8 ms·

Every time some product or service introduces AI (or more accurately shoves it down our throats) people start looking for a way to get rid of it. It's so stran

• voidhorse 2y ago
  Precisely. From day one this was about doing what industrialization did for manual labor for "white collar" work.
  • greenavocado 2y ago
    The end goal is a global panopticon followed by a culling of the herd. Read the inscriptions: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/georgia-guidestones/ https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeo...
    • talldayo 2y ago
      Sometimes I worry that the internet has enabled ordinary but gullible people to find exactly the supporting evidence they need to be considered insane by society.
      • greenavocado 2y ago
        The Freemasons which rule over you in the form of police and courts and the legislative branch built the Georgia Guidestones
        • NikolaNovak 2y ago
          I genuinely cannot tell if this is a joke, or a serious hypothesis :-/
          • miningape 2y ago
            The best conspiracy theories dance along this line
      • quesera 2y ago
        > the internet has enabled ordinary but gullible people to find exactly the supporting evidence they need to be considered insane by society If by "be considered insane by society", you mean "find each other, attract new members, mobilize, and vote", I'd say you're spot on. This was all a big mistake. To future generations, all I can say is that we meant well.
      • gosub100 2y ago
        Billionaires destroy the working class: "progress". Working class organizes a defense: "insanity".
• smt88 2y ago
  AI has value the way self-checkout has value: it's anti-consumer and widely hated, but it (can) save the companies money and will therefore be too widespread for anyone to opt out.
  • ashoeafoot 2y ago
    you get the employees rebate at selfcheckout
  • n4r9 2y ago
    Self-checkout has come a long way IMO. I love not having to queue as long or speak to staff. The occasional "unknown item" still happens, but it's worth it. Even better are the ones in smaller shops that don't have a weighing sensor.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Stores seem to have dialed down some of the sensitivity. I don't know the last time I've run into a complaint because I used my own bag or something else that affects weight. One of my regular grocery stores doesn't have self-checkout. The other one has both and I'll wait for a cashier if I have a lot of items, especially produce. But if I have a handful of barcoded items I'll use self-checkout unless there is a cashier's lane with literally no wait.
  • autoexec 2y ago
    Self-checkout has its uses and supporters. Introverts, the socially anxious, people in a hurry, people who'd much prefer to bag (or double/triple bag) their own items in ways that work best for them, people who want to get the organic tomato at the price of the non-organic one. It's absolutely still a scheme by companies to get rid of employees and get customers to do work for them for free, and there are still issues with the systems not working very well, but we at least have the option (in almost all cases) to queue up at the one or two registers with an employee doing the work. When it comes to AI, we're often not being given any choice at all. Even if we can avoid using it, or somehow avoid seeing it, we will still be training it.
• basscomm 2y ago
  > At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work It's this part. Salaries and benefits are expensive. A computer program doesn't need a salary, retirement benefits, insurance, retirement, doesn't call in sick, doesn't take vacations, works 24/7, etc.
  • dbcjv7vhxj 2y ago
    No it's not. It's because management is tone deaf and out of touch. They'll latch onto literally anything put in front of them as a way out of their inability to iterate and innovate on their products. Throwing "ai" into it is a simple addition, if it works, great, if it doesn't well the market just wasn't ready. But if they have to actually talk to their users and solve their real problems that's a really hard pill to swallow, extremely hard to solve correctly, and basically impossible to sell to shareholders because you likely have to explain that your last 50 ideas and the tech debt they created are the problem that needs to be excised.
    • RajT88 2y ago
      Today it is AI. Yesterday it was Blockchain. Tomorrow it will be Agentic AI Blockchains. I know what you are thinking: robots are coming for our jobs after that. Don't worry! Those AI robots will run on the Cloud.
      • SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
        But that's where my job is!
      • csixty4 2y ago
        Can I control those robots using VR?
        • RajT88 2y ago
          No. The VR revolution will never come.
