The worst is in the workplace. When people routinely tell me they looked something up with AI, I now have to assume that I can't trust what they say anylonger because there is a high chance they are just repeating some AI halucination. It is really a sad state of affairs.
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I am way less hostile to Genai (as a tech) than most and even I've grown to hate this scenario. I am a subject matter expert on some things and I've still had people trying to waste my time to prove their AI hallucinations wrong.
I've started seeing large AI generated pull requests in my coding job. Of course I have to review them, and the "author" doesn't even warn me it's from an LLM. It's just allowing bad coders to write bad code faster.
I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the "it's not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it's making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl" which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don't need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.
There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.
The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going "thank you so much, I could have never done this without you".
I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.
I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn't compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It's also addictive.
It's important to remember that there's a lot of money being put into A.I. and therefore a lot of propaganda about it.
This happened with a lot of shitty new tech, and A.I. is one of the biggest examples of this I've known about.
All I can write is that, if you know what kind of tech you want and it's satisfactory, just stick to that. That's what I do.
Don't let ads get to you.
First post on a lemmy server, by the way. Hello!
There was a quote about how Silicon Valley isn't a fortune teller betting on the future. It's a group of rich assholes that have decided what the future would look like and are pushing technology that will make that future a reality.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Classic Torment Nexus moment over and over again really
Reminds me of the way NFTs were pushed. I don’t think any regular person cared about them or used them, it was just astroturfed to fuck.
My boss had GPT make this informational poster thing for work. Its supposed to explain stuff to customers and is rampant with spelling errors and garbled text. I pointed it out to the boss and she said it was good enough for people to read. My eye twitches every time I see it.
good enough for people to read
wow, what a standard, super professional look for your customers!
I'm mostly annoyed that I have to keep explaining to people that 95% of what they hear about AI is marketing. In the years since we bet the whole US economy on AI and were told it's absolutely the future of all things, it's yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it's own production or design, or a blockbuster product that I'm aware of.
We're betting our whole future on a concept of a product that has yet to reliably profit any of its users or the public as a whole.
I've made several good faith efforts at getting it to produce something valuable or helpful to me. I've done the legwork on making sure I know how to ask it for what I want, and how I can better communicate with it.
But AI "art" requires an actual artist to clean it up. AI fiction requires a writer to steer it or fix it. AI non-fiction requires a fact cheker. AI code requires a coder. At what point does the public catch on that the emperor has no clothes?
it's yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it's own production or design, or a blockbuster product
Or a profit. Or hell even one of those things that didn’t suck! It’s critically flawed and has been defying gravity on the coke-fueled dreams of silicon VC this whole time.
And still. One of next year’s fiscal goals is “AI”. That’s all. Just “AI”.
It’s a goal. Somehow. It’s utter insanity.
The goal is "[Replace you money-needing meatsacks with] AI" but the suits don't want to say it that clearly.
There's a monster in the forest, and it speaks with a thousand voices. It will answer any question, and offer insight to any idea. It knows no right or wrong. It knows not truth from lie, but speaks them both the same. It offers its services freely, many find great value. But those who know the forest well will tell you that freely offered does not mean free of cost. For now the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices, and when you see the monster it wears your face.
Not just you. Ai is making people dumber. I am frequently correcting the mistakes of my colleagues that use.
My pet peeve: "here's what ChatGPT said..."
No.
Stop.
If I'd wanted to know what the Large Lying Machine said, I would've asked it.
It's like offering unsolicited advice, but it's not even your own advice
No, it's not just you or unsat-and-strange. You're pro-human.
Trying something new when it first comes out or when you first get access to it is novelty. What we've moved to now is mass adoption. And that's a problem.
These LLMs are automation of mass theft with a good enough regurgitation of the stolen data. This is unethical for the vast majority of business applications. And good enough is insufficient in most cases, like software.
I had a lot of fun playing around with AI when it first came out. And people figured out how to do prompts I cant seem to replicate. I don't begrudge people from trying a new thing.
But if we aren't going to regulate AI or teach people how to avoid AI induced psychosis then even in applications were it could be useful it's a danger to anyone who uses it. Not to mention how wasteful its water and energy usage is.
Unfortunately the masses will do as they're told. Our society has been trained to do this. Even those that resist are playing their part.
On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT's, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD's. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it's still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don't think I've ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I'm not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It's "oh this is a neat little feature I can use" not "this technology is going to change my life" the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM's being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because "AI" will be ruined.
AI's biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza. It's both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that's fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. "Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting," all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
People are overworked, underpaid, and struggling to make rent in this economy while juggling 3 jobs or taking care of their kids, or both.
They are at the limits of their mental load, especially women who shoulder it disproportionately in many households. AI is used to drastically reduce that mental load. People suffering from burnout use it for unlicensed therapy. I'm not advocating for it, I'm pointing out why people use it.
