I’ve tried several types of artificial intelligence including Gemini, Microsoft co-pilot, chat GPT. A lot of the times I ask them questions and they get everything wrong. If artificial intelligence doesn’t work why are they trying to make us all use it?
Cause it’s cool
Not to me. If you like it, that’s fine.
Perhaps your personal bias is cluding your judgement a bit here. You don’t seem very open minded about it. You’ve already made up your mind.
Probably but I’m far from the only one.
Who’s making you use it?
It’s useful for lots of things, but it requires a proof reader.
I try to do a search on Chrome and Gemini pops up and start spewing its BS. I go into messages and I try to send a message and gemini pops up and asks me if it wants to send a message for me. No I know how to write my own stupid messages. It’s all integrated into Windows 11, Is integrated into the Bing app. It’s like swatting flies trying to get rid of it.
Move to linux use self hosted foss alternatives. Regain ownership of your digital existance. Stop being a slave to the big tech machine.
Computer? What could this strange device be? Another toy that helped destroy the elder race of man?
I only have a phone
Damn u can rent a vps and ssh from ur phone?
A what now with a thingy?
Ye the flumberboozle
The last big fall in the price of bitcoin, in December '22 was caused by a shift in the dynamics of mining where it became more expensive to mine new btc than what the coin was actually worth. Not only did this plunge the price of crypto it also demolished demand for expensive graphics chips which are repurposed to run the process-heavy complex math used in mining. Cheaper chips, cascading demand and server space that was dedicated to mining related activities threatened to wipe out profit margins in multiple tech sectors.
6 months later, Chat GPT is tolled out by Open AI. The previous limitations on processing capabilities were gone, server space was cheap and the tech was abundant. So all these tech sectors at risk of losing their ass in an overproduction driven recession, now had a way to pump the price of their services and this was to pump AI.
Additionally around this time the world was recovering from covid lockdowns. Increased demand for online services was dwindling (exacerbating the other crisis outlined above) as people were returning to work and spending more time being social IRL rather than using services. Companies had hired lots of new workers: programmers, tech infrastructure workers, etc., yo meet the exploding demand during covid. Now they had too many workers and their profits were being threatened.
The Federal reserve had raised interest rates to stifle continued hiring of new employees. The solution that the fed had come up with in order to stifle inflation was to encourage laying off workers end masse – what Marxists might call restoring the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population – which was substantially depleted during the pandemic. But business owners were reluctant to do this, the tight labor market of the last few years had made business owners and managers skittish about letting people go.
A basic principle at play here, is that new technology is introduced for two reasons only: to sell as a new commodity and (what we are principally concerned with) replacing workers with machines. Another basic principle is that the capitalist system has to have a certain percentage of its population unemployed and hyper exploited in order to keep wages low.
So there was a confluence of incentives here. 1. Inexpensive server space and chips which producers were eager to restore to profitability (or else face drastic consequences) 2. A need to lay off workers in order to stop inflation 3. Incentives for businesses to do so.
Laying off relatively highly paid technical/intellectual labor is a low hanging fruit in this whole equation, and the roll out of AI did just that. Hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers were laid off across a variety of sectors, assured that AI would create so much more efficiency and cut out the need for so many of these workers. So they rolled out this garbage tech that doesn’t work, but everyone in the industry, the media, the government needs it to work, or else they face a massive economic crisis, which had already started with inflation.
At the end of the day its just a massive grift, pushed out to compensate for excessive overproduction driven by another massive grift (cryptocurrency) combined with economic troubles that arose from an insufficient government response to a pandemic that killed millions of people; and rather than take other measures to stifle inflation our leaders in global finance decided to shunt the consequences onto workers, as always. The excuse given was AI, which is nothing more than a predictive text algorithm attached to a massive database created by exploited workers overseas and stolen IPs, and a fuck load of processing power.
I hope someday we can come up with an economic system that is not based purely on profit and the exploitation of human beings. But I don’t know that I’ll live long enough to see it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this exact thought. 😕
Well remember that the shifts that can happen in material conditions and consciousness can happen very quickly. We can’t decide when that is, but we can prepare and build trust until it does occur. Hard to imagine what it would take in the west to see an overthrow of capitalism, all we can do is throw our weight behind where it will have the most effect, hopefully where our talents reside also! Stay optimistic, despite even evidence to the contrary. For the capitalists, its better to believe that the end of the world is coming than to believe a new world is possible. So if nothing else lets give em hell
We’ve already established that language models just make shit up. There is no need to demonstrate. Bad bot!
