For the love of god, defund MBAs.

They just don’t get it. Once everyone will use AI toilet and AI toothbrush they will sing a different tune.

I was at the optometrist recently and saw a poser for some lenses (transitions) that somehow had “AI”…I was like WTF how / why / do you need to carry a small supercomputer around with you as well.

“AI” is certainly a turn-off for me, I would ask a salesman “do you have one that doesn’t have that?” and I will now enumerate why:

1. LLMs are wrongness machines. They do have an almost miraculous ability to string words together to form coherent sentences but when they have no basis at all in truth it’s nothing but an extremely elaborate and expensive party trick. I don’t want actual services like web searches replaced with elaborate party tricks.

2. In a lot of cases it’s being used as a buzzword to mean basically anything computer controlled or networked. Last time I looked up they were using the word “smart” to mean that. A clothes dryer that can sense the humidity of the exhaust air to know when the clothes are dry isn’t any more “AI” than my 90’s microwave that can sense the puff of steam from a bag of popcorn. This is the kind of outright dishonest marketing I’d like to see fail so spectacularly that people in the advertising business go missing over it.

3. I already avoided “smart” appliances and will avoid “AI” appliances for the same reasons: The “smart” functionality doesn’t actually run locally, it has to connect to a server out on the internet to work, which means that while that server is still up and offering support to my device, I have a hole in my firewall. And then they’ll stop support ten minutes after the warranty expires and the device will no longer work. For many of these devices there’s no reason the “smart” functionality couldn’t run locally on some embedded ARM chip or talk to some application running on a PC that I own inside my firewall, other than “then we don’t get your data.”

4. AI is apparently consuming more electricity than air conditioning. In fact, I’m not convinced that power consumption isn’t the selling point they’re pushing at board meetings. “It’ll keep our friends in the pollution industry in business.”

I’ve found ChatGPT somewhat useful, but not amazingly so. The thing about ChatGPT is, I understand what the tool is, and our interactions are well defined. When I get a bullshit answer, I have the context to realize it’s not working for me in this case and to go look elsewhere. When AI is built in to products in ways that you don’t clearly understand what parts are AI and how your interactions are fed to it; that’s absolutely and incurably horrible. You just have to reject the whole application; there is no other reasonable choice.

To be honest, I lost all interest in the new AMD CPUs because they fucking named the thing “AI” (with zero real-world application).

I’m in the market for a new PC next month and I’m gonna get the 7800X3D for my VR gaming needs.

Lets see if this finally kills the AI hype. Big tech is pushing for AI because it is the ultimate spyware, nothing more.

LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn’t waste their money.

I’m actively turned off because they suck up my data to use it.

I love the idea of local only AI and would use those products, and do play with local LLM/Image products.

I can attest this is true for me. I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them. It gave me the feeling LG clothes washer division is full of shit.

Bought a SpeedQueen instead and been super happy with it. No AI bullshit anywhere in their product info.

d u h

They’ve overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.

This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.

I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.

I’ve been applying similar thinking to my job search. When I see AI listed in a job description, I immediately put the company into one of 3 categories:

1. It is an AI company that may go out of business suddenly within the next few years leaving me unemployed and possibly without any severance.
2. Management has drank the Kool-Aid and is hoping AI will drive their profit growth, which makes me question management competence. This also has a high likelihood of future job loss, but at least they might pay severance.
3. The buzzword was tossed in to make the company look good to investors, but it is not highly relevant to their business. These companies get a partial pass for me.

A company in the first two categories would need to pay a lot to entice me and I would not value their equity offering. The third category is understandable, especially if the success of AI would threaten their business.

Every company that has been trying to push their shiny, new AI feature (which definitely isn’t part of a rush to try and capitalize on the prevalence of AI), my instant response is: “Yeah, no, I’m finding a way to turn this shit off.”