a lot of people i know irl including me like ai,however when i use reddit or youtube or whatever i see a dozen ai bad content. why is that? surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Technical people have been through many hype cycles. Cloud, machine leaning, big data, blockchain, and now ‘AI’. We are just tired of marketing people lying and overhyping technology.
The cloud did not save us money, it costs more to run in Azure, AWS, GCP.
Big Data was social media companies trying to justify sucking up every scrap of data they can.
Machine learning was trying to make algorithms appear smarter at spotting trends and being more reactive.
Blockchain has turned into a massive scam platform with crypto currency and nfts. Any regular database with an Audit table will outperform them. ‘AI’ is shaping up to be a justification for lot of job losses for little to no gain as shown by articles from Gardner and The RegisterCoding tools by ‘AI’ companies are reintroducing flaws that we have solved because they are trained on Stack Overflow questions not answers.
Creative ‘AI’ tools do a bad job at producing acceptable output without hyper specific instructions to not have an extra arm or finger.
AI crawlers are slamming every webpage online in the hopes to update models with the latest data even though the data is unchanging.Hype cycles come and go, but cloud compute is still around because it has real advantages, and big data solves real scaling problems.
You left out the biggest hype cycle. The dot-com boom wasted a ton of cash but also created Google Amazon and Netflix.
it has real advantages for some scenarios. finding those scenarios (and by extension, everything it’s not good for) is usually what makes tech bubbles burst.
I miss having a big private cluster.
I do not miss fighting with other departments for a share of that one cluster.
I definitely do not miss waiting months for capacity to be added.
That it costs my employer a bit more is a decision made above my pay grade.
meanwhile we’re running our entire infra and support for hundreds of international customers on one of those old flat lenovo thinkstations.
we only just got a vps, because of routing issues.
Different scale needs different tech.
I’ve been at F500 companies but it sounds like you’re at a smaller business.
i’ve been all over. the last five years were spent partly with one other person in a garage, partly at a 100ish people biolab, partly at a high-security pan-european ID provider, partly at the world’s largest truck manufacturer.
The dot-com boom
In fairness I was in school for those so I have no experience in them. While I was in the workforce for the others.
I am curious what advantages the cloud offers that a colo in a DC with proper planning can’t.
The advantage is you don’t need to plan and provision your own infrastructure in a DC because the vendor handles it.
That flexibility is worth serious money.
Personally I don’t call that an advantage. Paying 3-5x times in monthly fees over the course of 5 years just so someone else can lifecycle the hardware. That doesn’t even include the performance hit from using shared infrastructure compared to dedicated infrastructure.
Look at 37Signals saving $7 million over 5 years after leaving AWS.
Because a lot of current “AI” is a solution in search of a problem, being shoved into every product and hyped up as the next revolution, at a great expense. Even without the obvious environmental and financial impact, it is a huge nuisance. So people are upset and annoyed by it.
You could ask the same about pop-up ads, invasive apps, spammers, scammers, mandated age verification, Amazon’s treatmeant of employees, and so on. No one would defend bad choices made by powerful people.
because AI is primarily being used against workers of all kinds, accelerates climate change, provides cover for nations to use violence, and gives state bureaucracies excuses to screw us over by having supposedly “neutral” AI make decisions
Personally I’m so anti Ai because there’s so much pro talk. Imagine if anything wrong in your life, some insufferable, rich, out of touch jackass said “have you tried hitting it with a hammer? Here, try this hammer. It’s great. Hammers will solve every problem in your life!”
Hammers are fine. They have a purpose. I use them when I need them. I don’t need EVERY HAMMER MAKER TO PROSYLTIZE HAMMERS AT ME. They don’t actually want to make my life better. They just want me to use THEIR hammer so they can make more money. It’s not about solving a problem. It’s just the latest product in a greedy aristocratic society.
AI IS GREAT EVERYONE USES IT TRUST ME BRO IT’S SO GREAT JUST GIVE IT A TRY BRO TRUST ME BRO JUST ONE TOKEN BRO ONE SQUARE KILOMETER OF RAINFOREST IS ALL IT TAKES AND ALL THE BIG TITTY MICKEY MOUSE JPGS CAN BE YOURS PLEASE JUST USE AI the chatbot is holding my family hostage please.
