alt Hacker NewsDon't push AI down our throats
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Microsoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about it.
> I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment.
Pretty much my sentiment too.
Amazon's Price History feature certainly doesn't need to open their AI assistant, but in addition to be graph I came for, I get a little summary of the graph. I really hope they aren't using an LLM for that when all it's doing is telling me it's the lowest price in 30 days.
> We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call.
What startups are doing earning calls?
Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.
assume it is being ‘done wrong’, not due to the usual trifecta of greed/evil/stupidity, but due to socio-economic pressure that demands this approach.
AI really needs R&D time, where we first figure out what it’s good for and how best to exploit it.
But R&D for SW is dead. Users proved to be super-resilient to buggy or mis-matched sw. They adapt. ‘Good-enough’ often doesn’t look it. Private equity sez throw EVERYTHING at the wall and chase what sticks…
The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap.
A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."
If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.
The worst usage of AI is “content dilution” where you take a few bullet points and generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop. These days, I would gladly take badly written content from humans filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes over that.
The AI push is not just hype, it’s a scramble for cash. For now the only game plan is to scale up massively with a giant investment gamble, to try to get beyond the obvious limitations that threaten to burst the bubble.
Plus the general economy outlook is negative, AI is the bright spot. They are striving to keep growth up amid downward pressure.
If AI was as great as they pretend, there would be no need to force it on us.
Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money.
I’m not opposed to any of the above, necessarily. I’ve just always been the type to want to adopt things as they are needed and bring demonstrable value to myself or my employer and not a moment before. That is the problem that capital has tried to solve through “founder mode” startups and exploitative business models: “It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not, what matters is that we’re forcing you to pay for it so we get our returns.”
As usual, those who spent too much money on it use it as a way to show their investors they didn't waste all that money and to get them to spend even more. That's why it's so messed up.
yeah, we're f&%^ed
Ok fair enough, feel more of the AGI.
try watching a televised American football game. So many ads for AI. Of course ads appeal most to the gullible.
Oh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the need to force every possible use case down our throats even if they don't make any sense or make quality worse.
E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.
> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.
i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible. It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to achieve "liftoff".
I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too. But that's my know-nothing take.
maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image content (and definitely the music content, spotify pushing this slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is open source, MIT licensed. It's not art at all. Go get it (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want to do the right thing).
If AI was amazing you wouldn’t need to push it, people would demand it!
You need to push slop, because people don’t really want it.
AI will with certainty increase productivity of % and the rest will fall behind, perhaps dramatically. Effectiveness with AI can still be a grind, beyond simple prompting, we are getting lots of expensive AI tools heavily subsidized right now, that may not always be the case.
The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won’t train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is insanity. If you’re paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you should be able to get activity history without training or review or storing your data for several years.