Explain Like I'm Five

Nah, you might just be falling for the same ol' loudest voices problem. Only absolute morons that care about technology while knowing absolutely nothing about it enjoy "AI". It is a very small percentage of people that unfortunately happens to include a ton of C-suit morons: Very loud people.

A lot of the general glazing are chatbots spamming positive engagement on what ever angle the person paying them to astroturf wants. If you think OpenAI's bot "going rogue" and attacking a competitor was an accident, then you're being a fool. Someone wanted it to happen and let it. They (the companies trying to make money, not the "AI" itself) are already showing malicious intent, and astroturfing is a lot easier than cyber attacks.

Though worth noting, there are sects of tech savvy people that like machine learning, and some that even like the generative slop machines, but I differentiate them by what they want from the tool. If they're a scientist looking to digest some massive data sets? Nice. If they're some dumbass "indie dev" trying to lazily slop a tech demo out in a language they barely understand with libraries they'd never read, then they can go pound sand.

Anti AI “outlier”? On Lemmy?

Amazon spent around 20 billion dollars cornering every conceivable market, and then successfully made all that money and more back by becoming the default online store for a huge number of people.

Investors want to recreate that unprecedented return on their investment.

But since Amazon already sells every real worthwhile product... remaining untapped markets included only new products of questionable worth.

Of the available new questionable products, AI is a really interesting one.

Now these investors have spent over $200 billion. And they have promised all that money back and much more.

Getting their investment back is important enough to these powerful influential investors that whether you or I actually want or need AI does not matter, to them.

These investors will strong arm everyone they have influence over until either they make their money back or they go broke.

You really can't see why people would be interested it robotics, automaton and getting information through natural language queries? It sounds like you have your perspective and you need to put yourself in the shoes of the average person. The kind of person who views all tech as a magic box.

The richest people on earth have spent lots of money on AI propaganda because they'll lose even more if AI services aren't adopted by the community at large. AI was a poor investment. It's like people telling you to buy a stock; they're not doing it so you gain money. They're doing it so their shares increase in value by your purchase.

You may find this blog entry by Nikhil Suresh useful.

There are frankly a lot of companies currently being led by individuals suffering from AI psychosis. Executives who plan their operations around AI...by asking for advice from AI.

The problem with AI is that it is very good at creating technical demonstrations good enough to persuade people who are not experts in the field. Executives have no idea how their workers actually do their jobs. They could ask the workers to assess the AI tools, but they don't trust the workers to be honest, as the executives hope to use the AI to lay off the workers.

The ownership class has really taken to AI as a religion. They're chasing the rapture. They have no connection to the actual work their investments are based on, so they are easily scammed by AI con artists.

However, America has an extremely authoritarian corporate culture. Most corporate leaders are surrounded by yes men and fire anyone who contradicts them. It's very Death of Stalin. Where once the top leaders really decide on something, any criticism of that idea becomes heresy.

So what is happening is that shit flows down here. The wealthy owners of companies have convinced themselves that they'll be able to cut their labor force in half, so they push the board of directors to deploy AI as fast and widely as possible. The board directs the CEO. The CEO and other executives direct middle management. Middle management filters the commands down to workers.

AI is a problem almost purpose-built to take advantage of the flaws in our corporate governance models. In a world where the economy was primarily run by worker-owned co-ops, this would never happen. But in our economy, all the people actually doing the real work have zero power over how the company is run. All the decisions are made by people who don't know how the company's workers actually do their jobs.

This creates a culture of compliance. If you've ever worked in a corporate environment, you'll be familiar with ideas like toxic positivity. In most corporate environments, losing the company money is a far less offensive than contradicting the executives who are losing the company money. The owners decree that companies go all in on AI, and anyone down the chain who points out the emperor has no clothes gets fired.

This is fundamentally a problem of economic organization.

This is going to cause a second Great Depression.

I feel the same about chatbots, but there are many great uses of AI, like in drug discovery or wildfire detection.

Corporate AI as a service is cancer. But I don’t completely discount locally hosted AI for certain tasks. If you know it’s capabilities and trade-offs, it can be used as one of many tools in a toolbox.

For example, vibe coding entire projects is shit but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a locally hosted AI spitting out ~6 lines of boiler plate code that you can edit for your needs. It’s a huge time saver when you don’t code for a living but enjoy it as a hobby. I don’t have unlimited time for hobbies and my local chatbot does let me accomplish some tasks faster.

Edit: for those of you who disagree, I’m curious to know at what scope you’re thinking about AI at. Are you just thinking about the tech and/or larger social consequences and/or environmental impacts etc. If we’re just talking about the tech, the tech is amazing and has its uses but if you’re thinking about it more broadly then I get it.

The dudes blowing a tools' knobs are idiots. The people pulling the lever are fascists, and in the end we have a tool that should have stayed local on your machine but our officials are all peeping toms.

Not gonna lie, as someone who hate driving, I would love a self driving car. That or better public transport where I live.

There’s different levels of what is being sold as AI.

At the top, there’s the big promises that AI will replace all workers and somehow usher in a golden age. But there’s never any real evidence to support it. I consider this all hype that’s easily ignored and is only dangerous when powerful people start to believe and act on it.

Below that, AI is coming in like a new tool that speeds up tasks that are otherwise very manual.

Stupid example: remember on The Office when they read Michael’s script, and at one point the “idiot” character was referred to as “Dwigt”? The explanation was that Michael had originally written the character to make fun of Dwight and then changed it via find-and-replace. Except that doesn’t catch Dwigt because it was a typo. An AI solution would be way more likely to catch that and fix it, preventing a humiliating mistake from being printed, and saving a person hours of proofreading.

Better example: when I wrote code at work, I can tell the AI “now write all the automated tests” and in a couple minutes it will spit out a thorough test suite that exercises all the functionality and edge cases. Something that might take a few hours is basically done for me, and I just have to review it. That reviewing would normally have been done by 2 other people before we can ship that change. Instead, I can be one of those reviewers and only one additional person needs to go over it. We’ve just saved somebody an hour.

But those examples aren’t the ones being hyped up so heavily because it’s only making AI “useful”, not “revolutionary”.

It’s a tool. It’s good at some things. It’s hilariously bad at others.

IMO it’s more like how Excel came in and replaced a bunch of tedious paperwork, allowing complicated spreadsheets to suddenly be easily edited and dynamically updated when you need to make changes.

O would love to have a robot doing the house chores for me.

Who is "everyone"? I haven't seen it here much.

It does seem line a case of the vocal minority, and one end of the bell curve just so happens to have strong influence over the means of communication.

Because the world is sick. I don't know, what kind of answer are you looking for?