So, are there any EU citizens around who are willing to create and run the needed European Citizens' Initiative to get this ball rolling? :) As a data point, the "Stop Killing Games" one has passed the needed 1M signatures so is in good shape: https://www.stopkillinggames.com
The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
81–90 of 421 posts
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 promise…
I think there are lots of valid arguments against llm usage, but it’s extremely tiring to here how it’s not useful when I get so much use out of it.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#83ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something like 8% of Instagram users say they would pay for it. Are we to take this to mean that Instagram is an unpopular product that is rbi g forced on an unwilling public?
If you answer no, does that make you an unwilling user of social media? It’s the most visited sites in the world after all, how could randomly injecting it into your GPS navigation system be a poor fit?
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#84I’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…
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#85ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something like 8% of Instagram users say they would pay for it. Are we to take this to mean that Instagram is an unpopular product that is rbi g forced on an unwilling public?
All the anti-AI people I know are in their 30s. I think there are many in this age group that got use to nothing changing and are wishing it to stay that way.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#86It's like talking into a void. The issue with AI is that it is too subtle, too easy to get acceptable junk answers and too subtle for the majority to realize we've made a universal crib sheet, software developers included, perhaps one of the worst populations due to their extremely weak communications as a community. To be repeatedly successful with AI, one has to exert mental effort to prompt AI effectively, but pre…
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 creating good prompts for Gemini 2.5 Pro, the next version might render those prompts useless. And that might get even worse with dynamic, "self-improving" models.
So when we talk about "Vibe coding", aren't we just doing "Vibe prompting", too?
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#87The 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…
The scale issue isn't the LLM provider, it's the power grid. Worldwide, 250 W/capita. Your body is 100 W and you have a duty cycle of 25% thanks to the 8 hour work day and having weekends, so in practice some hypothetical AI trying to replace everyone in their workplaces today would need to be more energy efficient than the human body.
Even with the extraordinarily rapid roll-out of PV, I don't expect this to be able to be one-for-one replacement for all human workers before 2032, even if the best SOTA model was good enough to do so (and they're not, they've still got too many weak spots for that).
This also applies to open-weights models, which are already good enough to be useful even when SOTA private models are better.
> You could argue that we already send a lot of data to public clouds. However, there was no economically viable way for cloud vendors to read, interpret, and reuse my data — my intellectual property and private information. With more and more companies forcing AI capabilities on us, it's often unclear who runs those models and who receives the data and what is really happening to the data.
I dispute that it was not already a problem, due to the GDPR consent popups often asking to share my browsing behaviour with more "trusted partners" than there were pupils in my secondary school.
But I agree that the aggregation of power and centralisation of data is a pertinent risk.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If those smaller models are sufficient for your use cases, go for it. But for how much longer will companies release smaller models for free? They invested so much. They have to recoup that money. Much will depend on investor pressure and the financial environment (tax deductions etc). Open Source endeavors will have a hard time to bear the resources to train models that are competitive. Maybe we will see larger coop…
Perhaps, but see also SETI@home and similar @home/BOINC projects.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
If those smaller models are sufficient for your use cases, go for it. But for how much longer will companies release smaller models for free? They invested so much. They have to recoup that money. Much will depend on investor pressure and the financial environment (tax deductions etc). Open Source endeavors will have a hard time to bear the resources to train models that are competitive. Maybe we will see larger coop…
Seems like you don’t have to train from scratch. You can just distil a new model off an existing one by just buying api credits to copy the model.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#90It's like talking into a void. The issue with AI is that it is too subtle, too easy to get acceptable junk answers and too subtle for the majority to realize we've made a universal crib sheet, software developers included, perhaps one of the worst populations due to their extremely weak communications as a community. To be repeatedly successful with AI, one has to exert mental effort to prompt AI effectively, but pre…
If I have to do extensive subtle prompt engineering and use a lot of mental effort to solve my problem... I'll just solve the problem instead. Programming is a mental discipline - I don't need help typing, and if using an AI means putting in more brainpower, its fundamentally failed at improving my ability to engineer software