I hated it when everything became ‘smart’.
Now everything has ‘AI’.
Nothing was smart. And that’s not AI.
Everything costs more, everything has a stupid app that gets abandoned, IoT backend that’s on life support the moment it was turned on. Subscriptions everywhere! Everything is built with lower quality, lower standards.
Get into self hosting.
Smart everything without subscriptions. And with you in control.
they don’t care. you’re not the audience. the tech industry lives on hype. now it’s ai because before that they did it with nft and that failed. and crypto failed. tech needs a grift going to keep investors investing. when the bubble bursts again they’ll come up with some other bullshit grift because making useful things is hard work.
Yup, you can see it in talks on annual tech conferences. Last year it was APIs, this year it’s all AI. They’ll just move on to the next trendy thing next year.
To be fair, APIs have been around since the 70s,and are not trendy, they’re just required to have a common interface for applications to request and perform actions with each other.
But yeah, AI is mostly trendy bullshit
I was ok with crypto and nft because it was up to me to decide if I want to get involved in it or not.
AI does seem to have impact at jobs, at least employers are trying to use it and see if it actually will allow them to hire less staff, I see that for SWE. I don’t think AI will do much there though.
it’s not up to you, it just failed before it could be implemented. many publishers already commit to in-game nfts before they had to back down because it fell apart too quickly (and some still haven’t). if it held on for just a couple more years there wouldn’t be a single aaa title that doesn’t have nfts today.
crypto was more complicated because unlike these two you can’t just add it and say “here, this is all crypto now” because it requires prior commitment and it’s way too complicated for the average person. plus it doesn’t have much benefit: people already give you money and buy fake coins anyway.
I’m giving examples from games because it’s the most exploitative market but these would also seep into other apps and services if not for the hurdles and failures. so now we’re stuck with this. everyone’s doing it because it’s a gold rush except instead of gold it’s literal shit, and instead of a rush it’s literal shit.
— tangent —
… and just today I realized I had to switch back to Google assistant because literally the only thing gemini can do is talk back to me, but it can’t do anything useful, including the simplest shit like converting currency.
“I’m sorry, I’m still learning” – why, bitch? why don’t you already know this? what good are you if I ask you to do something for convenience and instead you tell me to do it manually and start explaining how I can do the most basic shit that you can’t do as if I’m the fucking idiot.
Nft didn’t fail, it was just the idiotic selling of jogs for obscene amounts that crashed (most of that was likely money laundering anyway). The tech still has a use.
Wouldn’t exactly call crypto a failure, either, when we’re in the midst of another bull run.
when we’re in the midst of another bull run.
Oh, that’s nice. So, who’s money are you rug pulling?
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is greedy, clueless management pushing half baked products of dubious value on consumers.
I kind of like AI, sorry.
But it should all be freely available & completely open sourced since they were all built with our collective knowledge. The crass commercialization/hoarding is what’s gross.
What you are talking about is machine learning which is called AI. What the post is talking about is LLMs which are also called AI.
AI by definition means anything that exhibits intelligent behavior and it is not natural in nature.
So when you use GMaps to find the shortest path between 2 points that’s also AI (specifically called local search).
It is pointless to argue/discuss AI if nobody even know which type they are specifically talking about.
Yeah. I’ve been interested in AI for most of my life. I’ve followed AI developments, and tinkered with a lot of AI stuff myself. I was pretty excited when ChatGPT first launched… but that excitement turned very sour after about a month.
I hate what the world has become. Money corrupts everything. We get the cheapest most exploitative version of every possible idea, and when it comes to AI - that’s pretty big net negative on the world.
I mean you’re technically correct from a copyright standpoint since it would be easier to claim fair use for non-commercial research purposes. And bots built for one’s own amusement with open-source tools are way less concerning to me than black-box commercial chatbots that purport to contain “facts” when they are known to contain errors and biases, not to mention vast amounts of stolen copyrighted creative work. But even non-commercial generative AI has to reckon with it’s failure to recognize “data dignity”, that is, the right of individuals to control how data generated by their online activities is shared and used… virtually nobody except maybe Jaron Lanier and the folks behind Brave are even thinking about this issue, but it’s at the core of why people really hate AI.
You had me in the first half, but then you lost me in the second half with the claim of stolen material. There is no such material inside the AI, just the ideas that can be extracted from such material. People hate their ideas being taken by others but this happens all the time, even by the people that claim that is why they do not like AI. It’s somewhat of a rite of passage for your work to become so liked by others that they take your ideas, and every artist or creative person at that point has to swallow the tough pill that their ideas are not their property, even when their way of expressing them is. The alternative would be dystopian since the same companies we all hate, that abuse current genAI as well, would hold the rights to every idea possible.