Dammit. You won me over with big titty Mickey Mouse.
Personally I’m so anti Ai because there’s so much pro talk.
That’s not a great reason. That’s just an emotional reaction.
A good reason to be against AI is that it’s optimistic promise is that it’ll put lots of people out of work, and cause those left to think less. That’s the positive scenario. They only get worse from there.
It’s not just emotional. It’s historical. Everyone in my life whose tried to shove a product down my throat like this has been some sort of garbage personality. People who actually want to help will let you refuse them. People who want to leech money from you won’t take no for an answer. In my life,it’s always been a scam.
Personal history creates our emotional reactions. That doesn’t change the logic.
Being widely recomended doesn’t equate to being bad, no matter your personal experience. Lots of great things are widely recomendated.
Lol so we’re not supposed to filter our lives through our past experiences? I let go of this apple, but since I can’t judge it against my historical experience, it might not fall to the ground!
It wouldn’t be good to assume that, if apples fall up all the time also. In that world it would bad to use your personal experience of aples always falling down as the benchmark, since others have seen the opposite also.
But since in our reality, nobody anywhere has seen an apple fall a direction other than the pull of gravity. In that situation where your personal experience lines with everyone elses also, you aren’t just using your experience you’re using everyone’s. That’s a good reason to believe the apple will fall to the ground.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
3D Televisions; Facebook Metaverse; Trump Inaugurations; NFTs; the original Segway; Pets.com; Theranos; Beanie Babies; Fyre Festival; Enron…
All epic failures that made a few already filthy rich people a little more money before destroying the lives of many others.
People don’t like that generative AI is based on stolen content. People don’t like that it’s being forced into everything. People don’t like that it isn’t even good at most of the things it tries to do. People definitely hate it’s attempts at ‘music’ and ‘art.’ People don’t like it’s immense energy costs. People don’t like that it might render them, and everyone else, unemployed. People don’t like that they’re owned by oligarchs.
Oligarchs invested trillions in the hope of firing us all and no longer paying us wages. You need to get some class consciousness.
People don’t like that generative AI is based on stolen content.
Long before AI, people on the Internet were fairly likely to dislike copyright and correctly insist that copying is not theft.
How the times have changed.
I dislike copyright when it protects corporations.
I think copyright is good when it prevents individuals from getting exploited by corporations.
It’s not so much the stolen content that’s the problem, it’s them selling it on, or even more egregiously, replacing the people they stole the content from originally.
Stealing from rich person = good Stealing from poor person= bad
Robin hood has been a thing for centuries
I fail to see the relevance because both AI companies and other Internet users certainly sometimes (arguably) infringe copyrights held by rich people and sometimes those held by poor people.
i still do that,thats why idc that ai uses “stolen” content. bec i too pirate,if i can pirate then they can do it too.
you know how people pirating music did very little to hurt music sales, but how spotify has lowered the income of most of the world’s musicians?
it’s like that.
Been pirating books for a while. And in doing so, found a few authors I really like, so I ended up preordering some of their books and even recommending them to friends. AI doesn’t ever preorder their books, and will probably not recommend them to random people without being paid to advertise by the author. Which is why the argument of, “I pirate, so what’s the difference if AI does it?” kinda falls flat in my mind.
This is what frustrates me, the lack of any nuance whatsoever. I run local models, and am passionately against oligarchy. I don’t support them in the least.
My inner child still can’t get over how freakin cool AI actually is, at the technical level. And all anyone hears when I say how amazing the actual tech is, they tune me out and talk about whatever it is they’re trying to talk about.
And who made your local models?
That’s the rub. Local models have some positives, but overall the source for them is a negative. And the worst thing is, we can’t fix that now. We can’t undo what’s been done, we can’t start over with new data that is fair, and we can’t seem to get AI out of where it’s been jammed in.
What? I didn’t pay anything. I didn’t contribute to any oligarchy. What is your point by asking that question?
this is just the internet these days, people just go out in search of people to yell at so they can feel something
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Oh, my sweet summer child.
“They” didn’t invest trillions of their own money in it. They invested a few million, built up some hype, and got other people to invest more, so now their millions are billions. And they are smart enough to sell before it all collapses.
They make their billions even though it’s garbage. Heck, they make billions because they know it’s garbage before everyone else does.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Do you realize how much money they invested in the slave trade?
