True story time. I was talking to a guy at $dayjob and he says he’s been talking with a third party company, whose solution we might buy. I asked him how the talks with them went and he said they were negotiating and I asked him how that was going.
He offhandedly said that he asked if and how they were using AI at all in their solution. I asked “Why did you ask about AI?”, since I was sort of curious what benefit he was looking for.
He said “Well, it’s not that I actually care about AI in their product, but if they don’t have any AI stuff, I can use that as leverage when negotiating the contract for a lower price.”
I was a bit astonished and he did kinda knowingly smile. He said “yea I know, I am part of the problem”. He also said “it’s also about taking a temperature on how ahead in technology the company is”.
I just wanted to share cause this is so insidious. Companies are asking each other about AI, despite the fact that (at least sometimes) nobody actually wants it! They are asking in order to use the lack of AI as leverage, which incentivizes companies to include AI in their offerings, not because it’s actually useful, but because it gives them leverage to raise prices!
This really makes AI seem more and more like a bubble.
Stop me if this doesn’t make any sense at all but I’m not a proponent of AI I don’t really support it because of it’s associations and the goals of the people in charge of it. That said I will occasionally play with an AI just to see what it’s capable of and how it’s development is coming along because unfortunately I can’t just make the technology go away.
I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s pretty terrible for most things. I asked it how I could make my copy of Minecraft always open to a certain Port when I hit the open to LAN button.
It literally made up a jvm argument that wasn’t real and then later admitted that it just guessed.
My point is I’ll mess with it a little but it’s kind of a know your enemy thing.
One thing I do like about it is that it’s better at analyzing than generating which is a common theme. If I feed it a big long crash log it can usually tell me what happened reasonably well or enough that I don’t have to spend as much time f****** around digging through the logs, also if I’m getting obscure Windows errors it can generally comb through shitloads of Random microsoft support form b******* and point me in the right direction. I think the technology has uses it’s just that they’re different from what everyone is trying to use it for and that’s a real damn shame isn’t it
I will admit I use it occasionally, too. I use AutoCAD which can load LISP code but…I do not know how to write LISP. It can’t replace a real programmer but Chatgpt has made a bunch of little scripts for me that turn 30 second tasks into 1-second automations.