• Fomite 2y ago
  "How do I tell Copilot to go fuck itself?" - My mother during a recent tech support call.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    Siri will shut up if you yell, “Nobody asked you, Siri!” at it. And that, kids, is how I met your mother.
• hinkley 2y ago
  Somewhere there’s a graph that went boop just enough to get someone a promotion, a raise, or a bonus.
• munk-a 2y ago
  With the amounts being invested into AI and even just in recognition of running an AI service (@see how openAI loses money on their $200 subscriber accounts). The "for funsies" services like switching an HTML form over to a chatbot are clearly not going to be a realistic resolution for this technology. I'd argue that even when it comes to code generation the tools can be useful for green-field prototyping but the idea that a developer will need to verify the output of a model will never cause more than marginal economy of tools in that sector. The outcome that the large companies are banking on is replacing workers, even employees with rather modest compensation end up costing a significant amount if you consider overhead and training. There is (mostly) no AI feature that wall street or investors care about except replacing labor - everything else just seems to exist as a form of marketing.
  • gwervc 2y ago
    Ok but how are the companies supposed to replace workers when the tech isn't having real use cases, and is far from accurate?
    • hatefulmoron 2y ago
      One prescient comment was made by Eric Yuan (Zoom CEO), who made the claim that the reliability and general efficacy issues from AI products would be solved "down the stack", and I think this is more or less the attitude right now. Firms believe if they can build their LLM/AI products, the underlying LLMs/AI will catch up over time to meet their requirements. I've also talked to a number of CTOs and CEOs who tell me that they're building their own AI products nominally to replace human workers, but they're not necessarily confident it will be successful in the foreseeable future. However, they want to be in a good place to capitalize on the success of AI if it does happen.
• timoth3y 2y ago
  > At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work That's certainly part of it. However, at this point I think a lot of it is a kind of emotional sunk-cost. To stop now would require a lot of very wealthy and powerful people to admit they had personally made a very serious mistake.
  • munk-a 2y ago
    It is also possible that we're just in the realm of pure speculation now - if you look at Tesla and NVidia both their valuations are completely imaginary and with the latter standing to benefit a lot by being shovel sellers (but not that much) and the former seeing an active decline in profitability while still watching the numbers go up. It may be less that people are unaware of the speculative bubble but are just hoping to get in and out before it pops.
• xivzgrev 2y ago
  There will be a crash as with any hype cycle But this is normal. A new thing is discovered, the market runs lots of tests to discover where it works / doesn’t, there’s a crash, valid use cases are found / scaled and the market matures. Y’all surely lived thru the mobile app hype cycle, where every startup was “uber for x”. The amount of money being spent today pales in comparison to the long term money on even one use case that scales. It’s a good bet if you are a VC.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    It's a weird cycle though where the order of everything is messed up. The normal tech innovation model is: 1. User problem identified, 2. Technology advancement achieved, 3. Application built to solve problem With AI, it's turned into: 1. Technology advancement achieved, 2. Applications haphazardly being built to do anything with Technology, 3. Frantic search for users who might want to use applications. I don't know how the industry thinks they're going to make any money out of the new model.
    • contravariant 2y ago
      I mean the obvious solution is to just manufacture more problems. I wish I could be certain that we're not doing that already.
      • gtirloni 2y ago
        In this case, I wouldn't attribute malice to incompetence.
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        we most certainly are with this subscription era of software. No one had an issue with buying Office or Photoshop or any other product that has no business needing to do monthly update cycles being a "buy once, own until you wanna upgrade". Except executives who wanted to siphon more money out of their products.
    • teeray 2y ago
• analog31 2y ago
  The faint ray of hope that someone will engage has been the essence of advertising since time immoral. It's similar to the question of why flies lay millions of eggs.
