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Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents (www.wired.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 182 points 1 month ago (63 children)

What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don't do that, we don't want them or their "agents."

For fuck's sake.

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  • [–] 71 points 1 month ago (12 children)

    To be clear, "normal" people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won't shut up about them.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    99% nudify apps

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Nah, not for mosy people. I think that's actually more common with people who use local models (maybe that's what you were saying though?). My, albeit few, interractions with "normal" people have been pretty scary with how much they use AI in many ways. Most of my friends are very tech savvy and my family goes to me about stuff like this so they don't use any either (because I've taught them, not just told, how bad and dangerous it can be). It's not very often I talk with anyone else about this but, as said, the times I have it's been real scary.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Doesn't help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.

    Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of "don't be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them" that customization isn't making a damn agent, it's adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I've been "adjusting the prompt and saving changes" with Claude code for the past 9 months (it's not ready to have a baby yet), it has been steadily improving over those months, a lot of that seems to be in the models and harnesses provided by Anthropic, but not a small part of it is the customization of the prompt to do what I want the first time instead of making me redirect it constantly.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    lol it's true. My mom sends me screenshots of AI chats every fucking day.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Just the other day I was pissed off. My dad missed some deadline to request money from the government. I told him to call them, they might be able to do something anyways. He was like "nah, they'll never do that, why would they have a deadline if they do it after the deadline yadayada"
    Then a few days later he told me "oh that gpt thing told me to just try, I might be lucky and they pay out even after the deadline, he was very reassuring, so I'll try calling them!"

    Man chatgpt would fucking tell you to try your luck if you're 12 years over the deadline, but god forbid your son tells you the exact same thing and you even consider calling them lol

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    There was some research recently that showed the same thing. People who are "dug in" on a topic, usually a political topic, will shut down when a person tries to persuade them of an alternative, but are much more open to hear the same arguments from AI and actually reconsider their position.

    I believe this is a big reason why X-Ai was so important for conservatives to get off of the ground, they were afraid all the crazy would start wearing off if people asked the "woke" models for the truth.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as "AI". I think it's fairly useful now, and suspect we're at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.

    What I don't like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo's front end, which anonymizes prompts.

    As for agents, it's pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I'm confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Same, it's a tool everyone will use one day, it's just bad today.

    Remember the first mobile phones? Sucked dirt, and we're stupidly expensive. Then they got cheaper and better, today they almost give them away and the charge lasts a week and you can phone almost anywhere on the planet.

    "AI" will be the same, in some years I guess.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    If it does get better, it will be with technology other than LLMs, because LLMs don't get cheaper per unit of usage as usage scales.

    I suspect that we won't have actually useful AI of some sort until LLMs get out of the way. They're sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    And it's also not like the hardware is improving much either, we've effectively hit the wall performance wise with processors and RAM.

    That's literally what all these datacenters are for, we can't scale the individual computer performance up, so instead we build more and more of them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I bet you can make a cheap "AI" chip for using the trained model, it seems the training is the ruinous thing today.

    Remember when they predicted heavier than air flight to be centuries in the future just the week before the wright brothers flew? Me neither I wasn't born then, but it's an interesting example IMO.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    The difference here is that a cheap AI chip won't fix the fundamental software problems with LLMs. We might reach a point where they can produce output faster, but as long as what's actually going on is probabilistic next-token prediction in a static vector database, that just means faster mistakes as well.

    There's an odd psychosis going around where people become convinced that actual AGI can be derived from this technology. People who should know better just shut their brains off when it comes to token prediction, because they've had very compelling "conversations" with the predictor. They forget that the actual model is static, has no internal state, and doesn't even "remember" what you've said to it.

    What it has is a context window, and your entire conversational history - both what you've said and how it has responded - gets shoved into that window when you interact with it. (Or depending on the chatbot harness, saved in "memory" files that it can retrieve when the context contents indicate that would be useful.)

    That's why the bots seem so weirdly forgetful one moment and like they've got photographic memories the next. Stuff that is in the context window and has its "attention" will influence the tokens it produces, but whether or not the right things are in the context window and it's including them in the token prediction is a crapshoot.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I know right. "AGI" !!! Nah that won't happen tomorrow Kevin.

    But with thousands of the smartest engineers and researchers working on it, we might get a smarter AI. I mean the human brain thinks in similar ways. +a lot of other stuff of course, but maybe that stuff can be emulated, simulated, for "the next step" forward (still no agi lol).

    Interesting times lie ahead.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.

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