Excuse me? Are you calling me a bot?
I remember learning about Turing tests to determine whether speech was coming from a machine. Its ironic that in practice its much more common for people to not be able to recognize even a real person.
It’s just that I rarely see a real person be so confidently wrong.
Care to elaborate?
Are you an economist or business professor IRL? Because that was an amazing answer!
No actually I’m mostly self educated. I’m just a tech worker who studies history, social theory and economics, but also does some political organizing. So take it with a grain of salt if you must.
Glad you got something from it, I appreciate the compliment!
Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.
Exactly! the two things are the same phenomenon expressing in two different ways! This is exactly why this is such a mindfuck.
Follow my logic: in the usa by 2022, covid19 had killed over a million people. When you compare this to the total unemployed in the US, that’s not just the governments padded numbers but adding together all the people in prisons, people who stopped looking for work, etc., those covid deaths were about 12% of that unemployed “surplus” population. Again, the system needs a certain number of people to be unemployed, over a million people died, which means over a million “jobs” (this includes employed and unemployed positions within the entire workforce.) At the time the media was calling it “the great resignation,” where employees were just going out and getting better jobs. But where did these jobs come from? Can you really just go out and get a better job any time you want? Of course not. Try searching for a job now, good fucking luck.
Seriously, google “reserve army of labor” if you haven’t already, it explains everything. So as the labor market tightens, consumption increases. People got a better job and can fix their credit up in a few months and get a loan on a car maybe for the first time. People are walking out of the grocery store with more food, or going out to eat more. Retailers notice this and raise prices in response to increased spending. this is a phenomena that Marx wrote about in value price and profit, which I might mention again.
So why were prices going up? Larry Summers gets in front of Jon Stewart and says that increase in spending equals increase in demand, when demand challenges supply then prices go up! Which is what we are generally taught. Except Marx proved that this was not the case, that inflation really was just retailers raising prices due to increase in consumer spending. Its a bit of economic slight of hand that I could explain if you want but for now I’m already long.
The federal reserve says that inflation (which is like you said, mostly driven by companies raising prices to squeeze consumers, and this is proven by the way the fed responds) is out of control, so therefore they are raising interest rates. The way this will control inflation is by making it harder and more expensive for companies to get money for large capital investments. This is all to squeeze the companies to stop hiring (since their p&l is negatively affected) and eliminate excess staff. But the companies are reluctant to let people go/stop hiring because of what they just experienced with a “tight” labor market. They have the incentives or pressures, but they need an excuse, they need a justification. Enter automation with ai. Finally the automation revolution that the media has been threatening workers with for decades is here and sorry can’t halt progress you see (Ned Ludd did nothing wrong.)
Except it isnt all that. In the mean time the economy has adjusted to the depleted reserve population, the corpos were given everything they wanted or needed in order to continue to profit after the death of millions, and a new grift industry has grown up and attracted all this funding and following and clout. Didn’t even have to lose that many jobs, just a bunch of high paid ones. Except interest rates are still elevated so the fed is continuing to keep that pressure on the labor market. Anyway, there’s all of these cascading effects, from systems interacting with each other; therefore its more useful to understand the relation between phenomenon than it often is to try and understand that phenomena on its own.
So you’re right, it was corporate policy, but it isn’t greed necessarily. Definitely greed adjacent though, its like systematic greed. There are incentives and disincentives present within the system. Karl Marx was able to write about the causes of inflation 150 years ago, and they were using the same faulty excuses then. That’s also why the fed decided to raise interest rates, they understood what the problem was, and the fix is and always has been to throw people into unemployment. The system is predictable, but it isn’t rational.
That is a very pessimistic and causal explanation, but you’ve got the push right. It’s marketing that pushes I though, not necessarily tech. AI, as we currently see it in use, is a very neat technological development. Even more so it is a scientific development, because it isn’t just some software, it is a intricate mathematical model. It is such a complex model, that we actually have study it how it even works,because we don’t now the finer details.
