[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.
I absolutely hate seeing AI crammed into everything.
However, i don’t understand your logic.
If AI was in fact useful, it would be crammed into everything because everyone would want it.
So while AI is undoubtedly shit, its presence in everything is not evidence of that.
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.
LLMs are a really cool toy, I would lose my shit over them if they weren’t a catalyst for the whole of western society having an oopsie economic crash moment.
This is some amazing insight. 100% correct. This is an investment scam, likely an investment bubble that will pop if too many realize the truth.
AI at this stage is basically just an overrefined search engine, but companies are selling it like its JARVIS from Iron Man.
At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol
TL;DR
4 layers of stupidification. The (possibly willfully) ignorant user, the source bias, the bias/agenda of the media owner, then shitty AI.
AI should be a backup to human skill and not a replacement for it. It isn’t good enough, and who knows when or if it will ever be at a reasonable cost. The problem with the current state of AI is that it’s being sold as a replacement for many human jobs and knowledge. 30-40 years ago we had to contend with basic human bias and nationalism filtering facts and news before it got to the end user, then we got the mega-media companies owned by the ultra wealthy who consolidated everything and injected yet more bias with the internet and social media but at least you got provided with multiple sources, now we have AI being pushed as a source that can be programmed to use biased sources and/or objectively wrong sources that people don’t even bother checking another source about. AI should be used to find unique solutions to medical research, materials design, etc. Not whether or not microwaving your phone is a good idea.
You shoved it in my face now
I’ve been wondering about a similar thing recently - if AI is this big, life-changing thing, why were there so little rumblings among tech-savy people before it became “mainstream”? Sure, Machine Learning was somewhat talked about, but very little of it seemed to relate to LLM-style Machine learning. With basically all other innovations technology, the nerds tended to have it years before everyone else, so why was it so different with AI?
Realistically, computational power
The more number crunching units and more memory you throw at the problem, the easier it is and the more useful the final model is. The math and theoretical computer science behind LLMs has been known for decades, it’s just that the resource investment required to make something even mediocre was too much for any business type to be willing to sign off on. Me and my fellow nerds had the technology and largely dismissed it as worthless or a set of pipe dreams
But then number crunching units and memory became cheap enough that a couple of investors were willing to take the risk and you get a model like ChatGPT1. Talks close enough like a human that it catches business types attention as a new revolutionary thing, and without the technical background to know they were getting lied to, the Venture Capitalism machine cranks out the shit show we have today.
Because AI is a solution to a problem individuals don’t have. The last 20 years we have collected and compiled an absurd amount of data on everyone. So much that the biggest problem is how to make that data useful by analyzing and searching it. AI is the tool that completes the other half of data collection, analyzing. It was never meant for normal people and its not being funded by average people either.
Sam altman is also a fucking idiot yes-man who could talk himself into literally any position. If this was meant to help society the AI products wouldnt be assisting people with killing themselves so that they can collect data on suicide.
And additionally, I’ve never seen an actual tech-savy nerd that supports its implementation, especially in this draconian ways.
Canva just announced the next generation of Affinity. Instead of giving us Linux support, while Affinity is “free” now they crammed in a bunch of AI to upsell you on a subscription.
Yeah… we kinda saw that coming ever since that first email from Serif about the acquisition…
Is there anything out there now that’s comparable? I’ve still got v1 and v2 suites and installers, but… that’ll only last as long as the twats at Canva keep the auth servers going.
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?
ChatGPT is quite good and it’s not in my face at all, it’s just in a bookmark I access when I need it.
Copilot is hot garbage, and it’s plastered all over Windows, Edge, and Office.
I haven’t tried the Samsung AI, but it won’t let me forget it’s there.
OP absolutely has a point. The more in your face the AI is, the more garbage it is.
Had the exact same thought. If it was revolutionary and innovative we would be praising it and actual tech people would love it.
Guess who actually loves it? Authoritarians and corporations. Yay.
Similar thought… If it was so revolutionary and innovative, I wouldn’t have access to it. The AI companies would be keeping it to themselves. From a software perspective, they would be releasing their own operating systems and browsers and whatnot.
exactly right
Here’s a similar perspective: as a vegetarian, seeing advertisement selling meat is good: it means the animal exploitation industry is struggling and needs to promote their “product” which need nearly no advertising for years if not decades.
It’s very similar here: the advertising (in the form of putting it where you can’t miss it, in the tools you use everyday) is trying to convince you to use something many people are apparently just not that interested in.
Ads are just a way to sell more of your stuff. If you earn 100€ a day without ads and spending 100€ a day on ads earns you 101€, you spend 100€ a day on ads. It’s as simple as that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Shoving AI into everything and forcing people to interact with it, even when dismissing all the fucking prompts, is not advertising.
Some of the older lemmings here will remember what it was like when every company wanted to make a website, but they didn’t really have anything to put in there. People were curious to look at websites, because you hadn’t seen that many yet, so visiting them was kinda fun and interesting at first. After about a year, the novelty had worn off completely, and seeing YetAnotherCompanyName.com on TV or a road side billboard was beginning to get boring.
Did it ever get as infuriating the current AI hype though? I recall my grandma complaining about TV news. “They always tell me to read more online.” she says. I guess it can get just as annoying if you manage to successfully ignore the web for a few decades.
I think back then, they had a product that was ahead of its time, and just needed time for us to adapt to.*
Now, they have a solution in search of a problem, and they don’t know what the good use cases are, so they’re just slapping it on like randomly and aggressively.
- I hate the way we did though, and hope AI destroys the current corporate internet.
I’ve change to lemmy, now matrix. I’m doing my part.
I was an adult during that time, and I don’t recall it being anywhere near as annoying. Well, except the TV and radio adverts spelling at you like “…or visit our website at double-you double-you double-you dot Company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot C-O-M-P-A-N-Y dot com.”
YMMV, but it didn’t get annoying until apps entered the picture and the only way to deal with certain companies was through their app. That, of if they did offer comparable capabilities on their website but kept a persistent banner pushing you toward their app.
Those were the days… :-)
My old brain still thought of site addresses as having www in them, but this post just made me realize that’s more uncommon than not to see it any more.
I’m about that same age but am so glad we’ve largely abandoned the “www” for websites.
On my personal project website, I have a custom listener setup to redirect people to “aarp.org” if they enter it with “www” instead of just the base domain. 😆
server { listen 443 ssl; http2 on; server_name www.mydomain.xyz; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/privkey.pem; ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/conf.d/tls/shared/dhparam.pem; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 15m; ... location ~* { return 301 https://aarp.org/; } }that’s… a terrible idea for a portfolio site of any sort. why would you intentionally hamper accessibility? what if their company VPN automatically routes yoursite.org to www.yoursite.org? i personally wouldn’t spend the time figuring out why i was looking at AARP, i’d just pass you over and not hire you, let alone reach out.
I don’t think it works the way you think it does.
no, i think i know how things work enough to know this is a shitty idea.
that excerpt is going to do a 301 redirect to the AARP site for any requests to www.yoursite.xyz - that’s 100% not up for debate.
there are a fair amount of things, especially in a corporate environment, that automatically append www. to any URL passed. you think a hiring manager is going to care that it’s a quirky technical joke? why would you make it more difficult to access a portfolio who’s entire purpose is to be as accessible as possible for the target audience?
Oh, I totally forgot the www thing. That was super annoying. Good riddance!
The only one I didn’t hate was the jingle:
🎵 "F-R-E-E that spells "free" credit report dot com, baby". 🎵😆