• morpheos137 2y ago
  It's not strange. It's about power and control. Google and the other big names could care less about user satisfaction: their customers are the ad buyers. It's too bad because even 10 years ago Google and the internet in general were magical. You could find information on any topic, make connections and change your life. Now it is mostly santized dumbed down crap and the discovery of anything special is hidden under mountains of SEO spam, now even AI generated SEO spam that is transparently crap for any moderately intelligent user. For a specific example I like to watch wildlife videos and specifically ones that give insight to how animal think and process the world. This comparative psychology can help us better understand ourselves. If you want to watch Macaque monkeys for example google/youtube feeds you almost exclusively SEO videos from a handful of locations in Cambodia. There are plenty of other videos out there but they are hidden by the mass produced videos out of Cambodia. If I find an interesting video and my view history is off the same video is often undiscoverable again even with the exact same search terms. Search terms are disregarded or substituted willy nilly by Google AI who thinks it knows better what I want than myself. But the most egregious thing for me as a viewer of nature videos is the AI generated content. It is obviously CGI and often ridiculous or physically impossible. For example let's say I want to see how a monkey interacts with a predatory python, I am allowed to watch that right??? Or are all the Serengeti lion hunting gazel videos to be banned in 2025? Lol. So I search "python attacks monkey" hoping to see a video in the natural setting. Instead I am greeted with maybe a handful of badly shot videos probably staged by humans and hundreds of CGI cartoons that are obviously not real. In one the monkey had a snake mouth! Lol. Who goes searching for real nature videos to see badly faked stuff? Because of how I can not find anything on google or Youtube anymore without picking through a mountain of crap I use them less now. This is for almost any kind of topic not just nature videos. Is that a win for advertisers? Less use? I don't think so. In about 20 years of using the product the number of times a google or Youtube search has led to me actually purchasing a product or service DUE to an ad I saw, is I believe precisely zero. Recently I have been seeing Temu (zero interest), disability fraud (how is this allowed), senior, and facebook ads. I am a non disabled, 30 something man. I saw an ad for burial insurance today. Why is facebook paying to advertise "facebook" on youtube in 2025? Is this some ritual sacrifice to the god Mammon or something? Surely in 2025 everyone who would be interested in Facebook has heard of it. I have the Facebook app installed. Why the hell do facebook investors stand facebook paying google to advertise facebook non-selectively on youtube. It's the stupidest thing I ever saw. I have not watched any political content in years. And yet when I search for a wild life video I get mountains of videos about Trump and a handful of mass produced low quality wildlife content interspersed. Today I was treated to an irrelevant ad about "jowl reduction." I know many of you use ad blockers but this is how horrendous it is without them. You can't find what you want, even what you just saw, and you are treated to a deluge of irrelevant, obnoxious content and ads. Clearly it is about social control, turning our minds to mush to better serve us even more terrible ad content.
• bobxmax 2y ago
  Billions of dollars are being spent on very useful AI. You just notice the shitty ones, but people on HN thinks that's the norm for some reason.
  • Nullabillity 2y ago
    You might've been… slightly… more convincing if you had any sources to back that absolutely wild claim up.
    • bobxmax 2y ago
      That billions of dollars is being spent on AI? That's a wild claim?
      • Nullabillity 2y ago
        That said "AI" is "very useful".
  • timewizard 2y ago
    Is the "useful AI" technology any different from this slop? If not then I fear that's wasted money as well. Which I think is the reason this stuff keeps getting shoehorned in. They invested money in training and equipment all of which is depreciating far faster than it has returned value. I strongly doubt this "dichotomy AI" theory.
    • bobxmax 2y ago
      That's demonstrably false unless you believe millions of people are spending their own money every month for useless tech. I don't know how a thinking person can use this technology and not see the possibilities it opens up.
