I think there is potential for using AI as a knowledge base. If it saves me hours of having to scour the internet for answers on how to do certain things, I could see a lot of value in that.
The problem is that generative AI can’t determine fact from fiction, even though it has enough information to do so. For instance, I’ll ask Chat GPT how to do something and it will very confidently spit out a wrong answer 9/10 times. If I tell it that that approach didn’t work, it will respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t do [x] with [y] because [z] reasons.” The reasons are often correct but ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent” enough to ascertain that an approach will fail based on data that it already has before suggesting it.
It will then proceed to suggest a variation of the same failed approach several more times. Every once in a while it will eventually pivot towards a workable suggestion.
So basically, this generation of AI is just Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Able to to sting together coherent sentences of mostly bullshit.
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No shit Sherlock
In other news, AI bros convince CEOs and investors that polls saying people don’t like AI are out of touch with reality and those people actually want more AI, as proven by an AI that only outputs what those same AI bros want.
Just waiting for that to pop up in the news some time soon.
That’s literally the sales response to this. “People don’t really know what they want until we sell it to them”
It’s pretty fucking gross.
“If I asked people what they want, they would say, better AI”
MBA tech bro: “so … that means what they really want is the same shitty AI, right?”
My brother in the fediverse, ceos and investors are the AI bros
More like people know when it’s just being used as a buzzword and are smart to avoid when that’s (often) the case
I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
Seeing the whole thing as Knowingly Trading in Hype is actually a really good insight.
Certainly it neatly explains a lot.
Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.
If the whole sector turns out to be garbage it won’t matter which particular set of companies within it you invest in; you will get burned if you cash out after everyone else.
OpenAI will fail. StabilityAI will fail. CivitAI will prevail, mark my words.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
I’m not. My particular beef is with is with plastics and toxic materials and chemicals being ubiquitous in everything I buy. Systemic problem that I can do almost nothing about apart from make things myself out of raw materials.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
“You’re always trying to make everything just a little bit worse so that you can feel good about having a lot more of it. I love it. It’s so human!” - The Good Place
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
Yeah, can make some products better but most of the products these days that use AI, it doesn’t actually need them. It’s annoying to use products that actively shovel AI when it doesn’t even need it.
Ya know what pfoduct MIGHT be better with AI?
Toasters. They have ONE JOB, and everybody agrees their toaster is crap. But you’re not going to buy another toaster, because that too will be crap.
How about a toaster, that accurately, and evenly toasts your bread, and then DOESN’T give you a heart attack at 5am when you’re still half asleep???
IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK???
Sweet, I’m the one who gets to link the obligatory Technology Connections toaster video!
Aw man, now I want this toaster.
I said the exact same thing months ago when I saw that video. I don’t even use a toaster.
This is the visionary we need. Take my venture capital millions on a magic carpet ride, time traveler!
Nah. We already have AI toasters, and they’re ambitious, but rubbish.
Adding AI is just serious overkill for a toaster, especially when it wouldn’t add anything meaningful, not compared to just designing the toaster better.
It only needs one string of conditions that it can understand: don’t catch on fire. Turn yourself off IF smoke.
AI toasters are a Bad Idea
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
That’s an even worse ‘use case’ than I could imagine.
HR should be one of the most protected fields against AI, because you actually need a human resource.
And “prompt engineer” is so stupid. The “job” is only necessary because the AI doesn’t understand what you want to do well enough. The only productive guy you could hire would be a programmer or something, that could actually tinker with the AI.
God that sounds like hell.
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
My doorbell camera manufacturer now advertises their products as using, “Local AI” meaning, they’re not relying on a cloud service to look at your video in order to detect humans/faces/etc. Honestly, it seems like a good (marketing) move.
They just don’t get it. Once everyone will use AI toilet and AI toothbrush they will sing a different tune.
I definitely need a toilet that remember and analyze my shit. Yes.
They will try to sell it to you as a way to detect any possible health issues early. But it will just be used to analyze you food patterns to shove mcdonalds ads
too bad I already eat mcdonalds all days
Not sure what happened to it, but this was a thing already in 2005.
For some reason I imagine a toilet that automates a stool test and blood test and gives you a health report every month.
If the toilet is receiving a blood sample I have bad news for your monthly health report.
