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I have ADHD and OCD, which means writing reports, proposals, and even simple emails is very difficult for me in a number of ways. For the last year or so, I tell ChatGPT what I want to say and I work to polish or complete what it gives me, and out comes exactly what I wanted.
I'm not able to do that stuff myself. I'm just not mentally able to do it by myself. I strongly support ChatGPT and will continue to use it as as I can.
I feel like the AI industry did this to themselves by absolutely shoving it down our throats at every possible chance they had.
AI in general isn’t a bad technology, it just has very limited use cases where it’s actually good at things. Most things it’s used for are things it’s bad at. Kind of like using a steam locomotive to clean the bottom of your pool.
I've seen people literally use it as find and replace 🤦♂️
I can count on one hand the number of jobs or functions I've seen people try to get AI to do that isn't already done better by a hard-coded program or an Excel spreadsheet.
I've used it as a sort of find and replace in the past, but by feeding it the output from Ripgrep to skip the "find" part. The "replace" was just unwrapping unnecessarily confusing "try" blocks and allowing errors to propagate to the appropriate handlers. This would have required a syntax-aware replacement tool (and some exist but I didn't really feel like learning one for a one-off).
As a simple "find this text and replace with this other text" it makes no sense.
I did that today. It went something like this:
“See the naming conventions at the beginning of the script. Apply all the rules to all the non-conforming variable names and the new custom function we made earlier.“
There were like 100 changes here and there, and I just didn’t feel like doing all that work manually.
In my experience, the trick to this is to get a list of changes to make yourself, rather than trusting the machine to actually get it right. (Unless you're in a dev/test environment and don't care much if it fucks it up.)
This code isn’t anywhere near production yet. I’m still going to make a hundred little changes, but an LLM can do all the boring stuff so that I can focus on the interesting bits. There’s also going to be plenty of testing and iterative tweaks, so any major mistakes will be exposed sooner rather than later. Honestly, about half of the errors will be caused by me.
They spent a trillion dollars on it. It can't be a slightly better search and a way for schoolchildren to cheat. It has to be the next industrial revolution, otherwise their investment was not justified.
Kind of like using a steam locomotive to clean the bottom of your pool.
I'm surprised that wasn't tried on the reflecting pool in D.C. "We love the old-timey trains, don't we, folks? And now were going to use one in the most amazing way the world has ever seen!"
Powered by "clean coal" of course, right? It'd have been more effective than dumping a couple bottles of hydrogen peroxide into the pool at least since the emissions would prevent future algae growth more effectively.
Oh, they did dump some H~2~0~2~ along the edges, giving a dark blue hue surrounding the algae bloom. Apparently, a comprehensive distribution either didn't come to mind or was nixed. Alternatively, clearing it up immediately would negate Trump's claim that the green hue was the result of vandalism and thus, well ...
Exactly. And the few things GenAI does well aren't that compute intensive and can run on local models.
LLMs are terrible at writing new text that matters, i.e. anything at all technical or important. But they're good at reformatting content into properly structured English, editing text for grammar, and explaining everyday concepts. But they're so good at those things, that a tiny model running on consumer hardware can do it.
So, I don't understand how anyone can possibly expect LLMs to be a profitable business. Where are the moats?
In the early days of the steam engine's success, what helped it find an economic footing was the need to pump water from coal mines. At the time, logistics of transporting things over large distances were difficult, so having the coal supply on-site was an obvious benefit. So while using a steam engine to pump water from a pool would be quite archaic and inefficient, but at least for emptying the pool, it could technically be used.
Of course, a locomotive moving the engine around would be entirely impractical for pumping a somewhat steady stream. Chlorinated water would also make for poor steam, I imagine.
I guess driving a scrubber back and forth would be possible, but I could do that more efficiently by hand. I drink less water, eat less coal, don't require rails and skilled operators and I'm easier to transport to the site. I'm not sure how the carbon footprint for a human compares to that of extracting and processing iron, but it won't be favourable if at least one human is involved.
The scrubber couldn't be as large and heavy though. If you need a heavy scrubber, you'd also need a powerful motivator. That's where a steam engine might have an edge over me: sheer power output.
To match that, you'd have to employ and pay multiple people. So if the steam engine's rent seems cheaper than that...
There are lists of technology which will work for AI such as programmer. which require analytics of AI and work with that frame of mind.
We were shown the list in my school 15 years ago and told "some day soon AI will take these jobs, so choose wisely" with a rough percentage for each job.
