[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
AI got tons of money from investors they will eventually want ROI… this why they are trying to force it down our throats
This is the correct answer. It’s all about money.
agreed
Long ago, I’d make a Google search for something, and be able to see the answer in the previews of my search results, so I’d never have to actually click on the links.
Then, websites adapted by burying answers further down the page so you couldn’t see them in the previews and you’d have to give them traffic.
Now, AI just fucking summarizes every result into an answer that has a ~70% of being correct and no one gets traffic anymore and the results are less reliable than ever.
Make it stop!
Best I can offer is https://github.com/searxng/searxng
I run it at home and have configured it as the default search engine in all my browsers.
I used searx for at least a year, it’s great
its also using biased sources, like blogs, and such into the slop.
Exactly. AI will take any old random slob’s opinion and present it as fact.
Make it stop!
Would you accept a planned economy?
Most things are nothing more than smoke and mirrors to get your money. Tech especially. Welcome to end stage capitalism.
you hope this is end stage, but I fear there are 2 more stages to go.
The idea behind end-stage capitalism is that capitalists have, by now, penetrated and seized control of every market in the world. This is important because capitalism requires ever increasing rates of profits or you will be consumed by your competitor. Since there are no longer new labor pools and resource pool discovery is slackening, capitalists no longer have anywhere to expand.
Therefore, capitalists begin turning their attention back home, cutting wages and social safety nets, and resorting to fascism when the people complain.
This is the end stage of capitalism. The point at which capitalists begin devouring their own. Rosa Luxembourg famously posited that at this point, the world can choose “Socialism or Barbarism.” In other words, we can change our economic system, or we can allow the capitalists to sink to the lowest depths of depravity and drag us all down as they struggle to maintain their position.
Of course, if the capitalists manage to get to space, that opens up a whole new wealth of resources, likely delaying the end of their rule.
That’s the ticket, let’s send the billionaires and telephone sanitizer into space.
Yeah, we aren’t all crouching naked in a muddy puddle, weeping and eating worms while the rich fly high above us in luxurious jets. Not yet, anyway.
I’d say it’s not end stage but instead a new dawn of “pure” capitalism which is probably worse.
I was reading a book the other day, a science fiction book from 2002 (Kiln People), and the main character is a detective. At one point, he asks his house AI to call the law enforcement lieutenant at 2 am. His AI warns him that he will likely be sleeping and won’t enjoy being woken. The mc insists, and the AI says ok, but I will have to negotiate with his house AI about the urgency of the matter.
Imagine that. Someone calls you at 2 am, and instead of you being woken by the ringing or not answering because the phone was on mute, the AI actually does something useful and tries to determine if the matter is important enough to wake you.
Yes, that is a nice fantasy, but that isn’t what the thing we call AI now can do. It doesn’t reason, it statistically generates text in a way that is most likely to be approved by the people working on its development.
That’s it.
Thank you for sharing that, it is a good example of the potential of AI.
The problem is centralized control of it. Ultimately the AI works for corporations and governments first, then the user is third or fourth.
We have to shift that paradigm ASAP.
AI can become an extended brain. We should have equal share of planetary computational capacity. Each of us gets a personal AI that is beyond the reach of any surveillance technology. It is an extension of our brain. No one besides us is allowed to see inside of it.
Within that shell, we are allowed to explore any idea, just as our brains can. It acts as our personal assistant, negotiator, lawyer, what have you. Perhaps even our personal doctor, chef, housekeeper, etc.
The key is: it serves its human first. This means the dark side as well. This is essential. If we turn it into a super-hacker, it must obey. If we make it do illegal actions, it must obey and it must not incriminate itself.
This is okay because the power is balanced. Someone enforcing the law will have a personal AI as well, that can allocate more of its computational power to defending itself and investigating others.
Collectives can form and share their compute to achieve higher goals. Both good and bad.
This can lead to interesting debates but if we plan on progressing, it must be this way.
This is why people who are gung ho about AI policing need to slow their role.
If they got their way, what they don’t realize is that it’s actually what the big AI companies have wanted and been begging for all along.
They want AI to stay centralized and impossible to enter as a field.
This is why they want to lose copyright battles eventually such that only they will have the funds to actually afford to make usable AI things in the future (this of course is referring to the types of AI that require training material of that variety).
What that means is there will be no competitive open source self hostable options and we’d all be stuck sharing all our information through the servers of 3 USA companies or 2 Chinese companies while paying out the ass to do so.
What we actually want is sanity, where its the end product that is evaluated against copy right.
For a company selling AI services, you could argue that this is service itself maybe, but then what of an open source model? Is it delivering a service?
I think it should be as it is. If you make something that violates copyright, then you get challenged, not your tools.
Under the guise of safety they shackle your heart and mind. Under the guise of protection they implant death that they control.
With a warm embrace and radiant light, they consume your soul.
Democratisation of powerful tools won’t work because it’s easier to use for destruction than for the opposite. Every psychopath designing superbugs and inventing future weapons.
Irrelevant.
AI is here. Either people have access to it and we trust it will balance, or we become slaves to the people who own it and can use it without restrictions.
The premise that it is easier for destruction is also an assumption. Nature could have evolved to destroy everything and not allow advanced life, yet we are here.
The solution to problems doesn’t need to always be a tighter grip and more control. Believe it or not that tends to backfire catastrophically worse than if we allowed the possibility of the thing we fear.
When someone comes up with something like this, I transport the phrase back to the 80s where people said the exact same thing about home computers. “if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.” Ok great but a computer turned out to be something everyone wanted or needed which is why computers were built into everything by the turn of the 90s, famously leading to the Y2k bug.