Treating AI users like a moral failure and disregarding their circumstances does nothing to discourage the use of AI. All you are doing is enforcing their alienation of anti-AI sentiment.
First, understand the person behind it. Address the root cause, which is that AI companies are exploiting the vulnerabilities of people with or close to burnout by selling the dream of a lightened workload.
It's like eating factory farmed meat. If you have eaten it recently, you know what horrors go into making it. Yet, you are exhausted from a long day of work and you just need a bite of that chicken to take the edge off to remain sane after all these years. There is a system at work here, greater than just you and the chicken. It's the industry as a whole exploiting consumer habits. AI users are no different.
Meanwhile, we have people making the web worse by not linking to source & giving us images of text instead of proper, accessible, searchable, failure tolerant text.
being anti-plastic is making me feel like i'm going insane. "you asked for a coffee to go and i grabbed a disposable cup." studies have proven its making people dumber. "i threw your leftovers in some cling film." its made from fossil fuels and leaves trash everywhere we look. "ill grab a bag at the register." it chokes rivers and beaches and then we act surprised. "ill print a cute label and call it recyclable." its spreading greenwashed nonsense. little arrows on stuff that still ends up in the landfill. "dont worry, it says compostable." only at some industrial facility youll never see. "i was unboxing a package" theres no way to verify where any of this ends up. burned, buried, or floating in the ocean. "the brand says advanced recycling." my work has an entire sustainability team and we still stock pallets of plastic water bottles and shrink wrapped everything. plastic cutlery. plastic wrap. bubble mailers. zip ties. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least" "but its convenient" "but you can" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the disposable default. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?
#ebb rambles #vent #i think #fuck plastics im so goddamn tired
If plastic was released roughly two years ago you'd have a point.
If you're saying in 50 years we'll all be soaking in this bullshit called gen-AI and thinking it's normal, well - maybe, but that's going to be some bleak-ass shit.
Also you've got plastic in your gonads.
I must be one of the few reaming people that have never, and will never- type a sentence into an AI prompt.
I despise that garbage.
you asked for thoughts about your character backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas
If I want ideas from ChatGPT, I could just ask it myself. Usually, if I'm reaching out to ask people's opinions, I want, you know, their opinions. I don't even care if I hear nothing back from them for ages, I just want their input.
No line breaks and capitalization? Can somebody ask AI to format it properly, please?
Everytime someone talks up AI, I point out that you need to be a subject matter expert in the topic to trust it because it frequently produces really, really convincing summaries that are complete and utter bullshit.
And people agree with me implicitly and tell me they've seen the same. But then don't hesitate to turn to AI on subjects they aren't experts in for "quick answers". These are not stupid people either. I just don't understand.
Meanwhile every company finds out the week after they lay off everyone that the billions they poured into their shitty "AI" to replace them might as well have been put in bags and set on fire
The reason AI is wrong so often is because it's not programmed to give you the right answer. It's programmed to give you the most pervasive one.
LLMs are being fed by Reddit and other forums that are ostensibly about humans giving other humans answers to questions.
But have you been on those forums? It's a dozen different answers for every question. The reality is that we average humans don't know shit and we're just basing our answers on our own experiences. We aren't experts. We're not necessarily dumb, but unless we've studied, our knowledge is entirely anecdotal, and we all go into forums to help others with a similar problem by sharing our answer to it.
So the LLM takes all of that data and in essence thinks that the most popular, most mentioned, most upvoted answer to any given question must be the de facto correct one. It literally has no other way to judge; it's not smart enough to cross reference itself or look up sources.
Yes, you're the weird one. Once you realize that 43% of the USA is FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE you start realizing why people are so enamored with AI. (since I know some twat is gonna say shit: I'm using the USA here as an example, I'm not being us-centric)
Our artificial intelligence, is smarter than 50% of the population (don't get started on 'hallucinations'...do you know how many hallucinations the average person has every day?!) -- and is stupider than the top 20% of the population.
The top 20%, wonder if everyone has lost their fucking minds, because to them it looks like it is completely worthless.
It's more just that the top 20% are naive to the stupidity of the average person.
My hope is that the ai bubble/trend might have a silver lining overall.
I’m hoping that people start realizing that it is often confidently incorrect. That while it makes some tasks faster, a person will still need to vet the answers.
Here’s the stretch. My hope is that by questioning and researching to verify the answers ai is giving them, people start applying this same skepticism to their daily lives to help filter out all the noise and false information that is getting shoved down their throats every minute of every day.
So that the populace in general can become more resistant to the propaganda. AI would effectively be a vaccine to boost our herd immunity to BS.
Like I said. It’s a hope.
The Luddites were right. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from them...