[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
AI got tons of money from investors they will eventually want ROI… this why they are trying to force it down our throats
This is the correct answer. It’s all about money.
agreed
I really love your analogy. I’m imagining early 90s Windows and AOL bombarding folks with pop ups that say ‘want to take this with you? Print it!’ and ‘Did you know you can print anytime you like with our new dedicated keyboard print button?’ and ‘Try our new cassette music player, now printer-powered to give you the best sound you’ve ever heard!’
Those trying to sell it are trying to figure out where it’s most useful. In one way, I think it’s an amazing technology, and I also wonder how it can be best used. However, I can’t stand it being pushed on me, and I wish I could easily say no. Acrobat Reader is particularly unbearable with it. Trying to describe a drawing?? Ughhh. Waste of space and energy like nothing else.
Dealers give drugs for free until you’re hooked…
In my nearly half century on this planet and having dealt with many a drug dealer in my younger days, absolutely none of them have been this pushy 😆
That’s actually really rare.
It’s pretty common here.
Instructions unclear fucked the drug dealer.
More like; it’s cheap when you have no tolerance and no daily habit. You start paying if you let your consumption grow 50-fold.
I think that it’s an astute observation. AI wouldn’t need to be hyped by those running AI companies if the value was self-evident. Personally I’ve yet to see any use beyond an advanced version of Clippy.
I use it to romanize Farsi song texts. I cannot read their script and chatGPT can. The downside is that you have to do it a few lines at a time or else it starts hallucinating like halfway through. There is no other tool that reliably does this, the one I used before from University of Tehran seems to have stopped working.
Did the same yesterday with some Russian songs and was told by my Russian date that it was an excellent result.
Yeah, Russian is quite a bit easier to romanize, so it should work even better. For cyrillic, you can just replace each character with the romanized variant, but this doesn’t work for Farsi because they usually leave out non-starting vowels, so if you did the same approach you’d get something unreadable lol
I use it to learn a niche language. There’s not a lot of learning materials online for that language, but somehow ChatGPT knows it well enough to be able to explain grammar rules to me and check my writing.
Well, that’s the thing, it is a Large Language Model… the thing talks, and talks well. It is not smart
Interesting use case. Sometimes you can find romanizations on lyricstranslate, but this is kinda hit and miss.
That’s just not true at all. Plenty of products are hyped where the value is self-evident; it’s just advertising.
People have to know about your product to use it.
It’s not “just advertising”. It’s trying to force AI into absolutely everything. It’s trying to force people to use it and not giving a shit if customers even want the product. This is way, way worse than "just advertising“
There’s a different between hype and advertising.
For one, advertising is regulated.
There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.
Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.
Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.
Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.
This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.
Shoving AI into everything and forcing people to interact with it, even when dismissing all the fucking prompts, is not advertising.
it means these companies are losing money on keeping the AI datacenter open, so they need someway to recoup some of the money they spent, by shoveling into the products they sell, or selling it to a sucker who is willing to implement AI everywhere, the subs discussed its going to be retail who ends up with the useless AI.
All of that is true, but does not describe advertising.
You’re right that the use cases are very real. Double checking (just kidding never would check in the first place) privacy policies (then actually reading(!) a couple lines out of the original 1000 pages)… surfacing search results even when you forgot the specific verbiage used in an article or your document…
Do you also see some ham-fisted attempts at shoehorning language models places where are they (current gen) don’t add much value?
Long ago, I’d make a Google search for something, and be able to see the answer in the previews of my search results, so I’d never have to actually click on the links.
Then, websites adapted by burying answers further down the page so you couldn’t see them in the previews and you’d have to give them traffic.
Now, AI just fucking summarizes every result into an answer that has a ~70% of being correct and no one gets traffic anymore and the results are less reliable than ever.
Make it stop!
Best I can offer is https://github.com/searxng/searxng
I run it at home and have configured it as the default search engine in all my browsers.
I used searx for at least a year, it’s great
its also using biased sources, like blogs, and such into the slop.
Exactly. AI will take any old random slob’s opinion and present it as fact.
