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I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
That’s an even worse ‘use case’ than I could imagine.
HR should be one of the most protected fields against AI, because you actually need a human resource.
And “prompt engineer” is so stupid. The “job” is only necessary because the AI doesn’t understand what you want to do well enough. The only productive guy you could hire would be a programmer or something, that could actually tinker with the AI.
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
God that sounds like hell.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
Seeing the whole thing as Knowingly Trading in Hype is actually a really good insight.
Certainly it neatly explains a lot.
Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.
If the whole sector turns out to be garbage it won’t matter which particular set of companies within it you invest in; you will get burned if you cash out after everyone else.
OpenAI will fail. StabilityAI will fail. CivitAI will prevail, mark my words.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
I’m not. My particular beef is with is with plastics and toxic materials and chemicals being ubiquitous in everything I buy. Systemic problem that I can do almost nothing about apart from make things myself out of raw materials.
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
Yeah, can make some products better but most of the products these days that use AI, it doesn’t actually need them. It’s annoying to use products that actively shovel AI when it doesn’t even need it.
Ya know what pfoduct MIGHT be better with AI?
Toasters. They have ONE JOB, and everybody agrees their toaster is crap. But you’re not going to buy another toaster, because that too will be crap.
How about a toaster, that accurately, and evenly toasts your bread, and then DOESN’T give you a heart attack at 5am when you’re still half asleep???
IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK???
Sweet, I’m the one who gets to link the obligatory Technology Connections toaster video!
Aw man, now I want this toaster.
I said the exact same thing months ago when I saw that video. I don’t even use a toaster.
Nah. We already have AI toasters, and they’re ambitious, but rubbish.
Adding AI is just serious overkill for a toaster, especially when it wouldn’t add anything meaningful, not compared to just designing the toaster better.
It only needs one string of conditions that it can understand: don’t catch on fire. Turn yourself off IF smoke.
AI toasters are a Bad Idea
Did you want some toast?
I can attest this is true for me. I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them. It gave me the feeling LG clothes washer division is full of shit.
Bought a SpeedQueen instead and been super happy with it. No AI bullshit anywhere in their product info.
I doubt there’s any actual AI in the LG product, it’s just a marketing buzzword like they used to use the term ‘smartwash’
Much like all the companies who used to market their headphones as “MP3 compatible”.
It’s just more marketing nonsense.
Sound compatible, fully electric
in terms of mp3 players, it may not all be marketing nonsense, I found that out while researching ipods/mp3 players for a friend. Typically since they are decidicated audio devices, they support better quality g formats/codecs then typical phones, so being mp3 compatible means it supports those higher qualities. The higher quality will still play on phones but, you just don’t get that better quality.
I’m not talking about players, I specifically mentioned headphones. A pair of small speakers you stick on your ears.
yea, I’m just responding with the reason why it might not be, you can apply that entire post to headphones as well. Both need the capability to handle it. Just take a shitty 99 cent pair of earphones from Walmart vs the 150$ pair and you’ll hear the difference
Saying MP3 compatible that it supports everything the MP3 player does where if it wasn’t you might still have the audio but it wouldn’t be as good
I’d be fairly certain the washing machine has a few sensors and a fairly simple computer program (designed by humans) that can make some limited adjustments to the wash cycle on the fly.
I’ve seen quite a few instances of stuff like that suddenly being called “AI” as that’s the big buzzword now.
Interestingly, LG’s AI Wash pre-dates the public release of ChatGPT by almost two years. Truly pioneers.
It’s cause GenAI copoted AI. Before all the LLM nonsense most people where using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) interchangeably.
I hated the use of AI before and now GenAI has made the whole thing 10x worse.
Honestly, +1 for SpeedQueen. That’s the brand that every laundromat uses, because they’re basically the Crown Vic of washers; They’re uglier than sin, but they’ll run for literal decades with very little maintenance. They do exactly one thing, (clean your clothes), and they do that one thing very well. They’re the “somehow my grandma’s appliances still work 70 years later, while mine all break after three years" of washing machines.
SpeedQueen doesn’t have any of the modern bells or whistles… But that also means there’s nothing to break prematurely and turn the washer into the world’s largest paperweight. Samsung washers, for instance, have infamously shitty LCD panels, which are notorious for dying right after the warranty expires. And when it dies, the entire washer is dead until you replace basically the entire control interface. SpeedQueen doesn’t have this issue, because they don’t even have LCD panels; everything is just physical knobs and buttons. If something ever does break, it’s just a mechanical switch that you can swap out in 15 minutes with a YouTube tutorial.
