What AI is not: Human connection. A creative.

What AI is: A very fancy search engine that gives human-like answers. Which includes the fallibility. People keep saying “you’re better off reading the page”… are you tho? Why are we suddenly defending the academy of google and “doing your own research”? People who are hell bent on being idiots will continue to be idiots, AI or no. Though AI has some chance to exposing logical fallacies in one’s arguments. If fucking anything, AI can help smart people with the exhausting task of dealing with gishgallop disinformation tactics in online discourse. And I mean SMART people, those who know better than to just have AI print a wall of text on their behalf, and who know the subject matter but don’t have every piece of proof at their fingertips at any given time (of course an argument can be made that a smart person wouldn’t get into this kind of argument in the first place - but ya’ll know how you are).

Also, as much as I dislike Google, there’s no viable alternative to YouTube. And Gemini is way better with YouTube searches.

And I’m happy to not be forced to go onto the garbage sites of Wikia etc. whenever I need to look something up in a videogame.

And it’s an utility that can help with the more tedious tasks of projects. Which isn’t an universally good thing since that usually implies more productivity, which implies more consumption. And we’re already over-consuming. But AI can also help production of something actually life-enhancing, from people who actually care and aren’t just looking to produce more to generate more profits.

It’s a tool, and a toy. And unfortunately a lot of people aren’t equipped to use it.

It broke me out of a broken mindset at least, since no human would actually talk to me in a wise way, this therapy-pilled bot did that job instead.

It really is a good search engine, provided you check sources. It’s a good way to get around the enshitified google searches.

Good for bouncing ideas off, and low-effort stories where you play whatever role your friends would not put up with. In other words, a fun game.

However, it’s been taking more time than it’s been saving whenever I tried to get it to do more. Agentic frameworks rarely work beyond “add this bit of text to my notes while I work”, so you don’t have to search up and find certain documents. Or “tell me what my document says about so and so topic”. If you expect it to code for you, or manage your files properly, or not delete it’s own components, forget it. More effort than it’s worth.

I actually shut down my VM, as I currently have no use for it whatsoever, and I don’t like using non-local AI models, for several reasons, I will only use them when necessary.

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No, it’s made it worse. I already automated the work “AI” could do before gpt was released.

Now when someone suggests a change there is always hallucinations of settings that don’t exist.

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.

It’s simultaneously awesome and overhyped.

The only things it’s good for are kinda evil.

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”

Over hyped trash.

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.