131–140 of 608 posts
It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better. Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been…
I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well ma…
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
I was at the grocery store a few weeks back browsing the clearance with my girlfriend. To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY” If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because…
I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population. “That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
For example:
I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.
Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".
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The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally always LLM. AI is now synonym for LLM, regardless of what it meant before. Just like crypto is now synonym for e-currency and does not mean cryptography anymore. People are not confused about these.
No that's not true. I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect). I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).
I mean I agree with you just that the popular perception of that word has changed
The word "turnoff' is an understatement. The rubes try to sell it like the Monorail on the Simpsons. They're pushier than a timeshare. Feels like a scam.
That episode was based on the musical The Music Man, FWIW
Feels like the old iThing or eWare trends of the 00s. New thing, new marketing trend.
This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices. We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face. Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively…
- "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product."
- "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail."
- "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression would be the better choice."
We are so far beyond the pale. This was a valid criticism ~5 years ago and now we remember it as the golden days.