FYI, all current Speed Queen models except the Classic Series dryer (DC5, not the washer) are electronically controlled. Even the ones with knobs. They are not mechanical and no longer use the oldschool sequencing drums.
The TR7/DR7 are at least still sold with a 7 year manufacturer’s warranty, though. This is specifically to assuage consumer fears about the electronic control panel.
Yes! A washer doesn’t need AI or wifi. It needs power, water, detergent and dirty laundry. Had a guest the other day pull out their phone and go Oh my dish washer is out of surfactant. Why the fuck do you need to know that, when you’re 20min away by car?
I will pay more if an appliance isn’t internet connected.
Speed Queen for the win. I recently replaced a couple of trusty machines that had finally given up after decades of abuse. Went for speed queen, no regrets.
Speed Queen is great stuff. It will last just about forever. When it does break it is built so it can be repaired.
I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them.
I might be thinking the same. But I actually purchased an LG washer a couple months ago and finally got around to finding and reading the manual, and realized that I should have been doing “AI wash” instead of the “normal wash” that I always did.
The manual says that this is what “AI wash” actually is for:
“This cycle automatically adjusts wash and rinse patterns based on load size”.
I’ve learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don’t mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.
I love it when I have to trick those stupid ai chatbots to let me talk to a human customer service rep
It has been getting so bad that even boring regular phone trees will hang up on you if you insist on talking to a human. If it’s ISP / cellular, nowadays I will typically just say I want to cancel my account, and then have cancellations route me to the correct department.
There really should be a right to adequate human support that’s not hidden behind multiple barriers. As you said, it can be a timesaver for the simple stuff, but there’s nothing worse than the dread when you know that your case is going to need some explanation and an actual human that is able to do more than just following a flowchart.
“AI” is certainly a turn-off for me, I would ask a salesman “do you have one that doesn’t have that?” and I will now enumerate why:
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LLMs are wrongness machines. They do have an almost miraculous ability to string words together to form coherent sentences but when they have no basis at all in truth it’s nothing but an extremely elaborate and expensive party trick. I don’t want actual services like web searches replaced with elaborate party tricks.
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In a lot of cases it’s being used as a buzzword to mean basically anything computer controlled or networked. Last time I looked up they were using the word “smart” to mean that. A clothes dryer that can sense the humidity of the exhaust air to know when the clothes are dry isn’t any more “AI” than my 90’s microwave that can sense the puff of steam from a bag of popcorn. This is the kind of outright dishonest marketing I’d like to see fail so spectacularly that people in the advertising business go missing over it.
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I already avoided “smart” appliances and will avoid “AI” appliances for the same reasons: The “smart” functionality doesn’t actually run locally, it has to connect to a server out on the internet to work, which means that while that server is still up and offering support to my device, I have a hole in my firewall. And then they’ll stop support ten minutes after the warranty expires and the device will no longer work. For many of these devices there’s no reason the “smart” functionality couldn’t run locally on some embedded ARM chip or talk to some application running on a PC that I own inside my firewall, other than “then we don’t get your data.”
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AI is apparently consuming more electricity than air conditioning. In fact, I’m not convinced that power consumption isn’t the selling point they’re pushing at board meetings. “It’ll keep our friends in the pollution industry in business.”
Can you help me with problems this complex? Idk maybe we could use it to help make things better. Just most people prompt like things I can’t say because they aren’t nice. Oh by the way. Can you do it right now for $0 please? Thanks!
Edit. Also need it done now. If you’re reading this you were too slow.
Your response doesn’t apply to ANY of his 4 points…
And might be subject to 1. LLMS are wrongness machines.
Yeah, lmfao. I like the tech and all but ignoring criticism and jumping straight to gatekeeping is just soooo bad. Those people are one of the reasons why people dislike ai.
