Stop giving AI more credit than it deserves. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolutionise industries, it’s going to keep spitting out verbose nonsense until we get bored of it.
Im surprised there are still people down on this first step of the ladder you’re lingering on.
Even most AI pessimists these days agree its useful as a force multiplier, allowing one person to do a bit more work in a given time frame, while still maintaining that its not competent enough to entirely replace a human in all but the most fringe cases.
“Its useless and acheives nothing” is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
You can remain anti-ai while still being realistic that it can be useful.
Especially if you acknowledge that the product is not the root of the problem, the late-stage capitalist system its being built to serve is the problem.
A product can be useful to its users while the companies providing it are still unprofitable because they’re spending enormous amounts on R&D, infrastructure and expansion.
This regurgitated, thought-terminating sentiment confuses utility with the providers current profit margin. Its fair enough to not understand how businesses operate but taking shots in the dark while not really knowing what you’re talking about isnt sensible.
I use it rewrite work emails, that way I don’t have to put any thought into formatting or punctuation it’s just a stream of consciousness that then translates into a proper formatted email. But that is pretty much it.
If my private life I don’t use AI for anything, not because I have a particular hatred of AI, I just don’t have anything that can think that it could be used for.
If the technology suddenly became unavailable, I’d be absolutely fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea to become too reliant on AI anyway, it leaves you vulnerable to price gouging. I like to keep all my thinking inside my own brain where it’s free.
If you look at how exponentially cheaper individual units of work have become over the last few years there’s no real reason to worry about price gouging. Particularly when there’s still competition in the market, and open-source models.
Without those you’d have a point.
Im in a combined coding and marketing role so for me its a huge time saver. Far from perfect, but so am I.
Have any of the AI companies ever reduce their input output token prices I’ve always been under the impressive gone up. Not that I keep much of an eye on it.
You’re talking about the cost to the consumer, where I was talking about the energy cost of an individual unit of work by a given model, but they’re both relevant. The underlying energy cost of generating a token at a given level of capability has been falling as hardware and inference become more efficient. Those efficiency gains can feed through into lower token prices for users, but also a more capable model can often complete the same task with fewer tokens, fewer retries and less prompting.
So even if the headline price of a new frontier model looks similar or higher, the actual cost, both in energy and money, of getting a given piece of work done can still fall substantially. It’ll keep doing so too, its still in its infancy.
I think it has some uses for people that can utilize it intelligently, but what what I’ve actually observed is it that it lets incompetent people look like they’re doing more work while making more work for others.
Yeah i’d definitely agree, but that’s not new. The equivalent 20 years ago would’ve been ‘google-fu’, but its the same with any tool, its only as good as the weilder.
It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.
The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They’re looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there’s been so much recent hype about “AI” “escaping” its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It’s also why the Trump administration is all-in on “AI” development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.
The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won’t be a general artificial intelligence.
Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet’s worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.
Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.
And I haven’t even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.
You’re treating the current resource cost as though it’s a fixed characteristic of AI, when cost per unit of useful output has been collapsing the entire time. Stanford found that the inference cost of GPT 3.5 performance fell more than 280x in about two years because hardware and algorithms continue getting more efficient all the time.
Total AI energy use still rose because we’re using vastly more of it, but thats obviously going to happen in an emerging market. If AI becomes 10x cheaper and more efficient while simultaneously becoming useful across millions more tasks, total consumption can increase even as the resource cost of doing any particular task falls dramatically, but efficiency will continue to improve as the technology develops.
Im not saying ‘its good that its using all this energy’, im saying dismissing it as doomed by its energy usage is short-sighted. Its not in its end form.
The other things you mentioned are all regulation issues stemming from a completely fucked political system, not fundamental issues with ai.
So what AI company can I invest in and start making money, today? Which one is a going concern with solid financials? Because I’m pretty sure none of them are actually making more money than they’re spending on electricity. Because this tech doesn’t work on a very basic level.
Maybe it will get better. But it’s been years and I haven’t seen it improve enough to be economically relevant.
