Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll have a great time. It’s a wild world out there.
Shove a bunch of AI nonsense in my face when I didn’t ask for it and I’m throwing your product out a window.
Lets see if this finally kills the AI hype. Big tech is pushing for AI because it is the ultimate spyware, nothing more.
I’ve learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don’t mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.
I like my AI compartmentalized, I got a bookmark for chatGPT for when i want to ask a question, and then close it. I don’t need a different flavor of the same thing everywhere.
They just don’t get it. Once everyone will use AI toilet and AI toothbrush they will sing a different tune.
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 definitely need a toilet that remember and analyze my shit. Yes.
Not sure what happened to it, but this was a thing already in 2005.
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
I love skibidAI toilet
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.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing these tech investor pump n’ dump patterns faster collectively, given how many has happened in such a short amount of time already.
Crypto, Internet of Things, Self Driving Cars, NFTs, now AI.
It feels like the futurism sheen has started to waver. When everything’s a major revolution inserted into every product, then isn’t, it gets exhausting.
Internet of Things
This is very much not a hype and is very widely used. It’s not just smart bulbs and toasters. It’s burglar/fire alarms, HVAC monitoring, commercial building automation, access control, traffic infrastructure (cameras, signal lights), ATMs, emergency alerting (like how a 911 center dispatches a fire station, there are systems that can be connected to a jurisdiction’s network as a secondary path to traditional radio tones) and anything else not a computer or cell phone connected to the Internet. Now even some cars are part of the IoT realm. You are completely surrounded by IoT without even realizing it.
Huh, didn’t know that! I mainly mentioned it for the fact that it was crammed into products that didn’t need it, like fridges and toasters where it’s usually seen as superfluous, much like AI.
I would beg to differ. I thoroughly enjoy downloading various toasting regimines. Everyone knows that a piece of white bread toasts different than a slice of whole wheat. Now add sourdough home slice into the mix. It can get overwhelming quite quickly.
Don’t even get me started on English muffins.
With the toaster app I can keep all of my toasting regimines in one place, without having to wonder whether it’s going to toast my pop tart as though it were a hot pocket.
I mean give the thing an USB interface so I can use an app to set timing presets instead of whatever UX nightmare it’d otherwise be and I’m in, nowadays it’s probably cheaper to throw in a MOSFET and tiny chip than it is to use a bimetallic strip, much fewer and less fickle parts and when you already have the capability to be programmable, why not use it. Connecting it to an actual network? Get out of here.
Yea I’m being a little facetious I hope it is coming through lol
Bagels are a whole different set of data than bread. New bread toasts much more slowly than old bread.
don’t forget Big Data
I think that the dot com bubble is the closest, honestly. There can be some kind of useful products (mostly dealing with how we interact with a system, not actually trying to use AI to magically solve a problem; it is shit at that), but the hype is way too large
TimeSquirrel made a good point about Internet of Things, but Crypto and Self Driving Cars are still booming too.
IMHO it’s a marketing problem. They’re major evolutions taking root over decades. I think AI will gradually become as useful as lasers.
It’s more of a macroeconomic issue. There’s too much investor money chasing too few good investments. Until our laws stop favoring the investor class, we’re going to keep getting more and more of these bubbles, regardless of what they are.
Yeah it’s just investment profit chasing from larger and larger bank accounts.
I’m waiting for one of these bubble pops to do lasting damage but with the amount of protections for specifically them and that money that can’t be afforded to be “lost” means it’s just everyone else that has to eat dirt.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
God that sounds like hell.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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???
AI toasters are a Bad Idea
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.
This is the visionary we need. Take my venture capital millions on a magic carpet ride, time traveler!
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.
Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI
It’s the new block chain or NFT hype, they think it’s magic.
There are different types of people in the market. The informed ones hate AI, and the uninformed love it. The informed ones tend to be the cornerstones of businesses, and the uninformed ones tend to be in charge.
So we have… All this. All this nonsense. All because of stupid managers.
Customers worry about what they can do with it, while investors and spectators and vendors worry about buzzwords. Customers determine demand.
Sadly what some of those customers want to do is to somehow improve their own business without thinking, and then they too care about buzzwords, that’s how the hype comes.
Prominent market investor arrested and charged for sexually assaulting AI robot
Market shows that the market buys into hype, not value.
Market shows that hype is a cycle and the AI hype is nearing its end.
How can you tell when the cycle is ending?
When one of two things happens:
- A new hype starts to replace it (can happen fast though!)
- The hype starts to specialize into subcategories of the hype (e.g. AI images, AI videos, AI text generation)
When “AI” hype dies down we are likely to see “AI” removed from various topics because enough people know and understand the hyped parent topic. It’ll just be “image generation”, “video generation”, “generated text”, etc.
To be honest, I lost all interest in the new AMD CPUs because they fucking named the thing “AI” (with zero real-world application).
I’m in the market for a new PC next month and I’m gonna get the 7800X3D for my VR gaming needs.
And workers…
Is that a real copilot ad?
Yep. Give me time and I’ll dig up the link.
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 mean, that’s exactly the advantage of slack over meetings but that doesn’t tickle middle management fancy as much.
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.
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.
They’ve overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.
This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.
What did they even expect, calling something “AI” when it’s no more “AI” than a Perl script determining whether a picture contains more red color than green or vice versa.
Anything making some kind of determination via technical means, including MCs and control systems, has been called AI.
When people start using the abbreviation as if it were “the” AI, naturally first there’ll be a hype of clueless people, and then everybody will understand that this is no different from what was before. Just lots of data and computing power to make a show.
Thing is, it already was ubiquitous before the AI “boom”. That’s why everything got an AI label added so quickly, because everything was already using machine learning! LLMs are new, but they’re just one form of AI and tbh they don’t do 90% of the stuff they’re marketed as and most things would be better off without them.
Gartner Hype Cycle is the new Moore’s Law.