It is not a replacement for office workers, it is not the robot revolution and it is not godlike. It is just a mathematical model on a previously unimaginable scale.
“Pessimistic and casual”? You’re gonna make me self conscious.
I’m an AI skeptic. Its too energy hungry and its not doing anything except scraping massive amounts of consumer data. No its not going to replace workers, but then again countless workers were already laid off so it already served its purpose there. Doesn’t have to replace them, just has to purge them but in a systematic way, such that the Fed called for when they started raising interest rates.
Are you an AI Scientist/engineer? If so I’d love to hear more about your work. I’m in tech myself but def not on the bleeding edge of AI.
I appreciate the candid analysis, but perhaps “nothing to see here” (my paraphrase) is only one part of the story. The other part is that there is genuine innovation and new things within reach that were not possible before. For example, personalized learning–the dream of giving a tutor to each child, so we can overcome Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem–is far more likely with LLMs in the picture than before. It isn’t a panacea, but it is certainly more useful than cryptocurrency kept promising to be IMO.
Again, I am highly skeptical that this technology (or any other) can be deployed for such a worthy social mission. I have a cousin who works for a company that produces educational materials for people who need a lot of accommodation, so I know that there are definitely good people in those fields who have the ability, and probably desire, to deploy this tech responsibly and progressively in a manner that helps fulfill that and similar missions, but when I look at things systemically I just don’t see the incentive structures to do so. I won’t deny being a skeptic of AI, especially since my personal and professional experience with it has been like dramatically underwhelming. I’d love to believe things work better than they do, that they even could but with ai I see a lot of promises and nothing in the way of results, outside of modestly entertaining tricks. Although I gotta admit, stable diffusion is really cool. Commercially I think its dogshit but the way it creates the images is fascinating.
What would a good incentive structure look like? For example, would working with public school districts and being paid by them to ensure safe learning experiences count? Or are you thinking of something else?
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I just want to know which elements work best for my Flower Fairies in The Legend of Neverland. And maybe cheese sauce.
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I have no idea how to do that
Woah are you technoreligious? Sure believe what you want and all but that is full tech bro bullshit.
Also on a different not just purely based off of you description doesn’t it seem like being able to just use search engines is easier than figuring out all of these intricacies for most people. If a tool has a high learning curve there is plenty of room for improvement if you don’t plan to use it very frequently. Also every time you get false results consider it equivalent to a major bug does that shed a different light on it for you?
I wish I could upvote twice.
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automation by companies so they can "streamline"their workforces.
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innovation by “teaching” it enough to solve bigger problems (cancer, climate, etc).
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creating a sentient species that is the next evolution of life and watching it systematically eradicate every last human to save the planet.
Terminator was also a documentary
Skynet for the win!
Come with me if you want to live!
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Look at all the comments on this post. We’re not quite there but imagine half of the comments written by Chat GPT and it’s only going to get better.
Does it matter than 50% of them get it wrong?
To advertisers? No.
To the platform designers? Also no.
To idiot users? Still no.
To non-idiot users? Surprisingly no (bc we already left and are here now:-).
To people wanting Reddit to go the distance and boost their stock values, yes. But only in the long-term, which never exists, and in the short-term, no.
Hence, enshittification, delivered in a confident tone.
If artificial intelligence doesn’t work why are they trying to make us all use it?
But it does work. It’s not obviously flawless but it’s orders of magnitude better than it was 10 years ago and it’ll only improve from here. Artificial intelligence is a spectrum. It’s not like we succesfully created it and it ended up sucking. No, it’s like the first cars; they suck compared to what we have now but it’s a huge leap from what we had before.
I think the main issue here is that the common folk has unrealistic expectations about what AI should be. They’re imagining what the “final product” would be like and then comparing our current systems to that. Ofcourse from that perspective it seems like it’s not working or is no good.
We’ll have to wait and see. I’m still not eating rocks or putting glue on my pizza.
It depends on the task you give it and the instructions you provide. I wrote this a while back i find it gives a 10x in capability especially if u use a non aligned llm like dolphin 8x22b.
I have no idea what any of that means. But thanks for the reply.
I’ll just toss in another answer nobody has mentioned yet:
Terminator and Matrix movies were really, really popular. This sort of seeded the idea of it being a sort of inevitable future into the brains of the mainstream population.