Conflating profitability with usefulness. AI companies are burning billions on R&D, infrastructure and expansion. That doesn’t mean the product isn’t already creating value for users.
The real question is whether that value eventually exceeds the cost of providing it.
“Its useless and acheives nothing” is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.
Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.
Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.
Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?
I also have an office job and can tell you I have uses for it.
I don’t use it to produce anything, but where I am researching something and have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more which are then verified.
have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more
I sometimes use it for that too but imo that’s a downgraded replacement from asking a colleague or a more senior person.
The capitalist class has squeezed the workers so much that taking a step back and asking your peers can be seen as wasting time, but that’s when breakthroughs happened.
If your wondering why I use it, well I think big brother is probably watching so my use shouldn’t be zero. I would much rather have collaboration time
I suppose it’s useful for writing those reports that have to be written because financial rules, but no one ever looks at. Reduced quality in that area is acceptable because the chances any of the documents are ever going to be looked at are minimal, and if they are looked at, the work the AI did was probably good enough, even if it wasn’t to your normal standards.
That’s possible, but I’m not convinced. At a certain point, a world dominated by services that most people can no longer afford stops making economic sense.
It’s easy to look at the current trajectory and assume it continues indefinitely, but systems are more adaptive than that. As the playing field changes, businesses, governments and consumers change their behaviour too. The incentives themselves shift as the consequences become clearer.
Possibly, but there’s no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I’ve seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I’ve also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.
Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it’s fans and critics.
Kinda makes sense that the people you see getting the most out of it aren’t particularly “impressive” when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Whether or not those workers will actually see any financial benefits out of it is a different question entirely.
OK instead of slop I’ll say anything they put in writing is less accurate and more verbose. It may be faster for them to do to it but any gain is canceled out then multiplied by the number of people having to parse through it… Or I could say slopified and anyone that has actually experienced it will know what I mean.
You looked at the amount of solar the world has implemented over the last couple of years to compensate though?
Or how fast a unit of work has been getting exponentially cheaper over very short spaces of time?
You’re not unreasonable in glancing at the situation and seeing Doom, dont get me wrong, but if you do more than glance there is a more positive picture forming.
Of course, political reform will be crucial or we’re fucked either way.
The alternative means for producing sufficient energy for a better standard of living than most of us are privileged enough to experience has been around for several decades now(much longer with caveats).
These decisions to not only continue to use fossil fuels but to accelerate the pace of ecological destruction in the name of “compute”, all the while failing to benefit or protect the rights of laborers, are purely political and always has been.
political reform will be crucial or we’re fucked either way.
Politics is the choice between a solarpunk or a cyberpunk present. It could be better today if we simply choose.
That’s a pretty ignorant statement. It has, objectively, changed the world. It has changed how we look at healthcare, politics, the economy, news, social media, the law, and countless other industries. Wtf do you mean it’s not going to change anything? I’m not arguing for AI, but I’m frustrated at your head in the sand approach.
Wow, so if AI has changed all of these fields, there must be some AI company making money? …right? It must be super easy to make money with such powerful tech, so there would obviously be a lot of good examples. Right?
Stop giving AI more credit than it deserves. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolutionise industries, it’s going to keep spitting out verbose nonsense until we get bored of it.
Im surprised there are still people down on this first step of the ladder you’re lingering on.
Even most AI pessimists these days agree its useful as a force multiplier, allowing one person to do a bit more work in a given time frame, while still maintaining that its not competent enough to entirely replace a human in all but the most fringe cases.
“Its useless and acheives nothing” is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
You can remain anti-ai while still being realistic that it can be useful.
Especially if you acknowledge that the product is not the root of the problem, the late-stage capitalist system its being built to serve is the problem.
If it’s so useful, then surely all these AI companies are making money, right? I’ll wait
What are you waiting for?
A product can be useful to its users while the companies providing it are still unprofitable because they’re spending enormous amounts on R&D, infrastructure and expansion.
This regurgitated, thought-terminating sentiment confuses utility with the providers current profit margin. Its fair enough to not understand how businesses operate but taking shots in the dark while not really knowing what you’re talking about isnt sensible.
