this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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The problem with Schmidt's perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an "AI" future for granted. Like it's a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.
But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) "AI" is necessary — that's in those companies' projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.
The corporations pushing "AI" into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they're huge, but they're hardly infallible. They may wish, as in "bet their savings", that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse ...but that's all it is.
They're just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It's ours to decide over.
it's fucking ghoulish that these salesmen treat a college commencement as just another platform to push their product and grow hype
I was hoping someone would throw tomatoes or something at him.
Maybe a brick or two.
He already looks like he took a tomato or two to the face
That will happen sooner or later
Here's hoping for sooner
I don't think Schmidt is doing that. He's just drunk the Kool-Aid.
He's a multi-billionaire either way. For him it's not about making more money. It's about his self-image as an important guy in tech who was still on the cutting edge at 71. I don't think he thinks he's important or relevant enough to shape the future anymore. I think he just wants to be seen as someone who can be invited to conferences and public speaking events because he's still relevant.
IMO that's a really, really big part of the AI ecosystem. A lot of executives are implementing AI at their companies because they're afraid they're going to be seen as old fuddy duddies who didn't know that the world had changed.
For most of these commencement speakers, it's more of an "emperor has no clothes" situation than it is a conspiracy to pump up the stock price.
As we all know, once you're rich, you stop wanting more money. 😉
When you're that rich, there are things that matter more than more money. Money is good, but more important is power, respect, etc.
i don't think you get that rich without your entire brain being rewired to treat money AS power, respect, etc.
Maybe. But, that doesn't mean that you look at a commencement speech to pump up AI stocks. It's more likely that you look at that kind of a speech as a way to prove to the world how smart and influential you are.
They want more of everything. They want more power, more respect, and more money. They want it all. They want everything.
They're hungry ghosts, they just want more and more forever and ever to fill the empty screaming void at the core of their being.
The problem is that it isn't ours to decide in many countries. Billionaires control everything, or at the very least have a 10 ton thumb on the scale and have a monopoly on violence.
Look at the US, vehement opposition to almost all datacenters over the entire country, the entire voterbase tells their politicians on every level that they all don't want them. What happens? The politicians completely ignore the population and the people that voted for them, use the people's tax money to build the billionaire surveillance complexes that will literally suck all of the water out of the ground and cause blackouts and create maybe 10 jobs.
We see that here is Europe more and more too, especially with anything having to do with banks. We data centers popping up everywhere and half of new automation engineer jobs are for data center pop ups here in Belgium with 0 option to even publicly dissent, much less vote against them.
This was a very well-said take. No notes.
Doing my humble, unassisted meatsack best.
Uh-huh. Sounds like something an AI would say. Let's see what's really behind that mask...
rips off face Ah-HA!!!
OH, GOD! There's so much blood! Whyyyy 😭
When Scooby Doo went really dark 🤣💀
Got a little Hannah Barbaric
Adding a gore Art warning
Ok, I have a note (and happy to run the risk of being ‘boo’d’ for making a ‘speach’. There, I feel better now).
It seems to me most of the (current) animosity is very squarely aimed at the large corporations, but comes under the general heading of ‘anti-AI’. I was working in that field in the early ‘90s and it had some interesting applications which we’ve seen deliver some real benefits. The recent avalanche of ‘our LLM can replace everything else you have’ is the problem, not AI. And large groups of people tend to prefer a nice black & white answer not a nuanced conversation. I’m not for a second defending Schmidt on that, but I worry the real important stuff will get lost in the noise.
It's a question of using the right tool for the right job, but CEOs that don't even know the job, nor the tools it needs, fall for charlatans selling them snake oil that'll magically increase revenue, cut expenses or otherwise make them look good when the time for allotting their bonus comes around. And why wouldn't they? They're not the ones to pay for their fuckup. They'll step down, get a chonky farewell gift and the employees taking pay cuts, losing their jobs or just suffering under the increased workload are left holding the bag.
For text processing with negligible precision, LLMs may be a great fit. For repetitive, primitive coding tasks in the hands of a senior coder, they can save time. For replacing humans, they lack critical thinking and semantic understanding.