If you publicize your work, your ideas being ripped from it is an inevitability. People learn from the works they see and some of them try to understand why certain works are so interesting, extracting the ideas that do just that, and that is what AI does as well. If you hate AI for this, you must also hate pretty much all creative people for doing the exact same thing. There’s even a famous quote for that before AI was even a thing. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
I’d argue that the abuse of AI to (consider) replacing artists and other working creatives, spreading of misinformation, simplifying of scams, wasting of resources by using AI where it doesn’t belong, and any other unethical means to use AI are far worse than it tapping into the same freedom we all already enjoy. People actually using AI for good means will not be pumping out cheap AI slop, but are instead weaving it into their process to the point it is not even clear AI was used at the end. They are not the same and should not be confused.
a rite of passage for your work to become so liked by others that they take your ideas,
ChatGPT is not a person.
People learn from the works they see […] and that is what AI does as well.
ChatGPT is not a person.
It’s actually really easy: we can say that chatgpt, which is not a person, is also not an artist, and thus cannot make art.
The mathematical trick of putting real images into a blender and then outputting a Legally Distinct™ one does not absolve the system of its source material.
but are instead weaving it into their process to the point it is not even clear AI was used at the end.
The only examples of AI in media that I like are ones that make it painfully obvious what they’re doing.
Was shopping for a laundry machine for my parents and LG, I shit you not, has an AI laundry machine now. I just can’t even
The reassuring thing is that AI actually makes sense in a washing machine. Generative AI doesn’t, but that’s not what they use. AI includes learning models of different sorts. Rolling the drum a few times to get a feel for weight, and using a light sensor to check water clarity after the first time water is added lets it go “that’s a decent amount of not super dirty clothes, so I need to add more water, a little less soap, and a longer spin cycle”.
They’re definitely jumping on the marketing train, but problems like that do fall under AI.
The thing is, we’ve had that sort of capability for a long time now, we called them algorithms. Rebranding it as ai is pure marketing bullshit
Well that’s sort of my point. It’s an algorithm, or set of techniques for making one, that’s been around since the 50s. Being around for a long time doesn’t make it not part of the field of AI.
The field of AI has a long history of the fruits of their research being called “not AI” as soon as it finds practical applications.
The system is taking measurements of its problem area. It’s then altering its behavior to produce a more optimal result given those measurements. That’s what intelligence is. It’s far from the most clever intelligence, and it doesn’t engage in reason or have the ability to learn.
In the last iteration of the AI marketing cycle companies explicitly stopped calling things AI even when it was. Much like how in the next 5-10 years or so we won’t label anything from this generation “AI”, even if something is explicitly using the techniques in a manner that makes sense.
No, problems like “how dirty is this water” do not fall under AI. It’s a pretty simple variable of the type software has been dealing with since forever.
Wouldn’t you know, AI has also been algorithmically based and around since the 1950s?
AI as a field isn’t just neural networks and GPUs invented in the last decade. It includes a lot of stuff we now consider pretty commonplace.
Using some simple variables to measure a few continuous values to make decisions about soap quantity, water to dispense, and the number of rinse cycles is pretty much a text book example of classical AI. Environmental perception and changing actions to maximize the quality of its task outcome.
Respectfully, there’s no universe in which any type of AI could possibly benefit a load of laundry in any way. I genuinely pity anyone who falls for such a ridiculous and obvious scam
I would say that when the intelligent washing machine has access to sensors (weight, hardness of water, types of laundry detergents) and actuators (releasing the right amount of detergents, water, spin to the barrel) it could make an optimal washing of laundry.
You can’t see a benefit to a washing machine that can wash clothes without you needing to figure out how much soap to add or how many rinse cycles it needs?
I genuinely pity anyone so influenced by marketing that they can’t look at what a feature actually does before deciding they hate it.
My parents got a new washer and dryer and they are wifi enabled. Why tf do they need to be wifi enabled? It won’t move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, so it’s not like you can set the laundry and then go about your errands and come home to dry clothes ready to be folded
Actually this one is sensible.
In the near future as more renewable energy is included in power grids the price of power will fluctuate depending on the weather.
The WiFi connection will allow you to configure your washing to be done when pricing reaches whatever point.
Ah yes, please fire up the washing machine at 3am and scare the fuck out of everybody. And then let the clothes sit in there wet so that when you wake up, they smell like mildew
Like others mentioned this one actually makes sense. Letting you know your washing is done so you can move it to the drier and letting you know its dry already so you can fold it is actually super helpful. I studied at an uni that had a connected laundry room so I didnt have to go all the way there to check if the machine was done with my laundry.
It already sings a song for 30 seconds when the load is done. I understand a notification at a laundromat, but what good is that really in your home?
A notification that your load is done is actually convenient. It’s typically also paired with some sensors that can let you know if you need more detergent or to run a cleaning cycle on the washer.
Mine also lets you set the wash parameters via the app if you want, which is helpful for people who benefit from the accessibility features of the phone. Difficult to adjust the font size or contrast on a washing machine, or hear it’s chime if you have hearing problems.
I mean, they have Alexa connected refrigerators with a camera inside the fridge that sees what you put in it and how much, to either let you know when you’re running low on something or ask to put in an order for more of that item before you run out, or tell you if something in there is about to spoil, or if the fridge needs cleaned, so I imagine a washer would do something similar?