The Matrix was a documentary
They were pretty cool when they first blew up. Getting them to generate semi useful information wasn’t hard and anything hard factual they would usually avoid answering or defer.
They’ve legitimately gotten worse over time. As user volume has gone up necessitating faster, shallower model responses, and further training on Internet content has resulted in model degradation as it trains on its own output, the models gradually begin to break. They’ve also been pushed harder than they were meant to, to show “improvement” to investors demanding more accurate human like fact responses.
At this point it’s a race to the bottom on a poorly understood technology. Every money sucking corporation latched on to LLM’s like a piglet finding a teat, thinking it was going to be their golden goose to finally eliminate those stupid whiny expensive workers that always ask for annoying unprofitable things like “paid time off” and “healthcare”. In reality they’ve been sold a bill of goods by Sam Altman and the rest of the tech bros currently raking in a few extra hundred billion dollars.
Now it’s degrading even faster as AI scrapes from AI in a technological circle jerk.
Yes, that’s what they said. I’m starting to think you came here with a particular agenda to push, and I don’t think that’s very polite.
Look it up. Also, they were pushing AI for web searches and I have not had good luck with that. However, I created a document with it yesterday and it came out really good. Someone said to try the creative side and so far, so good.
The person who said AI is neither artificial nor intelligent was Kate Crawford. Every source I try to find is paywalled.
I found a non paywalled article where scientists from Oxford University state that feeding AI synthetic data from other AI models could lead to a collapse.
Ooh an article, thank you
She might be full of crap. I don’t know. You would probably understand it better than I do.
I find that a lot of discourse around AI is… “off”. Sensationalized, or simplified, or emotionally charged, or illogical, or simply based on a misunderstanding of how it actually works. I wish I had a rule of thumb to give you about what you can and can’t trust, but honestly I don’t have a good one; the best thing you can do is learn about how the technology actually works, and what it can and can’t do.
For a while Google said they would revolutionize search with artificial intelligence. That hasn’t been my experience. Someone here mentioned working on the creative side instead. And that seems to be working out better for me.
The natural general hype is not new… I even see it in 1970’s scifi. It’s like once something pierced the long-thought-impossible turing test, decades of hype pressure suddenly and freely flowed.
There is also an unnatural hype (that with one breakthrough will come another) and that the next one might yield a technocratic singularity to the first-mover: money, market dominance, and control.
Which brings the tertiary effect (closer to your question)… companies are so quickly and blindly eating so many billions of dollars of first-mover costs that the corporate copium wants to believe there will be a return (or at least cost defrayal)… so you get a bunch of shitty AI products, and pressure towards them.
Sounds about right
Interestingly, the turing test has been passed by much dumber things than LLMs
I’m not talking about one-offs and the assessment noise floor, more like: “ChatGPT broke the Turing test” (as is claimed). It used to be something we tried to attain, and now we don’t even bother trying to make GPT seem human… we actually train them to say otherwise lest people forget. We figuratively pole-vaulted over the turing test and are now on the other side of it, as if it was a point on a timeline instead of an academic procedure.
True!
One of the few things they’re good at is academic “cheating”. I’m not a fan of how the education industry has become a massive pyramid scheme intended to force as many people into debt as possible, so I see ai as the lesser evil and a way to fight back.
Obviously no one is using ai to successfully do graduate research or anything, I’m just talking about how they take boring easy subjects and load you up with pointless honework and assignments so waste your time rather than learn anything.
It’s good at making Taylor Swift look like a Trump fan.
Ok, i am working on a legal case. I asked Copilot to write a demand letter for me and it is pretty damn good.
It’s understandable to feel frustrated when AI systems give incorrect or unsatisfactory responses. Despite these setbacks, there are several reasons why AI continues to be heavily promoted and integrated into various technologies:
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Potential and Progress: AI is constantly evolving and improving. While current models are not perfect, they have shown incredible potential across a wide range of fields, from healthcare to finance, education, and beyond. Developers are working to refine these systems, and over time, they are expected to become more accurate, reliable, and useful.
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Efficiency and Automation: AI can automate repetitive tasks and increase productivity. In areas like customer service, data analysis, and workflow automation, AI has proven valuable by saving time and resources, allowing humans to focus on more complex and creative tasks.
