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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

#31

Post by blablabla123 »

mrob wrote: post #25

>Everybody wanted the Internet. I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.

As a kid I had Internet access since the early 90s. Whenever there was some actual technology to see (Internet, mobile gadgets etc.) people stood there with big eyes and forgot for a moment this was the most nerdy stuff ever

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

#32

Post by jasonsb »

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 like Mistral could generate in seconds, leaving them 30-60 minutes to review and refine. There's a lot of resistance from the public. They're probably thinking that their job will be saved if they refuse to adopt AI tools.

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

#33

Post by squidbeak »

meheleventyone wrote: post #28
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn’t good enough that people actually want it and are willing to pay for it. Just from current ARR announcements: 3b+ anthropic, 10b+ oai, whatever google makes, whatever ms makes, yeah people are already paying for it.

Given everyone and their mother is putting AI in to their products it makes me wonder how that revenue breaks down between people incidentally paying for it versus deliberately paying for it versus being subsidized by VC. Obviously ultimately all this revenue is being collected at a massive loss but I wonder if that carries on down the value chain.

Amusing the way the argument shifts every time. This one's new though.

"If it was any good, people would pay for it."

"The data shows people are paying for it."

"Aah but they don't know they're paying for it."

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

#34

Post by lukaslevert »

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…

The irony is it’ll likely be the opposite.

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

#35

Post by jaimefjorge »

I feel an urge to build personal local AI bots that would be personal spam filters. AI filtering AI, fight fire with fire. Mostly because the world OP wants is never coming back. Everything will be AI and it's everywhere.

I also feel an urge to build spaces in the internet just for humans, with some 'turrets' to protect against AI invasion and exploitation. I just don't know what content would be shared in those spaces because AI is already everywhere in content production.

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

#36

Post by kgeist »

einrealist wrote: post #26

The major AI gatekeepers, with their powerful models, are already experiencing capacity and scale issues. This won't change unless the underlying technology (LLMs) undergoes a fundamental shift. As more and more things become AI-enabled, how dependent will we be on these gatekeepers and their computing capacity? And how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources? And we haven't really gotten t…

We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it turns out, most people don't use LLMs 24/7.

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

#37

Post by stevedonovan »

jstanley wrote: post #19
phito wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably want the version of it they sold you in the advertising. Or are you actually happy with the slop they're currently shipping?

Yes, I use Cursor every day. It has changed my life.

But this is one thing that Gen AI is genuinely good at, constructing computer programs under close human supervision. It's also the most profitable (but not enough to justify valuations) Also, it may be a big thing here but its pretty niche in the larger scheme of things

The article is about it encroaching in the domain of human communications. Mass adoption is the only way to justify the incredible financial promises.

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

#38

Post by lukaslevert »

blablabla123 wrote: post #30

I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries. In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish

Dunno about DDG but on Brave Search you can turn off the AI summaries if you prefer not to have them. Disclosure: I work at Brave.

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

#39

Post by JoshTriplett »

blablabla123 wrote: post #30

I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries. In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish

You can completely turn off the AI summaries in DDG.

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

#40

Post by metalman »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #39
blablabla123 wrote: post #30

I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries. In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish

You can completely turn off the AI summaries in DDG.

currently run duckduck, but dont get the summeraries as my phone browser sets individual domain conditions, and duck duck will return results without having java,cookies,dom enabled
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