We all know what AI is doing to the workforce but that’s no mystery. Has AI actually served you well, or is it all overhyped slop?
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Tldr: I think current AI hype is trying to go to get to the moon by building a better ladder. It’s useful but for a few select things.
I’ve managed to automate some boring tedious task (get measurements from a dozen different wikipedia article, do simple maths with them), something that would take about an hour to do manually took 15 minutes to argue with an AI and fact check after.
Creative stuff (stories, pictures, music) is amusing for a while but I suspect they are stuck in the same kind of uncanny valley robots have been in for a long time.
I like how Yaron Minsky from Jane Street characterized it: “It is smarter than we expected to be but dumber than it needed to be… It feels like something really dumb but somehow memorized the entire internet.”
This is kind of what I feel: despite all these impressive BAR and IMO achievements, in my work, I feel they do a great job at parapherasing the internet, but fails when you need it to do something mildly intelligent.
Does it improve my efficiency? yes, but only at some very tedious and specific taskes, once I go slightly out of scope, it comes up with inelegant solution that I will need to rewrite from scratch.
I use LLMs to break down huge tasks into small pieces because I’m too lazy to do anything. I also use them to write emails. Basically everything that I think is bullshit, that I don’t have to do by myself.
The technology is remarkable, the implementation is lame, the impact is happening too fast for us to adapt, the damage to artists and creatives is to cry for.
Someone posted a meme yesterday comparing it to The One Ring from LOTR and I think it’s spot on.
This is the largest technology con job right now. NFTs failed, the “metaverse” failed, now a badly trained AI is the “solution to humanity’s problems”. This is just as stupid as religion.
The only things it’s good for are kinda evil.
It’s simultaneously awesome and overhyped.
I would add one more adjective to complete the description: terrible. Depending on the situation, sometimes it’s awesome, sometimes it doesn’t live up to the hype, and sometimes it’s downright terrible.
Slop
for the average person, it just provides an objectively inferior result to reading the results on google. like I cannot imagine thinking “Wow I really want an incorrect and incomplete response to my query that doesn’t even link me to additional context to fill in the gaps right now”
Did you somehow forget that 90% of the shit on the internet 3 years ago just before AI was just absolute garbage websites copy/pasting from every other website in existence and so full of ads that people couldn’t even find the actual content on the page?
All that garbage is still there, under the slop, under the Reddit and other promoted answers. It’s just another layer on top of what we were actually looking for.
Machine learning in general is pretty awesome. It solves many problems behind the scenes, but even that side is overhyped.
We hoped it would solve hard problems, but it can’t. It solves boring problems. We hoped you could implement it easily, but it isn’t that straightforward either.
Generative AI for text, audio, images, and video is here, but the same problems persist. It doesn’t solve hard problems, no matter how hard we want it to. Also, implementation is harder than expected.
Then there’s the misuse of LLMs. Oh boy what a dumpster fire.
Over hyped trash.
I think Alan Tudyck get fucked over because Will Smith couldn’t handle not being the most likable character in a movie.
As soon as test audiences said they loved the robot, the cut back Tudyck’s scenes and completely dropped him from promotion and intro credits.
We all know what AI is doing to the workforce
Do we?
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs
Summary
While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative. The picture of AI’s impact on the labor market that emerges from our data is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level. While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies, it is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs. The lack of widespread impacts at this early stage is not unlike the pace of change with previous periods of technological disruption. Preregistering areas where we would expect to see the impact and continuing to monitor monthly impacts will help us distinguish rumor from fact.
I recently completed a fairly complex implementation training in government for a team of non-technical users, including agents, agentic workflows, some RAG, and small-scale enterprise app deployments.
I find it a very cool technology, but it is dumb yet. When unbounded, AI does some cool stuff. But building for complex workflows, I find, has resulted in a mixed bag of results. Very specific functions, such as mining data patterns, it is not bad at. But add gray area and it kind of takes stabs in the dark, much like a badly defined Web search.
Even our technical teams sell it as a 10-20% increase in efficiency, not a firesale position replacement. And they’re mandated to adopt and distribute it as widely through govt as possible.
In short, I think this is a fair assessment lol AI may replace us one day, but the models are far too new yet
It’s OK in some instances where it’s a tool that helps your hands. Once you start outsourcing your head to chatgpt, you’re voluntarily letting your mental faculties rot in favor of percieved comfort.
There are some minor tools for small work that have been helpful, but overall it is intrusive slop.
Windows updates keep trying to add back ai.exe and aimgr.DLL to my office folder. Which I delete, because otherwise it randomly hogs CPU and bogs down the computer.
Then every damn app has a new AI panel that is garbage.
I haven’t used Windows 11 in a long time, is it true copilot is in notepad now?