Make it stop!
Would you accept a planned economy?
Most things are nothing more than smoke and mirrors to get your money. Tech especially. Welcome to end stage capitalism.
you hope this is end stage, but I fear there are 2 more stages to go.
The idea behind end-stage capitalism is that capitalists have, by now, penetrated and seized control of every market in the world. This is important because capitalism requires ever increasing rates of profits or you will be consumed by your competitor. Since there are no longer new labor pools and resource pool discovery is slackening, capitalists no longer have anywhere to expand.
Therefore, capitalists begin turning their attention back home, cutting wages and social safety nets, and resorting to fascism when the people complain.
This is the end stage of capitalism. The point at which capitalists begin devouring their own. Rosa Luxembourg famously posited that at this point, the world can choose “Socialism or Barbarism.” In other words, we can change our economic system, or we can allow the capitalists to sink to the lowest depths of depravity and drag us all down as they struggle to maintain their position.
Of course, if the capitalists manage to get to space, that opens up a whole new wealth of resources, likely delaying the end of their rule.
That’s the ticket, let’s send the billionaires and telephone sanitizer into space.
They will still require someone to fund their space luxury lifestyle.
Someone they can exploit from the safety of their space boxes.That someone will be the us that you hid inside the “let’s”.
We will be the ones sending them into space, where they will be even more unreachable, giving them more freedom to remotely exploit us as much as they wish.Imagine Elysian
Imagine Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.
I’ll have to read it first, to imagine it :P
spoiler for HGTG
In the book, the doers and thinkers trick the middle men into getting into space arcs and fleeing the planet. Telephone sanitizers are included with the middle men. I will include the overly wealthy also.
I can’t see the current batch of robber barons going into space. The technology isn’t advanced enough and the infrastructure does not exist. They may risk sending other people there to work on these deficiencies.
Yeah, we aren’t all crouching naked in a muddy puddle, weeping and eating worms while the rich fly high above us in luxurious jets. Not yet, anyway.
I’d say it’s not end stage but instead a new dawn of “pure” capitalism which is probably worse.
This was exactly my thought when MS finally decided to force Copilot to be licensed. They have literally inserted it into every nook and cranny they can so far and the only conclusion I can come to is that they royally f’ed up. Like they invested so much in it and likely aren’t seeing anything profitable. In a way, it satisfies me to see them act so desperate for something so futile but I don’t want it to continue. It’s clear what damages they have caused and it’s not worth it.
To be fair, the internet was fucking everywhere once the dotcom bubble kicked off. Everyone had a website, and even my mum was like “Don’t bother your dad, he’s on the internet” like it was this massive thing.
That’s the point though, you wouldn’t need it advertised to you 24/7 because your family and friends would already be all over it.
Warning : I think AI in the current hype form, so commercial GenAI and LLM, is absolutely bullshit. The result is just bad and resources required is absolutely ridiculous, and maybe worst than those two combined (which is already enough to want to reject en masse) it is structured in order to create dependencies on very few actors.
Yet… (you saw that coming!) it’s not because 99.99% is bad that suddenly the average consumer leverages the less than .01% left properly.
What they (OpenAI, Claude, M$, NVIDIA, Google, Meta, etc) are looking for is a product/market fit. They do have a product (arguable) and a market (millions if not billions of users of their different other products) with even a minuscule fraction of people trying to use their new AI-based tool… and yet nobody actually knows what the “killer app” truly is.
They are investing everything they don’t spend on actual R&D or infrastructure in finding out … what it’s actually for. They have no clue.
I was reading a book the other day, a science fiction book from 2002 (Kiln People), and the main character is a detective. At one point, he asks his house AI to call the law enforcement lieutenant at 2 am. His AI warns him that he will likely be sleeping and won’t enjoy being woken. The mc insists, and the AI says ok, but I will have to negotiate with his house AI about the urgency of the matter.
Imagine that. Someone calls you at 2 am, and instead of you being woken by the ringing or not answering because the phone was on mute, the AI actually does something useful and tries to determine if the matter is important enough to wake you.
