this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
1038 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
88677 readers
3519 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Im surprised there are still people down on this first step of the ladder you're lingering on.
Even most AI pessimists these days agree its useful as a force multiplier, allowing one person to do a bit more work in a given time frame, while still maintaining that its not competent enough to entirely replace a human in all but the most fringe cases.
"Its useless and acheives nothing" is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
You can remain anti-ai while still being realistic that it can be useful.
Especially if you acknowledge that the product is not the root of the problem, the late-stage capitalist system its being built to serve is the problem.
It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.
Like any tool, the user plays a key role in the quality of the output.
Yeah but it’s also just kind of a shitty tool.
Not really. The output of LLMs is massively increased global warming, increased prices of goods and services, decreased number of jobs, increased numbers of bugs in software, massive increase in wealth migration from poor to the rich, and increased surveillance. None of that has to do with the quality of the users. Just using it at all results in all of those things.
You're confused, those things are the outputs out late-stage capitalism.
Both can be true.
Usually id agree but im not sure that really applies here.
I'd understand if these tools were small scale, eco-friendly, ethically developped and trained, and owned by the workers.
Considering most LLM and AI/AI-adjacent tools used are large-scale tools created and owned by big greedy corporations, I'd say the tools themselves are a product of late stage capitalism, thus the bad results they produce are results of simultaneoulsly :
You started by saying they produce the issues, but are now explaining what I said above, that they are a product of upstream social issues.
Is this worth discussing.
Reminder of my only two previous comments in this topic:
and
End of the reminder.
Your answer to that was:
What motivated my answer is:
Most events have multiple causes and multiple consequences. All of them can also interfere with each other. They can form retroaction loops too.
What I was explicitely saying is:
These tools were created and specialised for late-stage capitalism goals. There will be some common consequences, including bad ones, between usage by the big corpos and usage by random persons, whatever their skills. That's why I said that both these takes are true:
and
It seems that we disagree about my view, but don't attribute to me shit I didn't say to fight this false argument.
So...
Apparently no, at least not when you oversimplify causality and misrepresent what I said. Still worth argumenting for others to have more arguments to weight.
Now, this discussion looks to me like the stupid "debate" around "guns kill people" VS "guns don't kill, only the people using them do" in the specific context of gun control laws.
And also, fuck capitalism, and other systems of exploitation, oppression, domination.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They're looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there's been so much recent hype about "AI" "escaping" its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It's also why the Trump administration is all-in on "AI" development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.
The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won't be a general artificial intelligence.
Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet's worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.
Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.
And I haven't even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.
Get correct.
I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.
Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.
Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.
Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?
I also have an office job and can tell you I have uses for it.
I don't use it to produce anything, but where I am researching something and have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more which are then verified.
I sometimes use it for that too but imo that’s a downgraded replacement from asking a colleague or a more senior person.
The capitalist class has squeezed the workers so much that taking a step back and asking your peers can be seen as wasting time, but that’s when breakthroughs happened.
If your wondering why I use it, well I think big brother is probably watching so my use shouldn’t be zero. I would much rather have collaboration time
Possibly, but there's no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I've seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I've also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.
Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it's fans and critics.
Kinda makes sense that the people you see getting the most out of it aren't particularly "impressive" when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Whether or not those workers will actually see any financial benefits out of it is a different question entirely.
Good yes finally! We need to burn the planet for modest productivity gains.
You looked at the amount of solar the world has implemented over the last couple of years to compensate though?
Or how fast a unit of work has been getting exponentially cheaper over very short spaces of time?
You're not unreasonable in glancing at the situation and seeing Doom, dont get me wrong, but if you do more than glance there is a more positive picture forming.
Of course, political reform will be crucial or we're fucked either way.
You can't compensate for wantan abuse.
The alternative means for producing sufficient energy for a better standard of living than most of us are privileged enough to experience has been around for several decades now(much longer with caveats).
These decisions to not only continue to use fossil fuels but to accelerate the pace of ecological destruction in the name of "compute", all the while failing to benefit or protect the rights of laborers, are purely political and always has been.
Politics is the choice between a solarpunk or a cyberpunk present. It could be better today if we simply choose.
Agreed 🤷♂️
So business created inefficient ways of working then pat themselves on the back when they come up with an expensive shortcut?
Or you know, office processes are the problem.
Trust me... middle managers using LLMs are not doing anything but throwing slop everywhere
What were they doing before?
The good ones? Nothing that benefits from LLMs and isn't made worse by being slopped up.
