No thanks. I’m perfectly capable of coming up with incorrect answers on my own.
you're right tho
Even non tech people I talk to know AI is bad because the companies are pushing it so hard. They intuit that if the product was good, they wouldn't be giving it away, much less begging you to use it.
You're right - and even if the user is not conscious of this observation, many are subconsciously behaving in accordance with it. Having AI shoved into everything is offputting.
Speaking of off-putting, that friggin copilot logo floating around on my Word document is so annoying. And the menu that pops up when I paste text — wtf does "paste with Copilot" even mean?
One of the mistakes they made with AI was introducing it before it was ready (I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible). It will be extremely difficult for any AI product to shake the reputation that AI is half-baked and makes absurd, nonsensical mistakes.
This is a great example of capitalism working against itself. Investors want a return on their investment now, and advertisers/salespeople made unrealistic claims. AI simply isn’t ready for prime time. Now they’ll be fighting a bad reputation for years. Because of the situation tech companies created for themselves, getting users to trust AI will be an uphill battle.
Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.
iOS still doesn’t do what was sold in the ads, almost a full year later.
Edit: also things like email summary don’t work, the email categories are awful, notification summaries are straight up unhinged, and I don’t think anyone asked for image playground.
Insert 'Full Self Driving' Here.
Also, outlook's auto alt text function told me that a conveyor belt was a picture of someone's screen today.
capitalism working against itself
More like: capitalism reaching its own logical conclusion
(I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible)
It was ready for some specific purposes but it is being jammed into everything. The problem is they are marketing it as AGI when it is still at the random fun but not expected to be accurate phase.
The current marketing for AI won't apply to anything that meets the marketing in the foreseeable future. The desired complexity isn't going to exist in silicone at a reasonable scale.
I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible
To be honest it feels more and more like this is simply not possible, especially regarding the chatbots. Under those are LLMs, which are built by training neural networks, and for the pudding to stick there absolutely needs to have this emergent magic going on where sense spontaneously generates. Because any entity lining up words into sentences will charm unsuspecting folks horribly efficiently, it’s easy to be fooled into believing it’s happened. But whenever in a moment of despair I try and get Copilot to do any sort of task, it becomes abundantly clear it’s unable to reliably respect any form of requirement or directive. It just regurgitates some word soup loosely connected to whatever I’m rambling about. LLMs have been shoehorned into an ill-fitted use case. Its sole proven usefulness so far is fraud.
There was research showing that every linear jump in capabilities needed exponentially more data fed into the models, so seems likely it isn't going to be possible to get where they want to go.
I think people care.
They care so much they actively avoid them.
Oh we care alright. We care about keeping it OUT of our FUCKING LIVES.
AI is going to be this eras Betamax, HD-Dvd, or 3d TV glasses. It doesn't do what was promised and nobody gives a shit.
Betamax had better image and sound, but was limited by running time and then VHS doubled down with even lower quality to increase how many hours would fit on a tape. VHS was simply more convenient without being that much lower quality for normal tape length.
HD-DVD was comparable to BluRay and just happened to lose out because the industry won't allow two similar technologies to exist at the same time.
Neither failed to do what they promised. They were both perfectly fine technologies that lost in a competition that only allows a single winner.
BluRay was slightly better if I recall correctly. With the rise in higher definition televisions, people wanted to max out the quality possible, even if most people (still) can’t tell the difference
Blu-ray also had the advantage of PS3 supporting the format without the need for an external disc drive.
Dude don’t throw Betamax in there, that was a better product than the VHS. AI is just ass.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I honestly can't think of any practical use case for AI in my day-to-day routine.
ML algorithms are just fancy statistics machines, and to that end, I can see plenty of research and industry applications where large datasets need to be assessed (weather, medicine, ...) with human oversight.
But for me in my day to day?
I don't need a statistics bot making decisions for me at work, because if it was that easy I wouldn't be getting paid to do it.
I don't need a giant calculator telling me when to eat or sleep or what game to play.
I don't need a Roomba with a graphics card automatically replying to my text messages.