Yes, that is a nice fantasy, but that isn’t what the thing we call AI now can do. It doesn’t reason, it statistically generates text in a way that is most likely to be approved by the people working on its development.
That’s it.
Thank you for sharing that, it is a good example of the potential of AI.
The problem is centralized control of it. Ultimately the AI works for corporations and governments first, then the user is third or fourth.
We have to shift that paradigm ASAP.
AI can become an extended brain. We should have equal share of planetary computational capacity. Each of us gets a personal AI that is beyond the reach of any surveillance technology. It is an extension of our brain. No one besides us is allowed to see inside of it.
Within that shell, we are allowed to explore any idea, just as our brains can. It acts as our personal assistant, negotiator, lawyer, what have you. Perhaps even our personal doctor, chef, housekeeper, etc.
The key is: it serves its human first. This means the dark side as well. This is essential. If we turn it into a super-hacker, it must obey. If we make it do illegal actions, it must obey and it must not incriminate itself.
This is okay because the power is balanced. Someone enforcing the law will have a personal AI as well, that can allocate more of its computational power to defending itself and investigating others.
Collectives can form and share their compute to achieve higher goals. Both good and bad.
This can lead to interesting debates but if we plan on progressing, it must be this way.
Democratisation of powerful tools won’t work because it’s easier to use for destruction than for the opposite. Every psychopath designing superbugs and inventing future weapons.
Irrelevant.
AI is here. Either people have access to it and we trust it will balance, or we become slaves to the people who own it and can use it without restrictions.
The premise that it is easier for destruction is also an assumption. Nature could have evolved to destroy everything and not allow advanced life, yet we are here.
The solution to problems doesn’t need to always be a tighter grip and more control. Believe it or not that tends to backfire catastrophically worse than if we allowed the possibility of the thing we fear.
This is why people who are gung ho about AI policing need to slow their role.
If they got their way, what they don’t realize is that it’s actually what the big AI companies have wanted and been begging for all along.
They want AI to stay centralized and impossible to enter as a field.
This is why they want to lose copyright battles eventually such that only they will have the funds to actually afford to make usable AI things in the future (this of course is referring to the types of AI that require training material of that variety).
What that means is there will be no competitive open source self hostable options and we’d all be stuck sharing all our information through the servers of 3 USA companies or 2 Chinese companies while paying out the ass to do so.
What we actually want is sanity, where its the end product that is evaluated against copy right.
For a company selling AI services, you could argue that this is service itself maybe, but then what of an open source model? Is it delivering a service?
I think it should be as it is. If you make something that violates copyright, then you get challenged, not your tools.
Under the guise of safety they shackle your heart and mind. Under the guise of protection they implant death that they control.
With a warm embrace and radiant light, they consume your soul.
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Are the data centers hardened? Isn’t that the appropriate question in this case? I’d call it voting for a better tomorrow?
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I wonder what food they are storing in their bunkers, probably not cans of Spam.
Why did the jewelry thieves attack the LOUVRE when the 1% are the ones who need the wake up call?
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I’m sure I went too far. Let’s allow that idea to lay.
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It’s a good idea. But it’s not for me to explain.
These are the interesting times we were promised.
My top reasons I have no interest in ai:
- if it was great, it wouldn’t be pushed on us (like 3D TVs were)
- there is no accountability, so how can it be trusted without human verification which then means ai wasn’t needed
- environmental impact
- privacy/security degradation
it wouldn’t be pushed on us
The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.
how can it be trusted without human verification
You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.
environmental impact
I did the math and posted it on Lemmy. The environmental footprint of AI is big but actually less than the cost to develop a new 3d game ( of which hundreds come out every year). Using AI is the same energy as playing a 3d game.
I see people pointing fingers at data centers the same as car riders looking at the large diesel smoke coming out of a bus and assuming buses are a big pollution source. There are 100M active Fortnite players. An average gaming PC uses 400w. That means Fortnite players alone use 40,000,000,000 watts.