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<greentext>
Be me
Early adopter of LLMs ever since a random tryout of Replika blew my mind and I set out to figure what the hell was generating its responses
Learn to fine-tune GPT-2 models and have a blast running 30+ subreddit parody bots on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, including some that generate weird surreal imagery from post titles using VQGAN+CLIP
Have nagging concerns about the industry that produced these toys, start following Timnit Gebru
Begin to sense that something is going wrong when DALLE-2 comes out, clearly targeted at eliminating creative jobs in the bland corporate illustration market. Later, become more disturbed by Stable Diffusion making this, and many much worse things, possible, at massive scale
Try to do something about it by developing one of the first “AI Art” detection tools, intended for use by moderators of subreddits where such content is unwelcome. Get all of my accounts banned from Reddit immediately thereafter
Am dismayed by the viral release of ChatGPT, essentially the same thing as DALLE-2 but text
Grudgingly attempt to see what the fuss is about and install Github Copilot in VSCode. Waste hours of my time debugging code suggestions that turn out to be wrong in subtle, hard-to-spot ways. Switch to using Bing Copilot for “how-to” questions because at least it cites sources and lets me click through to the StackExchange post where the human provided the explanation I need. Admit the thing can be moderately useful and not just a fun dadaist shitposting machine. Have major FOMO about never capitalizing on my early adopter status in any money-making way
Get pissed off by Microsoft’s plans to shove Copilot into every nook and cranny of Windows and Office; casually turn on the Opympics and get bombarded by ads for Gemini and whatever the fuck it is Meta is selling
Start looking for an alternative to Edge despite it being the best-performing web browser by many metrics, as well as despite my history with “AI” and OK-ish experience with Copilot. Horrified to find that Mozilla and Brave are doing the exact same thing
Install Vivaldi, then realize that the Internet it provides access to is dead and enshittified anyway
Daydream about never touching a computer again despite my livelihood depending on it
</greentext>
LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.
Often the answers are pretty good. But you never know if you got a good answer or a bad answer.
And the system doesn’t know either.
For me this is the major issue. A human is capable of saying “I don’t know”. LLMs don’t seem able to.
Accurate.
No matter what question you ask them, they have an answer. Even when you point out their answer was wrong, they just have a different answer. There’s no concept of not knowing the answer, because they don’t know anything in the first place.
The worst for me was a fairly simple programming question. The class it used didn’t exist.
“You are correct, that class was removed in OLD version. Try this updated code instead.”
Gave another made up class name.
Repeated with a newer version number.
It knows what answers smell like, and the same with excuses. Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing whether it’s actually bullshit until you take a whiff of it yourself.
So instead of Prompt Engineer, the more accurate term should be AI Taste Tester?
From what I’ve seen you’ll need an iron stomach.
They really aren’t. Go ask about something in your area of expertise. At first glance, everything will look correct and in order, but the more you read the more it turns out to be complete bullshit. It’s good at getting broad strokes but the details are very often wrong.
Now imagine someone that doesn’t have your expertise reading that answer. They won’t recognize those details are wrong until it’s too late.
That is about the experience I have. I asked it for factual information in the field I work at. It didn’t gave correct answers. Or, it gave working protocols which were strange and would not be successful.
With proper framework, decent assertions are possible.
- It must cite the source and provide the quote, not just a summary.
- An adversarial review must be conducted
If that is done, the work on the human is very low.
That said, it’s STILL imperfect, but this is leagues better than one shot question and answer
Except LLMs don’t store sources.
They don’t even store sentences.
It’s all a stack of massive N-dimensional probability spaces roughly encoding the probabilities of certain tokens (which are mostly but not always words) appearing after groups of tokens in a certain order.
And all of that to just figure out “what’s the most likely next token”, an output which is then added to the input and fed into it again to get the next word and so on, producing sentences one word at a time.
Now, if you feed it as input a long, very precise sentence taken from a unique piece, maybe you’re luck and it will output the correct next word, but if you already have all that you don’t really need an LLM to give you the rest.
Maybe the “framework” you seek - which is quite akin to a indexer with a natural language interface - can be made with AI, but it’s not something you can do with LLMs because their structure is entirely unsuited for it.
The proper framework does, with data store, indexing and access functions.
The cutting edge work is absolutely using LLMs in post-rag pipelines.
Consumer grade chat interfaces def do not do this.
Edit if you worry about topics like context window, sentence splitting or source extraction, you aren’t using a best in class framework any more.
Sounds familiar. Citation please
Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll have a great time. It’s a wild world out there.
Shove a bunch of AI nonsense in my face when I didn’t ask for it and I’m throwing your product out a window.
Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll generate twenty gigabytes of weird anime fetish content.
This is the only true use of AI
You forgot to add “and post it to Lemmy”.
As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:
Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.
In your own words, tell me why you’re calling today.
My medication is in the wrong dosage.
You need to refill your medication is that right?
No, my medication is in the wrong dosage, it’s supposed to be tens and it came as 20s.