I use it rewrite work emails, that way I don’t have to put any thought into formatting or punctuation it’s just a stream of consciousness that then translates into a proper formatted email. But that is pretty much it.
If my private life I don’t use AI for anything, not because I have a particular hatred of AI, I just don’t have anything that can think that it could be used for.
If the technology suddenly became unavailable, I’d be absolutely fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea to become too reliant on AI anyway, it leaves you vulnerable to price gouging. I like to keep all my thinking inside my own brain where it’s free.
If you look at how exponentially cheaper individual units of work have become over the last few years there’s no real reason to worry about price gouging. Particularly when there’s still competition in the market, and open-source models.
Without those you’d have a point.
Im in a combined coding and marketing role so for me its a huge time saver. Far from perfect, but so am I.
Have any of the AI companies ever reduce their input output token prices I’ve always been under the impressive gone up. Not that I keep much of an eye on it.
The chinese models are getting cheaper now that they have “flash” variants
You’re talking about the cost to the consumer, where I was talking about the energy cost of an individual unit of work by a given model, but they’re both relevant. The underlying energy cost of generating a token at a given level of capability has been falling as hardware and inference become more efficient. Those efficiency gains can feed through into lower token prices for users, but also a more capable model can often complete the same task with fewer tokens, fewer retries and less prompting.
So even if the headline price of a new frontier model looks similar or higher, the actual cost, both in energy and money, of getting a given piece of work done can still fall substantially. It’ll keep doing so too, its still in its infancy.
I think it has some uses for people that can utilize it intelligently, but what what I’ve actually observed is it that it lets incompetent people look like they’re doing more work while making more work for others.
Yeah i’d definitely agree, but that’s not new. The equivalent 20 years ago would’ve been ‘google-fu’, but its the same with any tool, its only as good as the weilder.
Knowing how the google search engine worked and being able to utilize it to its full potential is not at all equivalent to vibe sloping.
Explain why.
It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.
Like any tool, the user plays a key role in the quality of the output.
Yeah but it’s also just kind of a shitty tool.
Thats a take, but if you pair that sentiment with what I just said it paints a funny picture.
Like if I went to the store and bought a cheap hammer and it breaks after a few swings it’s a shitty tool. No matter my expertise with said tool.
That analogy only works if the AI literally stops functioning after a few uses.
A better comparison would be a tool that performs badly when used for the wrong job or by someone who doesn’t know its limitations.
“Sometimes produces bad output” isn’t the same thing as “shitty tool.”
Which just feeds back into what I’ve already said. Shall we go around again?
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They’re looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there’s been so much recent hype about “AI” “escaping” its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It’s also why the Trump administration is all-in on “AI” development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.
The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won’t be a general artificial intelligence.
Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet’s worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.
Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.
And I haven’t even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.
Get correct.
Get correct while making dead arguments haha.
You’re treating the current resource cost as though it’s a fixed characteristic of AI, when cost per unit of useful output has been collapsing the entire time. Stanford found that the inference cost of GPT 3.5 performance fell more than 280x in about two years because hardware and algorithms continue getting more efficient all the time.
Total AI energy use still rose because we’re using vastly more of it, but thats obviously going to happen in an emerging market. If AI becomes 10x cheaper and more efficient while simultaneously becoming useful across millions more tasks, total consumption can increase even as the resource cost of doing any particular task falls dramatically, but efficiency will continue to improve as the technology develops.
Im not saying ‘its good that its using all this energy’, im saying dismissing it as doomed by its energy usage is short-sighted. Its not in its end form.
The other things you mentioned are all regulation issues stemming from a completely fucked political system, not fundamental issues with ai.
So what AI company can I invest in and start making money, today? Which one is a going concern with solid financials? Because I’m pretty sure none of them are actually making more money than they’re spending on electricity. Because this tech doesn’t work on a very basic level.
Maybe it will get better. But it’s been years and I haven’t seen it improve enough to be economically relevant.
Conflating profitability with usefulness. AI companies are burning billions on R&D, infrastructure and expansion. That doesn’t mean the product isn’t already creating value for users.
