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Turns out Generative AI was a scam (garymarcus.substack.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [B] to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] 4 points 8 months ago (8 children)

"Why are they pushing AI? Nobody wants this!" Meanwhile chatgpt.com is the fifth-most-visited website in the world.

But I suppose people can just wrap themselves in a social media bubble where anyone who say something positive about AI gets downvoted through the floor, and then their view of the world gets curated to look a bit more like how they want it to be.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    There's a big difference between having a website that you can choose to engage with and having LLMs jammed into your device's operating system or programming IDE that make you jump through hoops just to disable them (or your email and then be told your emails are going to be used in training and if you don't want that you have to turn off all the smart features, including the ones that aren't LLM-based).

    There would be certain use cases I'd be open to, but at least give me a choice when deploying it out as to whether it's on or off, what it has access to and make it easy to change those settings.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Right. The website that people choose to engage with shows that people are choosing to engage with AI without being forced to. It shows that the demand for AI is organic and real. Lots of people want to use AI.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    Of course they do. People want comfort and AI as it is marketed is the ultimate comfort. Doesn't change the harm it does at all, but lots of people are eager to dismiss the harm as long as their comfort is assured.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    yeah exactly, I also love their 'it produces NOTHING but GARBAGE', as if I can't see exactly what it's producing every time I make a query which I do multiple times a day 🤯

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Yeah, I have deep reservations about the various AI companies, the environmental impacts of the industry, and many of the other issues that people are bringing up here. And, I have still found a few very practical uses.

    My partner was fighting with their insurance company about getting reimbursed for several thousand dollars of medical expenses. After a couple of rounds of rejections I had them send me the paperwork, insurance information, and rejection letters and then asked ChatGPT what we should say to get them to reimburse us. It came up with a letter that had the right legal mumbo jumbo to convince the insurance company to agree and pay us. Yes, I could have hired a lawyer, but the legal fees would have eaten up most of the money. And I guess I could have gone to law school, gotten a specialization in insurance law, and figured it out myself. But that also would have cost more time and money.

    I still think “AI” is overhyped and has a lot of ethical issues, but there are also some very practical uses.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago*

    You're right, it's just mostly garbage output. I eventually get to a moderately usable answer a lot of the time, but more often than not I have to constantly tweak the prompt or tell it to follow the goddamned system prompts I give it, and it still feeds me obvious bullshit on 1/4-1/2 of the responses.

    Maybe you're working in a common area where the AI doesn't have to work hard to give you good outputs, but the AI is trash for the tasks I give it.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    the overwhelming majority of chatbot users run on average about 5 prompts per week, or less than one prompt per day, according to OpenAI’s own usage stats.

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