You need to change the pharmacy where you’re picking up your medication?
I need to speak to a human please.
I understand that you want to speak to an agent, is that right?
Yes.
Chorus, 5x. (Please give me your group number, or dial it in at the keypad. For this letter press that number for that letter press this number. No I’m driving, just connect me with an agent so I can verify over the phone)
I’m sorry, I can’t verify your identity please collect all your paperwork and try calling again. Click
Why ever would we be mad?
I went through a McDonald’s drive-thru the other day and had the most insane experience. For the context of this anecdote, I don’t do that often, so, what I experienced was just weird.
While not quite “AI,” the first thing that happened was an automated voice yells at me, “are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
There’s like three menu-speaker boxes, and due to where the car in front of me stopped, I’m like in between the last two. The other speaker begins to yell, “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
The person running drive-thru mumbles something about pull around. I do. Pass by the other menu “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
Dude walks out with a headset and starts taking orders from each car using a tablet.
I have no idea what is happening. I can’t even see a menu when the guy gets around to me. Turns the tablet around at me.
I realized that I was indeed ordering using the mobile app today.
To be fair, this is not new, unless you’re counting all answering machines as AI
Hardly. It used to be natural language dictation and decision tree. Now they’re trying to use LLM training to automatically pick up more edge cases and it’s pretty much b*******.
I’ve found ChatGPT somewhat useful, but not amazingly so. The thing about ChatGPT is, I understand what the tool is, and our interactions are well defined. When I get a bullshit answer, I have the context to realize it’s not working for me in this case and to go look elsewhere. When AI is built in to products in ways that you don’t clearly understand what parts are AI and how your interactions are fed to it; that’s absolutely and incurably horrible. You just have to reject the whole application; there is no other reasonable choice.
I find the tech interesting, but the rush to commercialize it was a bad idea. It’s not ready yet, total uncanny valley.
Maybe I’d be more interested in AI if there was any I with the A. At the moment, there’s no more intelligence to these things than there is in a parrot with brain damage, or a human child. Language Models can mimic speech but are unable to formulate any original thoughts. Until they can, they aren’t AI and I won’t be the slightest bit interested beyond trying to break them into being slightly dirty (and therefore slightly funny).
Just so you know I totally agree with you but if you go far back enough in my comment history I had a really interesting (imo) discussion/argument with someone abt this very topic and the topic of how to determine if an AI ‘thinks’ or ‘reasons’ more broadly.
It can be helpful to approach this from the other direction. The part of the brain that works like an LLM.
Lets see if this finally kills the AI hype. Big tech is pushing for AI because it is the ultimate spyware, nothing more.
Nothing more? Usually the incentive is that it’s something worth giving info for.
Except that it’s actually not. They can’t provide a real use-case for LLMs. It’s a shitty solution in search of a problem.
I’ve built and seen many real world use cases for LLMs. The reality is the most valuable use cases are extremely mundane.
Can you give an example? Machine learning is fairly obvious but LLMs are often just terrible costumer support.
Better trained customer support
This is because AI is usually used to reduce the human cost to the company, and rarely to reduce the human labour for the customer.
That, or mass surveillance.
AI has some pretty good uses.
But in the majority of junk on the market it is nothing but marketing bloatware.
It does and AI is being tarnished by the hype/marketing.
Not long ago Firefox announced it would deliver client-side “AI” to describe web pages to differently-abled users. This is awesome.
Some people on Lemmy conflated AI and Large Language Models and complained about the addition. I don’t blame them, not everyone is an IT pro and is equipped to understand the difference between Machine Learning Models, LLMs and such. I mentioned Firefox has “AI” for client-side translation and that’s a great thing. They wondered since when “AI” was used for translation. Machine learning/deep learning translation has been a thing for over a decade and it amazing. It’s not LLM (even if LLMs are really good at translation).
The market has pushed “AI” too hard making people cautious about it. They are turning it into the new “blockchain” were most people didn’t find any benefit from the hype, on the contrary, they saw the vast majority of it being scams.
even if LLMs are really good at translation
As someone that actually played japanese RPG games translated with AI on dlsite, bullshit.
I can’t really agree as a video producer. Luma, Krea, Runway, Ideogram, Udio, 11Labs, Perplexity, Claude, Firefly -> All worth more than they’re charging, most with daily free options. They save me a ton of time. Honestly, the one I’m considering dropping at the moment is ChatGPT.
