[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 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!’
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.
Interesting use case. Sometimes you can find romanizations on lyricstranslate, but this is kinda hit and miss.
Well, that’s the thing, it is a Large Language Model… the thing talks, and talks well. It is not smart
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.
There’s a different between hype and advertising.
For one, advertising is regulated.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
If AI truly was the next frontier, we wouldn’t be staring at the start of another depression (or a bad recession). There would be a revolution of innovations and most people’s lives would improve.
The idea that technological improvements would improve everyone’s life is based on the premise that capitalists wouldn’t keep the productivity gains for themselves.
AI does offer some efficiency improvements. But the workers won’t get that money.
Note that it was improving the average worker’s life proportionately until the capitalists broke the system in the early 70s.
I’m guessing that the consistent trend wasn’t consistent prior to WWII, that it was just a blip from about 1945 - 1970/.
I can’t find any similar graphs for before 1945, does anybody know where I could find the data?
Pls give me just one more pixel
.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Sizes are different. Before “AI” went mainstream, those in machine learning were very excited about word2vec and reinforcement learning for example. And it was known that there will be improvement with larger size neural networks but I’m not sure if anyone knew for certain how well chatgpt would have worked. Given the costs of training and inference for LLMs, I doubt you can see nerds doing it. Also, previously you didn’t have big tech firms. Not the current behemoths anyway.
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
As someone (forgot which blog I read it on, sorry) recently observed: if AI made software development so much easier, we’d be drowning in great new apps by now.
Yeah, and we wouldn’t have so much garbage code out there breaking the internet. I tried to argue with someone on another site who was saying AI was the best thing ever basically, with my own real world encounters (that are weekly now) of why it’s not and often wrong. He said the people using must be idiots, which sure, but if an idiot can get bad answers than it’s not that good. He finished by saying he would never hire me because I refuse to use AI within my IT job. Alright, whatever dude. I can’t wait to be pissed off by the shit application you coded with AI when it runs like hot garbage.
It’s advertising. It’s shoved in your face so you use Copilot instead of Google.
I setup a brother all in one printer for my mother in law and it wanted to install software that loads at startup that pops up constantly with their printer toner sales and marketing.
I learned a long time ago to never install manufacturer printer drivers. Or, at least, never install them from the provided
Setup.exe.They’ve always installed a bunch of bloatware (HP has always been the worst but other brands are just as bad).
If you look in the setup folder, there’s usually the raw drivers you can install from Device Manager. If the driver package is just a single
.exefile, you can usually unpack it with 7zip and get at its inner contents.If that fails, the system-included HP LaserJet 4200 PCL driver is about as close to a universal print driver as you can find lol.
It is just advertising. The more I think about it the more I can’t think of any practical use for generative AI that doesn’t involve essentially spamming everyone.
The more I think about it the more I can’t think of any practical use for generative AI
It really does improve productivity. The problem is thinking a spell checker on steroids will do your job (the mistake both employees and employers make).
It doesn’t really improve productivity much for me. And if you take into account the emails I receive from coworkers written with copilot then I’m actually doing more work to decipher what they are trying to say.
It’s also investor money talking. Looks like everyone with at least a few dollars to spare wants to get on the AI hype train. They have dumped an absurd amount of money on AI, and now they can’t wait to see those stock prices climb. These expectations put an immense amount of pressure on all AI companies to push their products anywhere and everywhere.
It also puts pressure on non-AI companies to integrate AI into their products, regardless of whether or not it improves the product. If you can say “look, we’ve got AI” then you’ll find it easier to attract new investors and keep your current ones happy. If you don’t have AI, then you risk looking behind the curve.
Can’t wait to see someone shove AI into egg times, flashlights and calculators. This kind of innovation just makes me sad.
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.
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 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.
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". 🎵😆
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?
I actually think you do not, in fact, know enough. VPN does not care about layer 7. Having some proxy forcefully rewrite random domain names will immediately lead to redirect loops and will be disabled that same day because everyone will be screaming “internet no worky”.
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.
