do work that requires mathematics as well as contextual understanding of what that math represents.
You can have really fun or cool conversations with it, but it’s not exactly captivating. It is also wildly inaccurate for daily use. I ask it for help finding songs by describing the lyrics and other clues, and it confidentially points me to non-existing albums by hallucinated artists.
I have no doubt in time it’s going to radically change our world, but that time frame is going to require a LOT more time and baking before it’s done. Despite how excited a few select people are, nothing is changing overnight. We’re going to have a century-long “singularity” and won’t realize we’ve been through it until it’s done. As history tends to go.
I would also add “hopeful delusionals” and “unhinged cultist” to that list of labels.
Seriously, we have people right now making their plans for what they’re going to do with their lives once Artificial Super Intelligence emerges and changes the entire world to some kind of post-scarcity, Star-Trek world where literally everyone is wealthy and nobody has to work. They think this is only several years away. Not a tiny number either, and they exist on a broad spectrum.
Our species is so desperate for help from beyond, a savior that will change the current status-quo. We’ve been making fantasies and stories to indulge this desire for millenia and this is just the latest incarnation.
No company on Earth is going to develop any kind of machine or tool that will destabilize the economic markets of our capitalist world. A LOT has to change before anyone will even dream of upending centuries of wealth-building.
Or until the American people get bored with talking about it, like with everything else, then stop caring and just let whatever happen.
you just angered the entire AI/singularity community. Expect a sternly worded, AI-generated notice.
Because they have successfully lied and manipulated their current marketing material to make a sizeable portion of the population believe some kind of technological rapture is imminent, and that all we need is to invest, invest invest in AI tech. It’s a full-on cult now. The people they have roped in are fanatical, unpaid marketing mobs who don’t sleep, don’t waver, and can’t be reasoned with. They are the engine that is driving the hype train.
They had a legit, non-satirical post on reddit the other day making their plans for what they’re going to do when Artificial Superintelligence comes and changes the world and makes every human rich and immortal without the need to work. I am not even exaggerating, this is what they believe and there are probably millions of them.
Currently over 80% of AI startups fail, and the remaining ones are often bought up by larger companies trying to control intellectual property and future patents. And we have ZERO useful models in our hands. I still don’t use my copilot app for anything other than setting a 30-minute timer for my lunch break. I tried to activate an AI helper on Adobe to see if it could help my productivity. The thing can’t read graphs and charts and has zero contextual awareness and can’t do math. WTF GOOD IS IT?
My ban was for quoting someone who said a slur so they couldn’t edit their comment after I reported it, and I said as much in my report.
It’s the moderators, they are dumb as fuck because there’s no consequence because they’re all volunteers. The only thing stupider than the volunteer mods who don’t demand pay, are the people who get hung up on what moderators are doing or not. We should have all stopped taking reddit so seriously a long, long time ago. Protests? Jesus christ, a reddit protest does as much real-world good as a kindergarten protest by the children mad that they can’t get more cookies.
Nobody is going to quit, all mod roles can be replaced in minutes with people excited to do it. If they have to, they can pay them even and make them official employees and never have to worry about protests again.
Also, who cares, the site has a clock over it, in a few years most users will be bots and children and all content will be farmed slop akin to youtube.
Furthermore, if anyone thinks that “protests” on reddit accomplish ANYTHING that person is a literal child, or someone else who shouldn’t be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
Whatever high ideals we had for reddit a decade ago are long-since dead and buried and that’s fine, instead of whinging about what we lost we should be trying to figure out what to build next to maintain some semblance of an internet in an age of AI slop.
What? and lose THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROTEST PLATFORM EVER MADE? I couldn’t imagine what else we would use to teach corporations and politicians a harsh lesson (insert giant eye rolling emoji)
Right after “People Falling Down And Suffering Serious Injuries: Oops! All slide Whistles Edition!”
Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone’s pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson’s voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?
If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.
As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.
But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.
I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.
At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.
Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They’re literally planning for what they’re going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization… in five years. I wish I was kidding.
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
Do you honestly think your choice of words in this post led to you being heard and understood? Or do you think that everyone is just being mean bullies? THiiiiiiink hard about this one.
It doesn’t matter where it came from, if you’re steeped in this kind of language it’s a massive signpost that you’ve handicapped your own intellectual abilities in a profound way. Healthy, normal people with regulated feelings and stable perspectives grounded in reality do not frequent the communities that use this kind of language.
It’s a red flag that will always make the outside world laugh and reject what you have to say, and if your instinct is to retreat back into the places that use this language, you are going to absolutely SUFFER in life, this is a warning coming from a place of compassion, you HAVE to believe me.
I am a well educated person who uses these forums and many others with regularity and I have many opinions on tech after working in both marketing and the tech sector for a long time.
That out of the way, I will simply skip over any comment that says “normies” unironically. Especially over and over.
This isn’t fucking 4chan, communicate like a human like the rest of us. You don’t get out of being one of us. I don’t even know your take because it’s so distracting and immature and condescending.
My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.
So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.
Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.
I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”
Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.
Otherwise people should think ahead.
The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems “fuck you, got mine” and I’m done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I’m sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.
He was Time’s person of the year too. Funny that you got a downvote for speaking this but it’s so important to remember.
All of this is correct, but people get really pissed at these facts because we live in a demented cartoon world where the majority of people run on reactions and feelings, so if they read anything other than emotional condemnations they lose their shit. Which is exactly why we have another set of Hitlers gaining power without resistance. Because you idiots out there can’t get it through your thick skulls that people like Hitler and the Nazis were PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME. Not monsters, not inhuman creatures, but idiots who thought they were doing the right thing because they let reactions and feelings guide them.