      • timewizard 2y ago
        > unless you believe millions of people are spending their own money every month for useless tech. Your premise is wrong. You assume these people are spending money creating useful output or would otherwise understand and be able to implement a more efficient means on their own. In the words of David Graeber a lot of people have bullshit jobs, are you sure the "AI" isn't alleviating some other problem for them? > and not see the possibilities it opens up. The current technology has no natural exponential growth curve. Which means for a linear increase in spending you get a linear increase in accuracy. Any thinking person should see where this is going. Which is why you should call these LLMs so you don't accidentally fool yourself. I mean, of course, when AGI does arrive and has a reasonable power budget, then we're talking. The current technology will never become this or anything like this. This will almost certainly lead to a new "AI winter" before AGI happens and will likewise almost certainly not occur during yours or my lifetime. If you do believe that then I have a self driving battery powered semi to sell you that's fully autonomous and will run road cargo trains for you all day and night for huge profits.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• IgorPartola 2y ago
  I am totally in the same boat but also I do suspect it is a minority. It’s the same way that some people really want open source bootloaders, but 99.99% of people do not care at all. Maybe AI assistants in random places just aren’t that compatible with people on HN but are possibly useful for a lot of people not on HN?
  • fouronnes3 2y ago
    I agree with this. I'm very surprised when I see someone blindly trust whatever the AI summary says in a google query, because I myself have internalized a long time ago to strongly distrust it.
    • IgorPartola 2y ago
      To me it looks like for most things I search it just verbatim is the top answer from Stack Overflow.
    • wlesieutre 2y ago
      I’ve seen quite a few posts on Reddit with people asking questions like “Is a Mazda 2 really faster than a Civic Type R?!? ChatGPT told me it is” and it’s some complete nonsense numbers that could’ve been fact checked in about 5 seconds. I don’t think the little “ChatGPT might be wrong, you should check” disclaimer is doing very much.
      • autoexec 2y ago
        It's a good sign that people are even going to reddit and asking for confirmation of something that seemed suspicious to them. Sure, many of them could have googled for those answers themselves, but part of the problem is how unreliable and dishonest Google has become. Reddit sure isn't an ideal place for fact checks. It's full of PR bots and shills, but at least there are still humans commenting and I can't fault people for doing what they can in the best way they know how.
        • wlesieutre 2y ago
• 3dsnano 2y ago
  at work i’ve been tasked with “developing AI use cases” to add on to our product. we still don’t know what problems to solve, but we’re gonna use AI to help us figure that out. once we do, it’s gonna be huge. this AI stuff is going to change everything!!!
• animitronix 2y ago
  Reminds me of 3d tv and AR glasses
• callamdelaney 2y ago
  Moved from android to iOS to get rid of the ceaseless ‘please use our assistant’ nagging.
  • b112 2y ago
    I was going to buy a pixel 9 fold, but I literally have no idea why I should. All the ad talked about was AI, nothing about specs, and barely a whisper of how it works, or even good demos of apps switching between open and closed. Every phone has AI now, big deal. How about you tell me, Google, what is cool about the fold, instead of talking for 4 minutes about AI?!
• gosub100 2y ago
  I'll repeat my favorite quote about it (paraphrased and read it here first but don't recall the attribution): AI can copy a song, tell me a joke, predict what I buy, but I still have to do my own dishes. If AI (or any tech) could clean, do dishes, or cook (which is not a chore for many, I acknowledge that) it could potentially bring families together and improve the quality of peoples lives. Instead they are introducing it as a tool to replace jobs, think for us, and mistrust each other ("you sound like an AI bot!/you just copied that from chatgpt! You didn't draw that! How do I know you're real?" I don't know if they really thought through to an endgame, honestly. How much decimation can you inflict on the economy before the snake eats its own tail?
  • b112 2y ago
    2030 at the latest. LLM androids(robots).
    • gosub100 2y ago
      I would be fine with cheating and embedding magnets in the plates or having a special track that fits the plate to the sink. But I find it pathetic that this problem hasn't been solved yet. No one likes doing dishes.
      • b112 2y ago
        Well, dishwashers are enough to remove lots of the work. And they can dry the dishes too. So it's a lower bar, there's a partial solution.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          Dishwashers and washing machines don't eliminate cleaning all dishes/kitchen stuff and clothes but, realistically, they cut down on them a lot.