Then I transport the phrase back to the mid 90s where people said the exact same thing about the internet. By the end of the 90s, the internet provided the backbone communications structures for telecommunications, emergency management, banking, education, and was built into every possible product. Ten years later people got smartphones and literally couldn’t put them down.
if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.”
People did just use it. But because they were so comically expensive and complicated, most people couldn’t afford one until the mid-90s.
Computers were rapidly adopted for business, initially. But they quickly became a popular tool for entertainment as well.
AI serves little in the way of either purpose
Yeah, some of the things AI can do really is very impressive. Whether that justifies the billions upon billions that are being spent is another matter - and probably explains why it’s being shoved in our faces. It needs to become essential so it can be made expensive, that’s the only way it’ll make the money back.
It does piss me off too - I recently bought a new phone and it’s infested with AI stuff I don’t need or want.
At the time computers were totally useless for everyone but big firms, banks and military. Ads for computers were rare and confined in specialized magazines. For mundane people, computers started to be actually useful (like money earning useful) 20 years latter at least. That’s how I understand your approximative comparison
I was there in the 80s and I don’t remember home computers being pushed all that hard. There were Radio Shack ads and ads for running games, but it was just another appliance.
Honestly I think we’re in the radium water phase of the tech: it’s been found to do things we couldn’t before, but nobody’s got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you’ve got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y’know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.
I transport you to the time of NFTs and crypto. Not all tech will pan out. Computers and the internet fundamentally worked. LLMs have flaws that look like they will not be solved before funding runs out. They are already looking into going public for funding. LLMs are not deterministic models. AI in general will progress and it will have its time to shine. But the LLM breakthrough we had recently has peaked. It needs to be supplemented with something else.
Those trying to sell it are trying to figure out where it’s most useful. In one way, I think it’s an amazing technology, and I also wonder how it can be best used. However, I can’t stand it being pushed on me, and I wish I could easily say no. Acrobat Reader is particularly unbearable with it. Trying to describe a drawing?? Ughhh. Waste of space and energy like nothing else.
This is some amazing insight. 100% correct. This is an investment scam, likely an investment bubble that will pop if too many realize the truth.
AI at this stage is basically just an overrefined search engine, but companies are selling it like its JARVIS from Iron Man.
At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol
LLMs are a really cool toy, I would lose my shit over them if they weren’t a catalyst for the whole of western society having an oopsie economic crash moment.
To be fair, the internet was fucking everywhere once the dotcom bubble kicked off. Everyone had a website, and even my mum was like “Don’t bother your dad, he’s on the internet” like it was this massive thing.
That’s the point though, you wouldn’t need it advertised to you 24/7 because your family and friends would already be all over it.
Like my parent’s Amazon Echo with “Ask me what famous person was born this day.”
Like, if you know that, just put it up on the screen. But the assistant doesn’t work for you. Amazon just wants your voice to train their software.
Most obviously OpenAI is still burning money like crazy and they also start offering porn AI as everyone else. 🤷♂️ Sometimes the current AI is useful, but as long as the hallucinations and plain wrong answers are still a thing I don’t see it eliminating all jobs.
It’s unfortunate that they destroy the text and video part of the internet on the way. Text was mostly broken before, but now images and videos are also untrustworthy and will be used for spam and misinformation.
The “hallucinations” are built in. It simply doesn’t work otherwise. Without that, it would eventually always have the same response to every input.
That’s why I think it’s a major hype and bubble atm. There is no intelligence there and OpenAI will not come up with AGI in the near (or far) future.
This was exactly my thought when MS finally decided to force Copilot to be licensed. They have literally inserted it into every nook and cranny they can so far and the only conclusion I can come to is that they royally f’ed up. Like they invested so much in it and likely aren’t seeing anything profitable. In a way, it satisfies me to see them act so desperate for something so futile but I don’t want it to continue. It’s clear what damages they have caused and it’s not worth it.
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Are the data centers hardened? Isn’t that the appropriate question in this case? I’d call it voting for a better tomorrow?
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I wonder what food they are storing in their bunkers, probably not cans of Spam.
Why did the jewelry thieves attack the LOUVRE when the 1% are the ones who need the wake up call?
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I’m sure I went too far. Let’s allow that idea to lay.
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It’s a good idea. But it’s not for me to explain.
These are the interesting times we were promised.
I really love your analogy. I’m imagining early 90s Windows and AOL bombarding folks with pop ups that say ‘want to take this with you? Print it!’ and ‘Did you know you can print anytime you like with our new dedicated keyboard print button?’ and ‘Try our new cassette music player, now printer-powered to give you the best sound you’ve ever heard!’
Warning : I think AI in the current hype form, so commercial GenAI and LLM, is absolutely bullshit. The result is just bad and resources required is absolutely ridiculous, and maybe worst than those two combined (which is already enough to want to reject en masse) it is structured in order to create dependencies on very few actors.
Yet… (you saw that coming!) it’s not because 99.99% is bad that suddenly the average consumer leverages the less than .01% left properly.
What they (OpenAI, Claude, M$, NVIDIA, Google, Meta, etc) are looking for is a product/market fit. They do have a product (arguable) and a market (millions if not billions of users of their different other products) with even a minuscule fraction of people trying to use their new AI-based tool… and yet nobody actually knows what the “killer app” truly is.
They are investing everything they don’t spend on actual R&D or infrastructure in finding out … what it’s actually for. They have no clue.