Okay, let AI take my job then, that would happen anyway. Jobs have been gouged ever since society has mutated apart from its basic building blocks. I at least want peace of mind!
Tell us what we're supposed to be excited about?
If you're a white-collar worker, it's either a bludgeon your boss is using to threaten to sack you, or an excuse as to why you should generate 5x more output without any more pay.
If you're a media consumer, it's a fountain of endless low-quality crap. Resources you used to be able to trust are being undermined.
These might be exciting if you're a sociopathic billionaire or wannabe-billionaire, but for the rest of use, the closest to a positive payout we have is a bunch of gacha machines that can produce mediocre graphics/music/text shaped things which might dovetail with what you're doing, until their economic unviability causes them to go out. (I think consumer video gen is already disappearing)
Not sure I'm quite willing to undermine civilization rather than fibd stock photos for my blog posts.
You love to see it.
Llms are the tech, which can be interesting.
"AI" is the moron capitalism auto-theft bubble of this stupid shit and cannot go away fast enough.
Our species proved we couldnt even handle the internet or gunpowder.
We know corruption bleeds through and eventually overpowers all good man-made ideas.
When will society genuinely ask themselves if we truly need this stuff to exist and be our best selves?
LLMs have some use cases, just far fewer than the hype fawns over. Automating tedium is a good use; we've been using computers for this for years. Automating creativity and services is terrible, and in the latter case, merely an extension of phone trees that make it impossible to reach a real person.
I have a good example from yesterday: I use CashApp for all of my banking needs, and I get distributions twice a month to cover rent and essentials. Well, yesterday, I had an unexpected charge that was partially reversed but left me in overdraft. I reached out to my mom and explained the situation, at which point begins four fucking hours of hell on both ends, and, of course, customer service tries to keep you in an "AI" loop before letting one talk to a real person.
But surprise! This is another "AI" with more elaborate scripts, each more insulting than the last. Yes, I'm sure I've entered all the information in correctly. Yes, I've tried it multiple times. The issue here is that the app is not doing today what it did yesterday under identical circumstances. No matter how I tried to describe the edge case we'd apparently run into, the chatbot insisted it was user error; everything's fine on their end.
Eventually, I get a link to talk with an alleged "real person," and the process repeats. It doesn't much matter if they're real or not when sticking to the script nets the same results as the first two chatbots.
The error message mom is getting when attempting to send money (and she attempted this multiple times) was "Your app is not up to date; please redownload and try again." And, of course, she had the most recent version and was able to confirm that. Her chatbot experience served only to frustrate her, so I looked at what I could figure out on my end, though she's on iOS, so replicating the issue was impossible.
Eventually, after trying to access my account through the Web portal instead, I run into a prompt telling me I need to create a new $cashtag. What's happened to the one I've been using without issue for years? "Customer service" muses that I did something to my account myself, or that there's been fraud I'd have clearly known about. That's the handle people pay me via, and changing it is not in my interest. But the "AI" knows all, and obviously everything is hunky-dory on their infrastructure end, so it's a me problem. Also, I can't have it back.
After further useless steps I'm guided through, we arrive where we were three fucking hours prior, I finally acquiesce and set up a new tag.
This is when the lightbulb goes off: There's a nonzero chance that my tag being canceled had unexpected downstream effects. On the fourth call with my mom, I tell her I had to pick a new one and share it, suggesting she give it one more try.
And it goes through as expected.
So, the error message she was getting and that chatbots were attempting to fix was a complete red herring. An error message of "the $cashtag you selected is no longer active" would have been useful. The "AI" being aware of the incorrect error message would have also been useful. Telling me that my tag had been canceled to start instead of walking me in circles, uninstalling, reinstalling, clearing cache, the whole nine yards, would have been useful.
Instead, two people spent four hours each trying to figure out two problems, one caused by the other. A full workday on a Saturday dedicated to troubleshooting issues the bots were blithely unaware of, even though it's literally impossible this is the first time these specific issues came up at the company. That's more than $200 of free labour to arrive somewhere that should have been known to the system.
This is what you cause when you don't use LLMs as intended.
That said, I still use it as a far more powerful Grammarly, as even on my laptop, I have a nasty propensity for typing totally correct spellings of incorrect words, and it's great as a fresh set of eyes where I'd fill in the word that should have been there upon editing. I generated a server image for a Discord based on an out-of-context line (a comically oversized rooster in an Alpine valley -- taller than the Alps themselves -- looking down on a scale cow, with a far less involved prompt), and there was much mirth and merriment.