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      > LLM androids They'll make you the perfect pizza with cheese that doesn't slide off because of the glue. But seriously, I predict inadvisably-applied LLMs are going to eventually end up somewhere between the mistakes of Juicero and the mistakes of leaded gasoline.
• kristopolous 2y ago
  At my company we have a live service chat feature. Recently some of our customers have been requesting an AI chatbot support (we've got fairly technical product offerings). I'm guessing they want to ask a bunch of stupid questions. I'm surprised as well. Some people want it
  • autoexec 2y ago
    the only reasons i can imagine that a customer would want to use an AI chatbot for support instead of chatting with a person is either because they don't currently have the option to chat with a person 24/7 at all (AI is better than no chat support), or their experience with human chat support has been terrible (long wait times, slow responses, unhelpful agents, annoying language barriers, responses so unnatural and overly scripted that they might as well be bots, etc). There's nothing AI brings to the table that a competent human wouldn't, with the added benefit that you don't have to worry about AI making things up or not understanding you. Or maybe they just want to try and convince the AI to give them things you wouldn't (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...)
    • kristopolous 2y ago
      I dunno. Sarah Connor explained it pretty nicely in the 90s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E Kinda on the nose
    • djur 2y ago
      I agree, although "competent human" is not really the bar when we're talking about actually existing phone support. A while back I was trying to solve an issue with Verizon and calling three separate times I got three completely different approaches to solving my problem, all three of which were totally incorrect. (And the correct solution was literally just "go to this URL and fill out a form".) At least one of those people gave me advice that would have put me in legal hot water. It was rough.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• karaterobot 2y ago
  Adding unwanted features, bolting on an AI assistant, changing to a subscription model, and even automating away employees can all be explained by the following iron rule: C-level leadership lives in abject terror of the numbers not going up anymore. Even if a product is perfect, and everyone who needs it owns it, and it needs no improvement, they must still find a way make the numbers go up. Always. So, they'll grab hold of any trend which, in their panic, seems like it might be a possible life preserver.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  What choice does Google have? Google search is such a shit show now that I use ChatGPT to do any complicated web search. The paid version has had web search for over two years now. Google couldn’t just keep ignoring it. I do wish it were an option instead of on by default - except for searches they can monetize
  • notpushkin 2y ago
    Could they... improve their search results?
  • ikt 2y ago
    how does chatgpt paid compare to perplexity.ai ?
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      I just used perplexity.ai. The interface is janky and it looks like it just does search. ChatGPT has image generation, you can upload word docs, images and PDFs and it has a built in Python runtime that it uses to offload math problems to.
• nonchalantsui 2y ago
  Marc Andreessen stated on twitter that was a core reason for why he likes AI, to drive down wages (which in his words "must crash"). So you are not far off from that concept of putting vast numbers of employees out of work, when influential figures like Andressen are openly stating that is their ambitions.
  • 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
    And Larry Ellison wants us all under the eye of AI cameras so that "citizens will be on their best behavior". I almost used the word "panopticon" there, but Ellison is proposing something strictly worse, in that there's no hope of the cameras not being watched.
• ranger_danger 2y ago
  > people start looking for a way to get rid of it I would bet money that the majority of users do not actually feel this way.
• Larrikin 2y ago
  I work on a project where customers need to fill out a form to receive help. We introduced an AI chat bot to help them do the form by just talking through the problem and answering questions. Then the form is filled out for the customer for them to review before submitting. Personally I find it slower than just doing it manually but it has resulted in the form being correct more often now and has a lot of usage. There is also a big button when the chat opens that you can click to just fill it out manually. It has its place, that place just isn't everywhere and the only option.
  • lazyasciiart 2y ago
    I did a project a while back that created a wizard to fill in a form - I also found it much easier to simply complete the form, but when we demonstrated it to target users they nearly cried with relief. It was a good reminder of the importance of knowing what users actually want. I should go back to look at that and see if we could incorporate an easy ChatBot as an improvement.