Or the Opium trade?
Or Epstein’s Island?
Just because it CAN make money, doesn’t mean it should.
a lot of people i know irl including me like ai,
Yeah, no offense but you certainly write like someone who likes AI. I’ll give you that.
Odds are you like AI because it makes you feel like you can do things that you couldn’t in the past due to a lack of talent or skills.
however when i use reddit or youtube or whatever i see a dozen ai bad content. why is that?
Because AI sucks, both in terms of the quality of what is produced as well as the effort by which people use it to produce “content”.
It’s primary real use is for fraudulence and con artistry. Furthermore, it’s a direct affront to humanity and culture. It is the for-profit technological strip mining of all of human knowledge, art and creativity for the benefit of the ultra wealthy investor class, in spite of the rules regarding intellectual property that they themselves created. It’s also intellectually lazy, often wrong, and making us all stupider. Finally, it is an exploitative technology that is being used to replace and subvert human workers.
In other words, generative AI is practically indefensible. There’s almost nothing good to say about it, so what do you expect people to say?
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Are you familiar with the concept of an investment bubble?
The basic idea is that investors at large end up putting waaaaay too much money into a speculative asset, to the point where its market value greatly exceeds its practical/intrinsic value to the economy itself. We’ve seen this happen countless times in modern human history, from real estate bubbles, to the “.com bubble”, to Dutch tulips.
In capitalism, value is subjective. You might value something a lot more than I do, or vice versa. But it’s also possible for things to be generally overvalued or undervalued by society as a whole.
Regardless how any of us feel about AI (for or against), it is objectively overvalued by investors. Anthropic was recently valued at nearly a $1,000,000,000,000, roughly the same market value as massive giants like Samsung or Walmart, despite being a company that has only ever lost money.
Because generative AI is absolute garbage, and the investors are dumbfucks.
Investing trillions in garbage is what makes the world go around.
I personally don’t like it because it’s a combination of unreliable and bland that I just don’t want anything to do with. I have no valid use for it that a search engine can’t do anyway.
Then there’s all the planet-burning/economy-wrecking stuff that I’m not all that keen on either.
I think a lot of it is the neverending push to put it everywhere by the billionaires that are counting on it to make them the first quadrillionaire. AI-first browsers, AI search, AI assistants, AI support, AI therapy, AI cameras, AI birdfeeders, AI healthcare, AI price manipulation at the grocery store, you can’t buy memory because AI, false arrests because of faulty AI facial recognition, etc. Then add in the surveillance factor where we are being turned into a fascist police state.
The pushback is because they aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they are turning everything they touch into shit, releasing stuff that’s clearly not ready for the real world in an effort to stay ahead of everyone one else in the contract race.
People invest in AI because they think they will make money on it someday. And some of them will, and some have.
I’ve used AI and I’ve had good and bad results. I do feel like AI is a net negative to humanity. It could be a net positive, but it’s doing so much bad stuff it’s hard to see the good.
The question is… do you just like AI as a concept? Or maybe you use ChatGPT or something like it? Or are you one of the ones actually paying for it? I think that’s an important distinction. I use it sometimes, but I’ve never paid for AI. I can say I’m anti-AI because I don’t like what it’s done to computer and game console prices. Or that I support artists. I can say I’m not anti-AI because I have ChatGPT on my phone and have used it to make things occasionally. I don’t hate it, I hate what people do with it. I don’t pay for it, but I can see the utility sometimes.
A good example of how I feel about it is the phone OpenAI is planning on making. I feel like on top of charging you for the phone, and on top of your cell bill, they will charge you to use the phone itself because it’s AI. And I think that’s horseshit. Even if they don’t charge at first, they’ll hook you and ask you to pay later. But they won’t give you a refund if you don’t. You just paid for a paperweight. Because what’s so bad about using an iPhone (or Android) for ChatGPT? Why do they need a whole phone? Because they want locked-in customers.
Because the reasons to oppose AI are complicated and hard to understand, so they need to be explained. The only reason to like AI is if you just look at it and assume it works. Explaining why it isn’t answering your question accurately, why it isn’t “thinking”, why it doesn’t understand your prompt, why it’s a waste of resources- these are all complicated arguments that require explanation.
