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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it's literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don't see good AI. It's like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don't. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
AI is any compute model performing complex enough reasoning that the output does not always resemble the input. They are by definition non deterministic and the same ask can provide different outputs without being influenced by other inputs.
So its a lottery
No
I put in a 5 and get a triangle. I put in the same 5 again and get a transvestite. This is intended behavior.
That system isn’t a magic box. It’s a bag of variables linked together by statistics and what’s basically automated guessing.
Everything is guessing, only death is certain. I've worked with AI/ML for over 15 years long before folks got all hot and bothered by it. Your examples you give are great because if you walked up to a person and just said 5 you might get as random of answers and you gave.
Assuming by AI you mean LLMs, because that is what is hot on social media today, they use statistical probability models to be able to rate their input to output consistency. It is measurable but could never be 100%. No compute or person is 100%, but an LLM is orders of magnitude less consistent than traditional compute.
I use AI on a daily basis. I trust it less than people, but I also am able to feed it dumb questions which is nice.
Yea I do that too. It’s dumb but it’s dumb in useful ways. I think about something, get lost and stuck and paint myself into a corner I don’t always recognize.
Consult the AI. It is always wrong but in trying to convince it of its wrongness, I can find the flaws in my own reasoning and find another way out of my problems.
The AI never got better but just bouncing the ideas off things and hearing the dumbest possible echo back reframes the issue in a useful way.