The real question is whether that value eventually exceeds the cost of providing it.
I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.
Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.
Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.
Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?
I also have an office job and can tell you I have uses for it.
I don’t use it to produce anything, but where I am researching something and have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more which are then verified.
I sometimes use it for that too but imo that’s a downgraded replacement from asking a colleague or a more senior person.
The capitalist class has squeezed the workers so much that taking a step back and asking your peers can be seen as wasting time, but that’s when breakthroughs happened.
If your wondering why I use it, well I think big brother is probably watching so my use shouldn’t be zero. I would much rather have collaboration time
I suppose it’s useful for writing those reports that have to be written because financial rules, but no one ever looks at. Reduced quality in that area is acceptable because the chances any of the documents are ever going to be looked at are minimal, and if they are looked at, the work the AI did was probably good enough, even if it wasn’t to your normal standards.
The problem is that before we reach a compromise between usability, efficiency, fairness, and the jobs it will destroy, we’ll already be screwed…
That’s possible, but I’m not convinced. At a certain point, a world dominated by services that most people can no longer afford stops making economic sense.
It’s easy to look at the current trajectory and assume it continues indefinitely, but systems are more adaptive than that. As the playing field changes, businesses, governments and consumers change their behaviour too. The incentives themselves shift as the consequences become clearer.
Possibly, but there’s no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I’ve seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I’ve also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.
Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it’s fans and critics.
Kinda makes sense that the people you see getting the most out of it aren’t particularly “impressive” when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Whether or not those workers will actually see any financial benefits out of it is a different question entirely.
Trust me… middle managers using LLMs are not doing anything but throwing slop everywhere
What were they doing before?
The good ones? Nothing that benefits from LLMs and isn’t made worse by being slopped up.
Imo, they’re just doing the same shit slightly faster. Whether or not it has value is separate and mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Slop is a thought-terminating buzzword, you’re relying on it too heavily to make your point and it undermines you.
OK instead of slop I’ll say anything they put in writing is less accurate and more verbose. It may be faster for them to do to it but any gain is canceled out then multiplied by the number of people having to parse through it… Or I could say slopified and anyone that has actually experienced it will know what I mean.
Good yes finally! We need to burn the planet for modest productivity gains.
You looked at the amount of solar the world has implemented over the last couple of years to compensate though?
Or how fast a unit of work has been getting exponentially cheaper over very short spaces of time?
You’re not unreasonable in glancing at the situation and seeing Doom, dont get me wrong, but if you do more than glance there is a more positive picture forming.
Of course, political reform will be crucial or we’re fucked either way.
You can’t compensate for wantan abuse.
The alternative means for producing sufficient energy for a better standard of living than most of us are privileged enough to experience has been around for several decades now(much longer with caveats).
These decisions to not only continue to use fossil fuels but to accelerate the pace of ecological destruction in the name of “compute”, all the while failing to benefit or protect the rights of laborers, are purely political and always has been.
Politics is the choice between a solarpunk or a cyberpunk present. It could be better today if we simply choose.
Agreed 🤷♂️
So business created inefficient ways of working then pat themselves on the back when they come up with an expensive shortcut?
Or you know, office processes are the problem.
Oh, I think we both know the answer to that question.
I have no opinion on this conversation, i just wanna acknowledge your username and how it fit the conversation.
Yeah but 4x8 workdays are gonna be just as productive as 5x8, if you factor in general mood improvements.
Using AI as a scapegoat is fine, i guess
If employers are going to be dumb enough to use it, workers should be protected.
That’s a pretty ignorant statement. It has, objectively, changed the world. It has changed how we look at healthcare, politics, the economy, news, social media, the law, and countless other industries. Wtf do you mean it’s not going to change anything? I’m not arguing for AI, but I’m frustrated at your head in the sand approach.
Wow, so if AI has changed all of these fields, there must be some AI company making money? …right? It must be super easy to make money with such powerful tech, so there would obviously be a lot of good examples. Right?
I never claimed it made money, I didn’t even suggest anything positive resulting from these changes.
Average Lemmy AI doomer