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Please stop the AI confidence theater

elenaverna.com

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Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#31

Post by phillipcarter »

Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products.

For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#32

Post by john_strinlai »

cautiouscat wrote: post #29
john_strinlai wrote: post #18

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life. > So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’

>how people tell them AI changed their life

yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#34

Post by dgellow »

john_strinlai wrote: post #18

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#35

Post by dgellow »

adi_pradhan wrote: post #15

There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans. I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.

Who are those people and businesses?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#36

Post by romaniv »

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.

A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.

The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#38

Post by AaronAPU »

algoth1 wrote: post #14

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then market…

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#39

Post by simianwords »

People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.

Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.

No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#40

Post by cryo32 »

dgellow wrote: post #34
john_strinlai wrote: post #18

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

Yes. However this one is a bit weird.

Every software purchase process I have been involved in I have asked the vendor to demonstrate their claims against our requirements.

With AI, I am expected to defend myself from claims that my requirements are wrong.

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