But these are no-stakes, low-impact uses. As soon as it's adjacent to something mission critical, not just for a business but also their customers, the level of scrutiny for software needs to be as high as it was pre-ChatGPT. And since that negates imagined cost-savings, ain't gonna happen.
You can eventually work a screw into some materials with a hammer and insistence that it's an improvement over a bespoke fucking screwdriver, but the substrate is damaged as a result.
Just so with LLMs. But more and more people are expected to use them in a work environment without anything approaching sufficient training, often in situations where they aren't domain experts. Garbage in, garbage out.
Every 3 days those goofs are telling us some new BS (it is good enough to improve itself, it is too powerful, it is whatever so watch out because now it is better at everything) only for it to...not happen. They try to scare people into giving up and giving in. Of course people don't like it. There is nothing sadder than an individual or company declaring that they like AI.
The main issue is that these Parasites can't hide their glee at replacing as many workers as possible, so they can keep all those paychecks as profit. They are pushing it hard, but we can all see that they don't give a rats ass about it being better, or making life easier, it's ONLY about how AI is going to boost profits through the stratosphere, and make them all Trillionaires.
And it's OBVIOUS to EVERYBODY that's the PRIMARY advantage of AI. When these jackals start extolling the great societal benefits at a graduation ceremony, it's like the Groom telling his wife on the wedding night how fuckable all the bridesmaids were, and then wondering why his new Bride is pissed off at him.
In fairness, I was naked in the hot-tub bath in the honeymoon suite with the maid of honour at one point during the afterparty. With the door open, of course.
"people have turned against AI" is an ... interesting framing, when the same article says that they're using AI more than ever. I can't quite believe that the bosses of ~60% of workers are forcing them to use it.
I can't quite believe that the bosses of ~60% of workers are forcing them to use it.
Ummm...except, they are. On top of the fact that AI is being implemented internally, all across most businesses...everything you do as a consumer, is also being integrated with AI. We are all literally "being forced to use it". In most cases, you can't even opt-out.
Some companies literally have AI minimum use quotas and will fire you if you don't use genAI enough
My company just implemented AI directly into our payroll system. Now, instead of looking up our information using the old UI interface, we have an app that's basically just an AI chat bot that we have to ask for information. No more pages to look up...just, "how many vacation hours do I have left?", or "show me my pay stubs for (enter date range here)."
Technically, this makes everyone at our company a part of the statistical group that's "using AI more than ever before", and none of us had a choice in the matter.
Try to jailbreak it into giving you more time off.
That's a reasonable use of a chatbot, to my mind. Payroll systems have historically been Byzantine, so being able to ask a question and get an accurate response due to database tie-in can shed friction. That said, available vacation hours, at least historically, was often inaccurate because of data-processing time. HR or IT still needs to input correct information to spit out a correct result.
That’s a reasonable use of a chatbot, to my mind.
Except, consider that the user just browsed to the vacation page to find that information previously. One click. Easy peasy.
Now they must interact with it by typing commands, like they're playing an old Infocom game: "ASK PAYROLL BOT FOR AVAILABLE VACATION HOURS." And sometimes it's hard for humans to know what to ask and how to ask it. It's much more user-friendly to just have something to click.
I don't know what payroll systems you've used, but viewing that info in all the ones I've experienced involved drilling down through multiple menus with useless indicator icons. Just navigating to the correct page took far more time than typing "show available vacation time."
I guess it's about AI being shaved down throat for financial reasons. I use AI as I perceive it as a tool among other tools, but I also I switched to Linux because I don't want AI to be shoved down my throat.
It's all seo and marketing.
If you want something connected to honesty you aren't going to find it within this system.
And also... I really don't believe that this Ai marketing and the bubble is actually being used to influence people to accept chatgpt or consumer grade ai product. That's just a front to cover for building ai surveillance data centers. And it's clearly working.
It's as if even the anti Ai side is just a distraction from the bigger issues which probably stem from the lack of honest humanity left within the entire structure we are forced to live within. There are more fundamental, and bigger, fish to fry. But everyone is terrified by the truth of what that would entail. It's like a pre built loop of consumerism and escapism people are trapped in because reality is actually chaos that most people are too scared to live within.
Good, but it’s still not enough
The only reason to use AI is because it's running on your computer at home. Otherwise, nah, I pass.