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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#131

Post by cs702 »

roxolotl wrote: post #125
brookst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

ROFL. Thank you for sharing that link!

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#132

Post by AstroBen »

roxolotl wrote: post #125
brookst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win

What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#133

Post by isaacremuant »

owebmaster wrote: post #96
isaacremuant wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK already responded saying "No, thanks". https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/

The UK left EU

You don't say.

The point is that thinking number of signatures is a victory is naive.

You can't use this as an example of success until you actually achieve something.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#134

Post by o11c »

oceanplexian wrote: post #91
einrealist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "Engineering" is based on predictability, on repeatability? LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. Each change to the model impacts how it parses and computes the input. For someone claiming to be a "Prompt Engineer", this cannot work. There are so many variables that are simply unknown to the casual user: training methods, the training set, biases, ... If I get the feeling I am…

> LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. It will spit out the same answer every time. So it’s not an issue with the technology and there’s nothing stopping you from writing repeatable prompts and promoting techniques.

By "unpredictability", we mean that AIs will return completely different results if a single word is changed to a close synonym, or an adverb or prepositional phrase is moved to a semantically identical location, etc. Very often this simple change will move you from "get the correct answer 90% of the time" (about the best that AIs can do) to "get the correct answer Whenever people talk about "prompt engineering", they're referring to randomly changing these kinds of things, in hopes of getting a query pattern where you get meaningful results 90% of the time.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#135

Post by NilMostChill »

brookst wrote: post #114
ikr678 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consumer pproducts, sure, don't buy them. For people in office based careers, they may not get a choice when their company rolls out copilot, or management decide to buy an ai helpdesk agent, or a vendor pushes ai slop into the next enterprise software version.

How is that different from not liking other technology choices one’s employer makes? I could write a book about how much I hate our expense tool. But it’s never occurred to me that I am entitled to have a different one.

Entitled, probably not, able to communicate frustrations and suggest alternative options, absolutely.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#136

Post by CoastalCoder »

brookst wrote: post #107
iLoveOncall wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User issue. Every single time this comes up. People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population. Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Google is nearly useless for recipes. Try finding a recipe for beef bourguignon. They exist, but with huge prefaces and elaboration that mean endless scrolling on a phone, all in the name of maximizing time spent on page (which is a search ranking criteria).

I've also heard a 3rd-hand claims that not authors of those recipes vett what they've written. E.g., what the true prep / cooking times are.

I still find online recipes convenient, but I don't blindly trust details like cooking time and temperature. (I mean, those things are always subject to variability, but now I don't trust the times to even be in the right ballpark.)

Happily, there are some cooks that I think deserve our trust, e.g. Chef John.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#137

Post by [deleted] »

jasonsb wrote: post #32

I’ve observed the opposite—not enough people are leveraging AI, especially in government institutions. Critical time and taxpayer money are wasted on tasks that could be automated with state-of-the-art models. Instead of embracing efficiency, these organizations perpetuate inefficiency at public expense. The same issue plagues many private companies. I’ve seen employees spend days drafting documents that a free tool…

[deleted]

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#138

Post by Nursie »

m000 wrote: post #3

I mostly agree with TFA, with one glaring exception: The quality of Google search results has regressed so badly in the past years (played by SEO experts), that AI was actually a welcome improvement.

LOL. I’ll take declining relevancy over (in order of badness) AI results that -

Badly summarise articles.

Outright invent local attractions that don’t exist.

Gave subtly wrong, misleading advice about employment rights.

All while coming across as confidently authoritative.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#139

Post by computerthings »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

[dead]

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#140

Post by rincebrain »

AstroBen wrote: post #132
roxolotl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

Part of the problem is that some of these services have enormous upfront costs to work at all.

It's fun to say "let's go write a complete replacement for Microsoft Office" or the Adobe suite or what have you, but that has a truly astonishing upfront cost to get to a point where it's even servicing 50% of the use cases, let alone 95 or 99%.

Or there's other examples where it's not obvious there's sufficient interest to finance an alternative - how many people are going to pay for something that replicates solely the old functionality of Microsoft Paint or Notepad, for example.

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