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Enhancing Decision-Making: AI systems can process vast amounts of data faster than humans, helping in decision-making processes that require analyzing patterns, trends, or large datasets. This is particularly beneficial in industries like finance, healthcare (e.g., medical diagnostics), and research.
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Customization and Personalization: AI can provide tailored experiences for users, such as personalized recommendations in streaming services, shopping, and social media. These applications can make services more user-friendly and customized to individual preferences.
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Ubiquity of Data: With the explosion of data in the digital age, AI is seen as a powerful tool for making sense of it. From predictive analytics to understanding consumer behavior, AI helps manage and interpret the immense data we generate.
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Learning and Adaptation: Even though current AI systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Co-pilot make mistakes, they also learn from user interactions. Continuous feedback and training improve their performance over time, helping them better respond to queries and challenges.
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Broader Vision: The development of AI is driven by the belief that, in the long term, AI can radically improve how we live and work, advancing fields like medicine (e.g., drug discovery), engineering (e.g., smarter infrastructure), and more. Developers see its potential as an assistive technology, complementing human skills rather than replacing them.
Despite their current limitations, the goal is to refine AI to a point where it consistently enhances efficiency, creativity, and decision-making while reducing errors. In short, while AI doesn’t always work perfectly now, the vision for its future applications drives continued investment and development.
I’m 80% sure this reply was written by an AI. Right now pretty much all it can do is tell people to eat rocks, claim you can leave dogs in hot cars, and starve artists.
lmao I see what you did there
We shall see. The above feels like an AI reponse.
Whoosh
Bravo.
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Holy BALLS are you getting a lot of garbage answers here.
Have you seen all the other things that generative AI can do? From bone-rigging 3D models, to animations recreated from a simple video, recreations of voices, art created from people without the talent for it. Many times these generative AIs are very quick at creating boilerplate that only needs some basic tweaks to make it correct. This speeds up production work 100 fold in a lot of cases.
Plenty of simple answers are correct, breaking entrenched monopolies like Google from search, I’ve even had these GPTs take input text and summarize it quickly - at different granularity for quick skimming. There’s a lot of things that can be worthwhile out of these AIs. They can speed up workflows significantly.
Yeah, I feel like people who have very strong opinions about what AI should be used for also tend to ignore the facts of what it can actually do. It’s possible for something to be both potentially destructive and used to excess for profit, and also an incredible technical achievement that could transform many aspects of our life. Don’t ignore facts about something just because you dislike it.
I’m a simple man. I just want to look up a quick bit of information. I ask the AI where I can find a setting in an app. It gives me the wrong information and the wrong links. That’s great that you can do all that, but for the average person, it’s kind of useless. At least it’s useless to me.
You aren’t really using it for its intended purpose. It’s supposed to be used to synthesize general information. It only knows what people talk about; if the subject is particularly specific, like the settings in one app, it will not give you useful answers.
I mentioned somewhere in here that I created a document with it and it turned out really good.
Yeah, it’s pretty good at generating common documents like that
So you got the wrong information about an app once. When a GPT is scoring higher than 97% of human test takers on the SAT and other standardized testing - what does that tell you about average human intelligence?
The thing about GPTs is that they are just word predictors. Lots of time when asked super specific questions about small subjects that people aren’t talking about - yeah - they’ll hallucinate. But they’re really good at condensing, categorizing, and regurgitating a wide range of topics quickly; which is amazing for most people.
It’s not once. It has become such an annoyance that I quit using and asked what the big deal is. I’m sure for creative and computer nerd stuff it’s great, but for regular people sitting at home listening to how awesome AI is and being underwhelmed it’s not great. They keep shoving it down our throats and plain old people are bailing.
tl;dr: It’s useful, but not necessarily for what businesses are trying to convince you it’s useful for
Yeah, see that’s the kicker. Calling this “computer nerd stuff” just gives away your real thinking on the matter. My high school daughters use this to finish their essay work quickly, and they don’t really know jack about computers.
You’re right that old people are bailing - they tend to. They’re ignorant, they don’t like to learn new and better ways of doing things, they’ve raped our economy and expect everything to be done for them. People who embrace this stuff will simply run circles around those who don’t. That’s fine. Luddites exist in every society.