Imo, they're just doing the same shit slightly faster. Whether or not it has value is separate and mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Slop is a thought-terminating buzzword, you're relying on it too heavily to make your point and it undermines you.
OK instead of slop I'll say anything they put in writing is less accurate and more verbose. It may be faster for them to do to it but any gain is canceled out then multiplied by the number of people having to parse through it... Or I could say slopified and anyone that has actually experienced it will know what I mean.
These are just assertions.
If they were true, nobody would be using them.
Millions upon millions of people are using them every day?
That is also just an assertion.
The fact people do something doesn't say much about it. A lot of things people do things just because they feel good, like alcohol or tobacco, and for a certain type of person, chatgpt. There are also other incentives than productivity to use LLMs. 90% of c-suite people drool at the thought of firing people and started pushing top-down for people to use them without ever measuring if it actually increased productivity.
Even for software development, probably one of the more impressive uses for LLMs despite them still actually tanking quality in the process, actually measuring people using them showed them thinking they were working faster but actually working slower.
Widespread use alone isn't conclusive proof of productivity, granted. But your alternative seems to require assuming thousands of companies are all independently making the same stupid decision, spending real money on tools that provide no value, while you've correctly identified what they've all somehow missed.
Corporate adoption can be wasteful, and some uses absolutely are poor. But that doesn't establish that LLMs don't improve productivity. At most, it shows the gains are task-dependent and easy to misuse.
I agree. They're far far more often misused than used effectively, however.
Yes, this is obvious for anyone that has eyes and isn't a sycophant.
Then we've narrowed the disagreement quite a bit. You accept that LLMs can be used effectively, you're just asserting that they're misused far more often than not.
But both that and “anyone with eyes can see thousands of companies are wasting their money” are still just restating your conclusion baselessly.
I never said they couldn't. In fact, saying as much was the first thing I said to you
My observations have just as much merit as your speculation that somehow companies by default make good decisions. I don't know why you have it stuck in your head that is a valid logical foundation, but you are incorrect.
In any case, you clearly don't have anything else to offer, so I think we're done here. Have a nice day!
Arguing against something I didn’t say. I never claimed companies “by default make good decisions.” I said thousands of independent companies and individuals repeatedly choosing to pay for a tool is reasonable evidence that it provides some value to them. That’s not some corporate infallibility, it’s revealed preference.
Your personal observations are anecdotes. If your claim is that LLMs are far more often harmful than useful, support it?
Oh, I think we both know the answer to that question.
I think it has some uses for people that can utilize it intelligently, but what what I've actually observed is it that it lets incompetent people look like they're doing more work while making more work for others.
I use it rewrite work emails, that way I don't have to put any thought into formatting or punctuation it's just a stream of consciousness that then translates into a proper formatted email. But that is pretty much it.
If my private life I don't use AI for anything, not because I have a particular hatred of AI, I just don't have anything that can think that it could be used for.
If the technology suddenly became unavailable, I'd be absolutely fine. I don't think it's a good idea to become too reliant on AI anyway, it leaves you vulnerable to price gouging. I like to keep all my thinking inside my own brain where it's free.
I have no opinion on this conversation, i just wanna acknowledge your username and how it fit the conversation.
If it’s so useful, then surely all these AI companies are making money, right? I’ll wait
What are you waiting for?
A product can be useful to its users while the companies providing it are still unprofitable because they're spending enormous amounts on R&D, infrastructure and expansion.
This regurgitated, thought-terminating sentiment confuses utility with the providers current profit margin. Its fair enough to not understand how businesses operate but taking shots in the dark while not really knowing what you're talking about isnt sensible.
LLMs improved significantly throughout 2024 until the first half 2025 and have now leveled off to more incremental gains instead of doubling benchmark scores within a few months. I think those days may be over. However, people who dismissed LLMs in 2024 and 2025 won’t have a correct understanding of their current capabilities. They’re useful and will probably continue with incremental improvements, but they’re also not a silver bullet that will magically produce high quality work without a competent human at the helm contributing most of the critical thinking and creativity.
The problem is that before we reach a compromise between usability, efficiency, fairness, and the jobs it will destroy, we’ll already be screwed...
That’s possible, but I’m not convinced. At a certain point, a world dominated by services that most people can no longer afford stops making economic sense.
It’s easy to look at the current trajectory and assume it continues indefinitely, but systems are more adaptive than that. As the playing field changes, businesses, governments and consumers change their behaviour too. The incentives themselves shift as the consequences become clearer.