I mostly agree with TFA, with one glaring exception: The quality of Google search results has regressed so badly in the past years (played by SEO experts), that AI was actually a welcome improvement.
Why do people who attempt to critique AI lean on the "no one wants this, everyone hates this" instead of just making their point. If your arguments are strong you don't need to wrap them in false statistics.
I noticed that some of his choices contributed to his problem. I haven't been forced into accepting AI (so far) while I've been using duckduckgo for search, libreoffice, protonmail, and linux.
> Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?
I think there’s a difference between the tool that helps you do work better and the service that generates the end result.
People would be less upset if ai is shown to support the person. This also allows that person to curate the output and ignore it if needed before sharing it, so it’s a win/win.
But why are the CEOs insisting so much on AI? Because stock investors prefer to invest on anything with "AI inside". So the "AI business model" would not collapse , because it is what investors want. It is a bubble. It will be bubbly for a while, until it isn't.
I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.
I’m not even sure it’s the right question. No one knew what the long term effects of the internet and mobile devices would be, so I’m not surprised people thought it was great. Cocoa leaves seemed pretty amazing at the beginning as well. But mobile devices especially have changes society and while I don’t think we can ever put the genie back in the bottle, I wish that we could. I suspect I’m not alone.
The major AI gatekeepers, with their powerful models, are already experiencing capacity and scale issues. This won't change unless the underlying technology (LLMs) undergoes a fundamental shift. As more and more things become AI-enabled, how dependent will we be on these gatekeepers and their computing capacity? And how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources? And we haven't really gotten to the wearable devices stage yet.
Also, everyone who requires these sophisticated models now needs to send everything to the gatekeepers. You could argue that we already send a lot of data to public clouds. However, there was no economically viable way for cloud vendors to read, interpret, and reuse my data — my intellectual property and private information. With more and more companies forcing AI capabilities on us, it's often unclear who runs those models and who receives the data and what is really happening to the data.
This aggregation of power and centralisation of data worries me as much as the shortcomings of LLMs. The technology is still not accurate enough. But we want it to be accurate because we are lazy. So I fear that we will end up with many things of diminished quality in favour of cheaper operating costs — time will tell.
I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries.
In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish
I’ve observed the opposite—not enough people are leveraging AI, especially in government institutions. Critical time and taxpayer money are wasted on tasks that could be automated with state-of-the-art models. Instead of embracing efficiency, these organizations perpetuate inefficiency at public expense.
The same issue plagues many private companies. I’ve seen employees spend days drafting documents that a free tool like Mistral could generate in seconds, leaving them 30-60 minutes to review and refine. There's a lot of resistance from the public. They're probably thinking that their job will be saved if they refuse to adopt AI tools.
I feel an urge to build personal local AI bots that would be personal spam filters. AI filtering AI, fight fire with fire. Mostly because the world OP wants is never coming back. Everything will be AI and it's everywhere.
I also feel an urge to build spaces in the internet just for humans, with some 'turrets' to protect against AI invasion and exploitation. I just don't know what content would be shared in those spaces because AI is already everywhere in content production.
This guy calls himself honest broker but his articles are just expressions of status anxiety. The kind of media the he loves to write about is becoming less relevant and so he lashes out at everything new from AI to TikTok.
I agree copilot for answering emails is negative value.
But I find Google AI search results are very useful, can't see how they will monetise this, but can't complain for now.
Excellent Frank Zappa reference in The Famous Article is "I'm the Slime"[1].
The thing that really chafes me about this AI, irrespective of whether it is awesome or not, is emitting all of the information to some unknown server. To go with another Zappa reference, AI becomes The Central Scrutinizer[2].
I predict an increasing use of Free Software by discerning people who want to maintain more control of their information.
ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something like 8% of Instagram users say they would pay for it. Are we to take this to mean that Instagram is an unpopular product that is rbi g forced on an unwilling public?
Agreed. My mother and aunts are using ChatGPT all the time. It has really massive market penetration in a way I (a software engineer and AI skeptic/“realist”) didn’t realize. Now, do they care about meta’s AI? Idk, but they’re definitely using AI a lot
People want these features as much as they wanted Cortana on Windows.
Which is to say, there's already a history of AI features failing at a number of these larger companies. The public truly is frequently rejecting them.
It's like talking into a void. The issue with AI is that it is too subtle, too easy to get acceptable junk answers and too subtle for the majority to realize we've made a universal crib sheet, software developers included, perhaps one of the worst populations due to their extremely weak communications as a community. To be repeatedly successful with AI, one has to exert mental effort to prompt AI effectively, but pretty much nobody is willing to even consider that. Attempts to discuss the language aspects of using an LLM get ridiculed as 'prompt engineer is not engineering' and dismissed, while that is exactly what it is: prompt engineering using a new software language, natural language, that the industry refuses to take seriously, but is in fact an extremely technical programming language so subtle few to none of you realize it, nor the power that is embodied by it within LLMs. They are incredible, they are subtle, to the degree the majority think they are fraud.