  • wokwokwok 2y ago
    I'm sure there's a time and place for these things, but this sounds very much like the echo chamber I hear at work all the time. Someone has a 'friend' who has a totally-not-publically-visible form where a chat bot interacts with the form and helps the user fill the form in. ...and users love it. However, when really pressed, I've yet to encounter someone who can actually tell me specifically 1) What form it is (i.e. can I see it?) 2) How much effort it was to build that feature. ...because, the problem with this story is that what you're describing is a pretty hard problem to solve: - An agent interacts with a user. - The agent has free reign to fill out the form fields. - Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is both faster and more accurate than users typing into the field themselves. - At any time the user can opt to stop interacting with the the agent and fill in the fields and the agent must understand what's happened independently of the chat context. i.e. The form state has to be part of the chat bot's context. - At the end, the details filled in by the agent are distinguished from user inputs for user review. It's not a trivial problem. It sounds like a trivial problem; the agent asks 'what sort of user are you?' and parses the answer into one of three enum values; Client, Foo, Bar -> and sets the field 'user type' to the value via a custom hook. However, when you try to actually build such a system (as I have), then there are a lot of complicated edge cases, and users HATE it when the bot does the wrong thing, especially when they're primed to click 'that looks good to me' without actually reading what the agent did. So. Can you share an example? What does 'and has a lot of usage' mean in this context? Has it increased the number of people filling in the form, or completing it correctly (or both?) ? I'd love to see one that users like, because, oh boy, did they HATE the one we built. At the end of the day, smart validation hints on form input fields are a lot of easier to implement, and are well understood by users of all types in my experience; it's just generally a better, normal way of improving form conversion rates which is well documented, understood and measurable using analytics. ...unless you specifically need to add "uses AI" to your slide deck for your next round of funding.
• toss1 2y ago
  Yet, some analysts claim the fact that people nevertheless use these awful choices means they like them despite their frequent complaints. They cite "Revealed Choice", which may apply when there is an actual choice. But in the nearly winner-take-all dynamic of digital services, when the few oligopolistic market leaders present nearly identical choices, the actual usage pattern reveals only that a few bad choices are just barely worse than chucking the whole thing.
• Blikkentrekker 2y ago
  Correction: That some subset of the people you mostly meet online tries to get rid off. You'd be surprised how many don't even realize it's artificial, and/or welcome it. The average Google user is most certainly not similar to the average Hacker News commenter.
• bradgessler 2y ago
  There’s been several products where I want to pay to disable certain features—especially AI features.
• gessha 2y ago
  > hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. They already fired so many developers and this feels more like a Hail Mary before maintenance costs and tech debt start catching up to you.
• hulitu 2y ago
  > At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work no. On the contrary. We will need people to clean the mess left by AI > and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. yes.
  • autoexec 2y ago
    I feel like a lot of devs and artists are dreading the idea of their entire job becoming nothing more than "debug/fix the mess an AI made". Going from designer/architect to QA/editor would kill a lot of the fun and satisfaction people get from their work.
• 8bitsrule 2y ago
  Hmmm. Is there a word I can use to stop seeing the word 'Subscribe' on every site?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• cookiengineer 2y ago
  Maybe at some point giant companies like google realize that the only logical solution to the expansion problem is that they have to help space research to actually be able to expand more. Jokes aside, investors behind google seem to not realize that google at this point is infrastructure and not an expandable product market anymore. What's left to expand to since the Google India Ad 2013? What? North Korea, China, Russia, maybe? And then everyone gets their payout? Financial ecosystems and their bets rely on infinite expansion capabilities, which is not possible without space travel.
• YeahThisIsMe 2y ago
  It just takes a generation of people growing up with it until it really takes hold. People didn't use to ask Google questions, either, but now you're the outlier if you try using search terms instead.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Vilian 2y ago
  People who knows better want to diable it 99% of others don't care or fins it more pratical to read the AI summary