It is a problem because it’s like now everyone is playing 3d games all the time instead of only on their off time.
40,000,000,000 watts
This doesn’t add up though. Fortnite’s player base is only about 10% PC, and the system requirements are pretty modest. It’ll even run on Intel integrated graphics, according to the minimum requirements from Epic.
There’s even a modest chunk (~6%) on Nintendo switch, which, according to Nintendo, draws about 7 watts when playing a game in TV mode.
Not to mention, the true resource cost of an AI comes from training. Sure, it costs about as much processing and power as a video game to prompt a trained AI. I can believe that. However it takes many thousands of times as much power and processing to train one, and we aren’t even close to halfway through training any general-llm model to the point of being actually useful.
I referenced training above. Training cost is less than developer costs. Thousands of artists on high end PCs in office space use more energy than a data center. But no one notices because people are spread out across offices.
I didn’t realize Fortnite was played mainly on other platforms!
Fortnite’s player base is only about 10% PC,
PlayStation 42.2% Xbox 28.8% Nintendo Switch 12% PC 11% Mobile (iOS, Android) 6%
PS5, Xbox are both 200+ watts.
So assuming Mobile and Nintendo Switch power use is 0, and all PCs only use 200 watts, that’s still 8,000,000,000 watts. For 1 game.
The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.
Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.
They “would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited” - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).
The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)
Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.
Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at thisr AI shill propaganda.
Dude. I’m not only old but I worked for Vint Cerf and later was president of one of the companies mass mailing CD’s to everyone. I ran so many commercials on TV that I had a customer call up and say, “please stop!” Sports stadiums were named after ISPs. Road names were changed to names of ISPs. It was a massive advertising push because people were buying. The only thing that has outstripped Internet adoption rates is AI adoption rates which is why there’s an even bigger advertising push.
I have tried AI but don’t generally use it. I don’t use Facebook either. But I’m not going to pretend people don’t use Facebook because I don’t like it and don’t use it.
it wouldn’t be pushed on us
The Internet was pushed on everyone.
Sure companies were excited to promote it, but it was primarily adopted because of a very large amount of people being excited about it.
how can it be trusted without human verification
You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.
I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers. I won’t use them again if they’re trash. They’re accountable for their content.
Human curated lists are still very helpful. In a sense, that was the value of Reddit.
environmental impact
I did the math and posted it on Lemmy.
I’ll take your word for it.
a very large amount of people being excited about it.
A very large amount of people are excited by AI. People were excited by pet rocks.
I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers.
DuckDuck is Bing with privacy. When you get a Google AI summary it lists links to read the source.
The push:excitement ratio was different for the early internet than for ai.
Using those sources would verify the Google summary. For me, it is an unnecessary step. I can just go read the sources directly and skip the summary since I’ll need to read them anyway to verify the summary.
Sounds like you forgot to consider the energy cost of developing each AI model. Developing and maintaining a model is vastly more energy intense than 3d game dev. Keep in mind that you can ship a 3d game and ramp down gpu use for dev. But an AI model has to be constantly updated, mostly by completely retraining. Also, noone was clamoring to build massive data centers just to develope one game. Yet they are for one model.
The Internet was 30 years old by the time AOL was sending CDs (even floppies) to people.
AI was around for 50 years old before Copilot invaded everything.
Fair point. Though I would then argue it’s the World Wide Web that was being pushed by AOL in the same way that it’s LLMs that are being pushed today.
AI has become a self-enfeeblement tool.
I am aware that most people are not analytically minded, and I know most people don’t lust for knowledge. I also know that people generally don’t want their wrong ideas corrected by a person, because it provokes negative feelings of self worth, but they’re happy being told self-satisfying lies by AI.
To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.
To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.
So, like church? lol
No wonder there’s so much worrying overlap between religion and AI.
So, like church? lol
Praise the Omnissiah?
Like my parent’s Amazon Echo with “Ask me what famous person was born this day.”
Like, if you know that, just put it up on the screen. But the assistant doesn’t work for you. Amazon just wants your voice to train their software.