I agree with the general gist of this piece, but the awkward flow of the writing style makes me wonder if it itself was written by AI…
There are open source or affordable, paid alternatives for everything the author mentioned. However, there are many places where you must use these things due to social pressure, lock-in with a service provider (health insurance co, perhaps), and yes unfortunately I see some of these things as soon or now unavoidable.
Another commenter mentioned that ChatGPT is one of the most popular websites on the internet and therefore users clearly do want this. I can easily think of two points that refute that:
1. The internet has shown us time and time again that popularity doesn’t indicate willingness to pay (which paid social networks had strong popularity…?)
2. There are many extremely popular websites that users wouldn’t want to be woven throughout the rest of their personal and professional digital lives
But that's exactly the problem with proprietary software. It's not force-feeding you anything, it's working exactly as intended.
Software is loyal to the owner. If you don't own your software, software won't be loyal to you. It can be convenient for you, but as time passes and interest changes, if you don't own software it can turn against you. And you shouldn't blame Microsoft or it's utilities. It doesn't owe you anything just because you put effort in it and invested time in it. It'll work according to who it's loyal to, who owns it.
If it bothers you, choose software you can own. If you can't choose software you own now, change your life so you can in the future. And if you just can't, you have to accept the consequences.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 76.2 ms ] threadIt’s like IPV6, if it really was a huge benefit to the end user, we’d have adopted it already.
Highways.
People would be less upset if ai is shown to support the person. This also allows that person to curate the output and ignore it if needed before sharing it, so it’s a win/win.
But is the big money in revolution?
I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.
Also, everyone who requires these sophisticated models now needs to send everything to the gatekeepers. You could argue that we already send a lot of data to public clouds. However, there was no economically viable way for cloud vendors to read, interpret, and reuse my data — my intellectual property and private information. With more and more companies forcing AI capabilities on us, it's often unclear who runs those models and who receives the data and what is really happening to the data.
This aggregation of power and centralisation of data worries me as much as the shortcomings of LLMs. The technology is still not accurate enough. But we want it to be accurate because we are lazy. So I fear that we will end up with many things of diminished quality in favour of cheaper operating costs — time will tell.
In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish
The same issue plagues many private companies. I’ve seen employees spend days drafting documents that a free tool like Mistral could generate in seconds, leaving them 30-60 minutes to review and refine. There's a lot of resistance from the public. They're probably thinking that their job will be saved if they refuse to adopt AI tools.
I also feel an urge to build spaces in the internet just for humans, with some 'turrets' to protect against AI invasion and exploitation. I just don't know what content would be shared in those spaces because AI is already everywhere in content production.
The thing that really chafes me about this AI, irrespective of whether it is awesome or not, is emitting all of the information to some unknown server. To go with another Zappa reference, AI becomes The Central Scrutinizer[2].
I predict an increasing use of Free Software by discerning people who want to maintain more control of their information.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPFIkty4Zvk
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Garage#Lyrical_and_sto...
I wonder how many uses of Chatgpt and such are malicious.
Which is to say, there's already a history of AI features failing at a number of these larger companies. The public truly is frequently rejecting them.
I said no. Respect my preferences.
There are open source or affordable, paid alternatives for everything the author mentioned. However, there are many places where you must use these things due to social pressure, lock-in with a service provider (health insurance co, perhaps), and yes unfortunately I see some of these things as soon or now unavoidable.
Another commenter mentioned that ChatGPT is one of the most popular websites on the internet and therefore users clearly do want this. I can easily think of two points that refute that: 1. The internet has shown us time and time again that popularity doesn’t indicate willingness to pay (which paid social networks had strong popularity…?) 2. There are many extremely popular websites that users wouldn’t want to be woven throughout the rest of their personal and professional digital lives
As a data point, the "Stop Killing Games" one has passed the needed 1M signatures so is in good shape:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com
"I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice.
I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice.
I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice.
I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice.
I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice.
I don’t want AI books on Amazon—but I don’t get a choice."
Software is loyal to the owner. If you don't own your software, software won't be loyal to you. It can be convenient for you, but as time passes and interest changes, if you don't own software it can turn against you. And you shouldn't blame Microsoft or it's utilities. It doesn't owe you anything just because you put effort in it and invested time in it. It'll work according to who it's loyal to, who owns it.
If it bothers you, choose software you can own. If you can't choose software you own now, change your life so you can in the future. And if you just can't, you have to accept the consequences.