Handing over my entire life's data just so a ML algorithm might be able to tell me what that one website I visited 3 years ago that sold kangaroo testicles was isn't a filing system. There's nothing I care about losing enough to go the effort of setting up copilot, but not enough to just, you know, bookmark it, or save it with a clear enough file name.
Long rant, but really, what does copilot actually do for me?
Reducing computer performance:
Turbo button 🤝 AI button
That's not fair! I care! A lot!
Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I've finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)
Imagine that, a new fledgingly technology hamfistedly inserted into every part of the user experience, while offering meager functionality in exchange for the most aggressive data privacy invasion ever attempted on this scale, and no one likes it.
WTF is an AI computer? Is that some marketing bullshit?
afaict they're computers with a GPU that has some hardware dedicated to the kind of matrix multiplication common in inference in current neural networks. pure marketing BS because most GPUs come with that these days, and some will still not he powerful enough to be useful
@Matriks404 @dgerard got it in one! It's MS's marketing campaign for PCs with a certain amount of "AI" FLOPS
Y'all remember when 3D TVs were going to be revolutionary?
A friend of mine is a streamer. On his discord, the topic of the Switch 2 came up, and one of his fans stated their desire for it to support 3D TV. Rather than saying my gut reaction -- "are you crazy?" -- I simply asked why. I consider it a great moment of personal self control.
It's not care. Its want. We don't want AI.
FR I think more people actively dislike it, which is a form of care.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and everyone else is hyping up AI. Consumers are not really seeing much benefit by making everything AI-ified. Executives are raving over it but maybe aren't realize that people outside of the C-suite aren't that excited? Having it shoved in our faces constantly, or crammed in places companies hope they can save money is not helping either.
It's FOMO amplified by capitalistic competition. No company wants to be the one left behind. I guarantee Google, Meta and even OpenAI know the limitations of their products. They don't care, they just want to be at least as good as their competitors, because they assume at some point one of them will reach "good enough." And at that moment, if they're not in position to grab market share, they'll lose a once-in-a-generation chance for billions or trillions of dollars in value.
We're the casualties, because the people in the middle - companies with no AI but whose C-suite buys into the hype - demand we use unworkable products because they're too willfully ignorant to know they're not panaceas to whatever is bothering those C-suite execs at the moment.
My problem is that it's not that fucking useful. I got the Pixel 9 specifically because of its advertised AI chip for the assistant and I swear it's just gotten worse since the Pixel 7. I used to be able to ask Google anything through the assistant, and now 90% of my questions are answered with "can't find the information."
They also advertised (or at least heavily alluded to) the use of the AI chip when you are in low network areas but it works just as good outside of 4g+ coverage as it ever did without the stupid chip.
Whats the point of adding AI branded nonsense if there's no practical use for it. And that doesn't even start to cover the issues with AI's reliability as a source of information. Garbage in = garbage out.
AI on phones peaked with MS Contana on W10 mobile circa 2014. "Remind me to jack off when I'm home". And it fucking did what i wanted. I didn't even have to say words, i could type it into a text box... it also worked offline.
Bad news for people who use google: they've removed the same feature, so their assistant is more useless than Cortana a decade ago (only a mild exaggeration)
Fuck AI
I would actively avoid the extra hassle of an AI computer.
I care. I care enough to crater copilot.
The only real purpose of AI is to get sweet VC money. Beyond that...
Do they care? No! Will they push more AI? Yes! Will they listen to the consumers? I don't think so.
Same thing happens with lot of products over the years. Companies push new stuff that we don't want, and a year later becomes a regular thing! They push AI day by day, from websites AI chat help to in app AI assistant. Do consumers like it? No, but still you gonna find it everywhere! and now they push it in computers and looks what it happens! No sales!
Call me crazy, but at some point, they need to look at their data or their consumers and do the right thing.
It's maddening that they did actually take away the headphone jack from all modern phones and there's nothing we can do about it even though it objectively sucks
The average technical person realises ai is shit.
The average non-technical person doesn't need an ai computer, because chatgpt is free.
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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