Add to that the issue that, even if AI did bring the promised savings, that wouldn't benefit the general public, particularly the people whose prospects for a job are now fucked along with their prospects for a living. This is a social factor that no discussion of tool aptitude or AI applications can solve.
We're on the same page about the problem, I think. And as I said in my original comment, there are absolutely reasonable applications for LLMs, they just won't pay back the investments chucked into the research quick enough. So we get instead our current "AI" moment.
Now, as a counterpoint to your argument about black and white positions — I see a lot of people filling the gray areas with what is essentially whataboutism:
In that context, I think it's important to take a black and white stance, staying off that slippery slop(e) of bad faith arguments. "AI" as it is being marketed to us is bullshit, and needs to stop.
But once that bubble is burst (and it will one way or another), research needs to continue in a more focused manner into the fields where LLMs can actually make a positive difference (hint: it's neither search engines or your operating system).
Those are not "whataboutisms" lol
Of course the AI bubble will pop massively, but LLMs not being useful in search engines or your OS is utterly delusional. Of course, I'm not talking about AI on Winblows, but having a locally running LLM could prove incredibly useful for providing support for Linux box. Please be charitable and assume that I'm talking about a well designed system and not some slop that would even dare suggest running commands in the terminal. If you have the hardware, might as well use it right?
It’ll be sad and unnecessary if we throw the cancer diagnostics out with the work stealing, resource wasting, slop machine.
It would be a tragedy if we accepted the latter so that we can obtain the former.
Limited models trained on good datasets have limited applications in analysis of similar data.
LLMs are a gigantic soul-sucking scam with no practical usage.
You are creating a distinction without a difference.
You think there’s no difference between a technology and a corporation pushing a technology?
Agreed
The problem is pushing a business model that likely seeks to put many of the graduates he’s speaking to out of a job.
Yes, the other things you say are also true, along with the tactless use of a commencement speech to advertise said business, but telling the people about how great AI is while failing to consider the effects on them is…well, very Billionaire of him.
If a machine can do my job better than me, then a machine should be doing that job. That's progress. Eventually all of this mindless toil should be done by machines so that people have the ability to pursue their dreams. The actual problem is that we've built a society where people need to toil mindlessly in order to live. This could be solved with something like a Universal Basic Income, so if my job gets taken by an LLM I can go back to school and learn a new trade. Or write some books. Or go ramble around Europe as an art bum. Or whatever.
Having said that, I think that LLMs are being used to replace jobs where the machine can't do it better than a human. It saves the company money in the short term, but it's going to catch up with them in the long term. On the other hand, some people are doing jobs that don't need doing, and replacing those with an LLM doesn't change anything, because the job was bullshit to begin with.
At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don't need "jobs". We should be fighting to get people's needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.
Economics should be people centered not robots
You do realize the main reason we don't have slavery in many countries is because of the Industrial Revolution, right?
like wise we shouldn't have poverty wages anymore.
We don't need machines to do everything to get that. We already have everything for a post scarcity-society. It's there now. But a lot of assholes want a bigger pile of money, and honestly, I'm pretty sure they don't actually want you or I to exist to get in the way of their utopia which is them hanging out on beaches while robots do everything for them.
On one hand, I agree with you.
On the other hand, what you're saying is, "Life would be better if we would become wholly dependent on a white supremacist, genocidal, colonial institution".
I don't think what you're suggesting is possible on the land known as the United States of America until it's no longer called that.
You're assuming everybody in this conversation is American? 🤔 I for one am not part of the "we" you describe there...
I completely agree with everything here, and I just want to reiterate:
👏 Universal 👏 Basic 👏 Income
Counterpoint, we don't need a society that requires universities to churn out graduates who need jobs. That's it, we have everything we need as a society already, and we are well past the post-scarcity part, but someone always wants a bigger boat.
We'll all do what we need to in order to get food, shelter, and all the basics. But we are past the point of needing a 40 hour work week, and putting people into menial positions just so they can get a paycheck.
You might as well say people shouldn’t have children.
What about my response gives you the impression that I think people shouldn't procreate?