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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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Technology
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never seen it helpful to anyone, except for the people wanting to do the layoffs. most of the time it gives misinformation to people looking for abstract-to-reality ideas.
I mean its use as a tool, maybe in a small business context. The individual can be the "visionary" giving their idea for a book to a de-facto ghost writer. AI's will often give you back info that confirms your ideas, so its like any other tool. If I am not good with a hammer then I smash my fingers and if I'm not good with AI then I convince myself the earth is actually flat.
The recent Bank of England report indicates that, yes, small businesses are seeing the biggest benefit of the tool (AI agents), but they are not spending big dollars on it. Free models and/or entry accounts are more than enough per their survey.
I agree, its a tool. I have used free models for the last few weeks to make python scripts into portable exes to help streamline some onsite job activities that normally are done multiple times a month. I never would have the time to research how to code python, figure out libraries and such to put together, and then compile all that into an exe. You'll never see me spend money on AI when the free models work well enough not needing "frontier" features.
I don't expect movement towards AI among small business to show up in total cloud AI revenues.
Small businesses are typically more competently run than the typical big corporation, so I doubt they're going to do things like lay most of their quality control people off thinking AI will do it. Big companies are mostly mid-wit trendies not anything that bright. Due to the perpetual motion of mature companies once they get off the ground, its hard for their stupid decisions to lead to bankruptcy. It takes a long time. They're essentially doing the bumper cars version of business, while small business is in the 1960s Formula 1 where any major mis-step could end their companies' existence.
Small businesses also don't need to spend a lot. Their needs could be met by a semi-skilled local IT guy they hire to set up LM Studio on a gaming PC to run a 26B or 35B model. Big companies will spend the same amount on their peoples' Dell or HP laptops business laptops that cost about the same but can't run local AI.
Open weights models like Kimi and GLM provide near-frontier quality on any low cost service that installs them. GLM 5.2 is excellent.
The funny thing to me is that Lemmy users seem to be so staunchly against LLMs, that they are unable to even acknowledge the small things it truly is good for as a tool. It's like the opposite of hackernews on here.