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AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not. Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as > Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is…
Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such? A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants…
I thought the very nature of technology and progress is to allow humans to be lazy.
We build technology to reduce our own burdens.
And most of the AI marketing is revolving around giving you the luxury to think less and do more for a price.
> The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even
I find this highly dubious. All the names (agents, assistants, suggestion makers) are synonyms. They are just pieces of text that come off a screen, for inputs given to them. I am highly skeptical of intelligence emanating from them, mainly because real innovation and insight seems to come from a brains ability to devolve something into its abstract self, mush it around other abstract ideas and find a link in the abstract level, that is then applied to the problem at hand. (Andrew Wiles solution to the Euler's problem comes to my mind)
Even problem solving ability or the ability to plan or the ability to anticipate, is not part of the regular content that you find on the internet.
For example, I may read about something a farmer does in Arkansas, and then relate it to something completely different, in a different domain.
Nowhere in the content on internet would I find those two things together.
Most of the agentic systems, the MCP stuff, seems to be a pseudo-deterministic system that is harder to debug.
It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
About 60% of my job is writing. Writing slack, writing code, writing design docs, writing strategies, writing calibrations. ChatGPT has allowed me to write 50%+ faster with 50%+ better quality. It’s been one of the largest productivity boosts in the last 10+ years.
It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
I too have sat at pianos and banged the keys but no valuable music came out. It must be because the piano is a bad instrument. /s
No, no, you have to realise, most pianists don't make real music!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This why I like how perplexity forces citations. I use it more like I’m googling then I care about what the LLM writes. The LLM simply acts as a sometimes unreasonable interface to the search engine. So really, I’m more focused on if whatever embeddings the LLM is trained on found some correlations between different documents, etc that were not obvious to a different kind of search engine.
You're over-representing the usefulness here. On topics where traditional search reaches a dead end, you will find the AI citations to be the same ones you might have found, except that upon checking, they were clearly misread or misrepresented. Dangerous and a waste of time. It's much more helpful on popular topics where summarization itself is already high quality and sufficient.
It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
I think it's starting to change. I'm an AI sceptic (and generally disregard most AI announcements). I don't think it's going to replace SWE at all. I've been chunking the same questions both to Gemini and GPT and I'd say about until ~8 months ago they were both as bad as each other and basically useless. However, recently Gemini has gotten noticeable better and has never hallucinated. I don't let it write any code fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. >Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point? I like that you point out here that the author clearly has a strong opinion, and then immediately say that the act of expressing that opinion may suggest that they do not hold that opinion at all.…
Is that what I did, though? I disagree. Rather, what I hoped to articulate was a sense that being able to viscerally feel that an author holds a very obvious position from the outset of an article, and then not seeing them make even the faintest attempt to proactively argue their point against the most obvious—the easiest—criticisms, comes across lazy. I expect arguing in good faith, and this wasn’t that.
Anything else is just aesthetics and personal preference
These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and n…
The one area I would agree that AI and ML tools have been surprisingly good, art generation.
But then, I see the flood of AI generated pictures and overall, feel it has made a already troublesome world, even more troublesome. I am starting to see the "the picture is AI made, or AI modified" excuses coming into mainstream.
A picture now, has lost all meaning.
> be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing
This, I am highly skeptical of. If you train an LLM with words of "trains can fly", then it spits that out. They may be good as summarizing or search tools, but to claim them to be "thinking" and "analyzing", nah.
I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow o…
> I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise. But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re…
- Turning a lot of data into a small amount of data, such as extracting facts from a text, translating and querying a PDF, cleaning up a data dump such as getting a clean Markdown table from a copy/pasted HTML source of a web page etc (IMO it often goes wrong when you go the other way and try to turn a small prompt into a lot of data)
- Creating illustrations representing ephemeral data (eg my daily weather report illustration which I enjoy looking at every day even if the data it produces is not super useful: https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink)
- Using Cursor to perform coding tasks that are tedious but I know what the end result should look like (so I can spend low effort verifying it) -- it has an 80% success rate and I deem it to save time but it's not perfect
- Exploration of a topic I'm not familiar with (I've used o3 extensively while double checking facts, learning about laws, answering random questions that would be too difficult to Google, etc etc) -- o3 is good at giving sources so I can double check important things
Beyond this, AI is also a form of entertainment for me, like using realtime voice chat, or video/image generation to explore random ideas and seeing what comes out. Or turning my ugly sketches into nicer drawings, and so forth.