A stool test sure, but I’m not going to trust a toilet to use a sterile needle to draw blood.
I love skibidAI toilet
Cue Nicholas Cage face
YA DON’T SAY!!!
No shit, because we all see that AI is just technospeak for “harvest all your info”.
Doubt the general consumer thinks that, in sure most of them are turned away because of the unreliability and how ham fisted most implementations are
+ a monthly service fee
for the price of a cup of coffee
Yes the cost is sending all of your data to the harvest, but what price can you put on having a virtual dumbass that is frequently wrong?
Not to mention it’s usually dog shit out put
I refuse to use Facebook anymore, but my wife and others do. Apparently the search box is now a Meta AI box, and it pisses them every time. They want the original search back.
That’s another thing companies don’t seem to understand. A lot of them aren’t creating new products and services that use ai, but are removing the existing ones, that people use daily and enjoy, and forcing some ai alternative. Of course people are going to be pissed of!
We aren’t allowed new things. That might change their perfectly balanced money making machine.
And making search worse so it can pretend to be an ex is not what I or anyone is looking for in the search box.
To be fair, I love my dog but he has the same output 🤷
But no one is investing billions into your dog’s shit, are they?
He’s open to investment 🤷
More like “instead of making something that gets the job done, expect pur unfinished product to complain and not do whatever it’s supposed to”. Or just plain false advertising.
Either way, not a good look and I’m glad it’s not just us lemmings who care.
This is because the AI of today is a shit sandwich that we’re being told is peanut butter and jelly.
For those who like to party: All the current “AI” technologies use statistics to approximate semantics. They can’t just be semantic, because we don’t know how meaning works or what gives rise to it. So the public is put off because they have an intuitive sense of the ruse.
As long as the mechanics of meaning remain a mystery, “AI” will be parlor tricks.
And I don’t mean to denigrate data science. It is important and powerful. And real machine intelligence may one day emerge from it (or data science may one day point the way). But data science just isn’t AI.
AI in consumer devices at this point stands for data harvesting, wonky functionality and questionable usefulness. No wonder nobody wants that crap.
As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:
Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.
And workers…


She looks so done with it. It is amazing how tone deaf and incapabale of detecting emotions the higher ups must have been to OK that image. Not blaming any one lower to approve this, they are probably all fed up too and were happy to use this.
Plus, it’s way too cold at her vast and empty warehouse hot desk, because she’s wearing at least two sweaters. Please let this lady have a cubicle of her own with a little space heater.
Is that a real copilot ad?
This is the link I had I believe, but it’s not loading for me now. Either it will work for you, or they pulled it. https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/?img_index=1 (comments were brutal IIRC)
Related article about it: https://futurism.com/microsoft-brags-ai-attend-three-meetings
The post is still there.
I just can’t see anyone contributing anything meaningful to a meeting when they’re split across three different conversations. If that’s the case for this hypothetical employee, she’s part of the problem.
I’m never contributing anything meaningful to the meetings I am continuously added to, so it would be nice to have an AI stand in. I could do the goddamn job I originally applied for instead of scrums, special project scrums, and meta scrums.
I just can’t see anyone contributing anything meaningful to a meeting when they’re split across three different conversations. If that’s the case for this hypothetical employee, she’s part of the problem.
I think the whole idea is that the AI handles two of those meetings for her (somehow) But yes, I try to put myself in the mind of someone who is enthused to finally be able to “attend” three meetings at once, and I just can’t. I have a good job that I mostly enjoy, and am usually enthusiastic about my work. No fucking way.
The only people who could want this are the 1% (and wanna-be 1%), and they want it so the rest of us can attend three meetings at once to increase their wealth even faster.
It’s people who brag about how hard they work and how many hours they work when other people say they hate their jobs.
And those people make me laugh. Oh really? You worked 80 hours last week? I “worked” 40, which meant about 4 hours of actual work a day, clocked out at 5 on the dot every day and spent time with my family.
I mean, that’s exactly the advantage of slack over meetings but that doesn’t tickle middle management fancy as much.
Yep. Give me time and I’ll dig up the link.
I barely trust organics. Some CEO being rock hard about his newest repertoire of buzzword doesn’t help.
Think of the savings if you replace the CEO with an AI!
Who would have guessed so?




















