Use AI to augment learning, not replace learning. Also most people hate AI slop, not AI.
The automobile has been a net benefit to society dosent stop Daren going 80 in a 50 zone ( 30 during school hours ). I feel like LLMs are largely the same. They are useful and can do good things, but they can also be used to do totaly inane shit… Dont be Daren.
“that’s ok. they were never an intended user base, they’re the targets.”
--some ceo, somewhere. probably.like with bullets! When some of you don’t do what I want! Why are you booing my commencememt speech?
– average tech CEO
I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.
I’ve tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)
But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone’s throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.
The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)
At the end of the day, the reason we’re burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can’t criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.
So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit
And given the way it impacts user’s thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.
Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.
Very rarely I see the argument that apart from being harmful directly, it’s also a GIGANTIC surveilance tool, and the most vulnerable people trust it with their inner thougths, which is to me scarier that ‘just’ copyrights.
Absolutely agree, the data collection feels like even a step beyond the already horrifying amount of people’s personal information we’ve normalized scraping directly into the pockets of corporations
Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary
Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning, due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the head of search now.
Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I’d need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Edit: from the provided link the person who killed google search was Prabhakar Raghavan, who was apparently responsible for yahoo search over the period in which it fell precipitously off a cliff. He was put in that role by sundar pichai, replacing someone who explicitly cared about search and was deeply important to search development and had been there since the beginning
Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products
So not Sundar pichai, but the article does explain that he was specifically picked to become the new head of search by sundar pichai, and that Sundar used to work for McKinsey Consulting, who were responsible for the business strategy that fueled the opioid crisis, among lots of other things. Super dense, but well worth the read!
i looked up the story I had read a while back, and sundar was not the head of ads, but had just become the ceo after having been on the board of directors, and the issue was kicked up to him when Ben Gomes refused implement changes that Prabhakar Raghavan of ads wanted. later Gomes left the company and was replaced by Raghavan as head of search.
This all coming from internal emails and memos that were released as part of the anti trust case summarized in this piece which does a very good job of sourcing individual claims by pointing to specific emails and memos, although, the author is very… passionate in their coverage.
Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people
Thank you so much!! There were some details I wanted to clarify for people after reading so I edited my previous reply so folks can see a summary of some of the relevant points
I appreciate you getting me a link! This will be very helpful in explaining some of the rot in the search experience and adds a lot of additional weight to my suspicion that making search worse may also be happening to push ai adoption
Replace AI with something like Flex Tape, and you really get a sense of how stupid the push to get AI into everything is. Flex Tape is great, but I don’t need it when ordering a pizza ffs.
I love AI, when it works, but even I don’t want it in 99% of my life. It’s a tool, and it should be rolled back to “tool” status and not some kind of therapist or friend or fact finder.
Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)
Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)
It was and is a good thing. I think it’s a huge problem that when it fades away future next generations of AI will not be able to learn from it. And the culture at that point will be to depend on AI instead of having sites like those, so even getting it back isn’t going to work. Honestly I think maybe we need a new job: “experts” who just do some fun highly thematic stuff and post results online to train AI.
I think you just described scientists :P
I love AI, when it works
The problem for me personally, is that AI has worked exactly 0% of the time when I try to use it.
I’ve been experimenting with agentic coding the past couple of weeks. The task is to write a data scraper for a report file I get out of a commercial tool I have to use for work.
It’s a pain of a format because it’s not written with computer parsing in mind. It’s verbose, contains loads of redundant parts, and doesn’t have good delimiters around data. It’s big too. 500MB uncompressed, so we keep them gzip’d.
All reasons why I don’t want to write the code to do it.
The model identifies the file format without me saying where it came from, but it sits in this loop:
- “Let me analyse the input file” - Does various greps, seds, and awks to pull out sections and find patterns in their formatting.
- “I understand the format enough for now” - and then proceeds to write out a list of rules it’s discovered. This bit is actually quite impressive.
- “Now I need to draft the data structures the data will go into” - …and it will write some over-decomposed objects. Not out to disk though.
- “The user says they want a parser, so let me start writing the actual code” … Finally!.. But hang on…
- “Actually, I need to understand the file format more” - loop to the top.
It does this for hours.
The tiny bits of code I’ve actually managed to get out of it are really bad. It’s like the code you’d get back from some race-to-the-bottom offshore software “team” you were forced to work with 10-15 years ago because your boss had found an “amazing opportunity”. In actuality it was somebody’s teenage nepo-hire. Similar adherence to rules and standards too.
I already have a rough data scraper for this file. It’s a couple of hundred lines of python. I wrote it in an afternoon. It’s not great. It doesn’t get everything I want out. However it exists and is usable. This isn’t an intractable task.
The problem for me personally, is that AI has worked exactly 0% of the time when I try to use it.
Your mistake is knowing that you’re doing, so you catch AI’s mistakes.
Try using it for stuff you’re not remotely qualified to do in the first place, then it can look useful!
Lots of people struggle to use it. Don’t feel bad. I think to use it correctly, one must first want to use it. After that, it becomes easier.
I recall when ChatGPT first came out, a coworker was criticizing it. I asked for a demonstration, and they just kept gaming it. Just actively trying to make it fail to do things it already struggled to do. I asked them to do something I already knew worked pretty well, and they tried to game again. I asked them to stop gaming it, and they just refused.
Clearly, they were not the target audience for AI. And that’s fine!
What I find is that people who love ai, think it is the greatest thing on earth and can do all things ever better than humans. Then there are the rest of us.
I guess you don’t know many people.
Probably not…
The problem for me personally, is that for my job, there simply isn’t enough information for the AI companies to
stealtrain models on. I do industrial programming. It’s programming with fucking crayons. AI is hilariously wrong every single time I have asked it anything.Give me an example of what you’ve asked it to do? And, what model and app did you use?
Not OP, but I was pretty disappointed trying Claude 4.6
Prompted
Write a C program to find the longest word in a static 5x5 array of characters. These characters shall be defined in a header file, you may allocate it with any letters for now This program should find the longest word, using words available in a file at /usr/share/dict/words This file will have one word per line The rules of the longest word are that you may select the next letter in any direction from your current letter one character away, including diagonals Any index may be the starting point, and you may not repeat a space on the gridIt did a breadth first search for the longest path, then checked if that longest path was a word, rather than checking each step, so it never found any words
When I asked it to fix that, it then opened and reread the entire dictionary for each character
Once I got it to fix that, I asked it to read the input array from a file, and after 30 minutes of asking it in different ways, it never managed to successfully read that file in
All in all, it took longer than just writing it myself, even for what I would call an interview question
In a single prompt I would not expect that specific exercise to produce efficient code, but within a few prompts it should. Certainly less time than it would take someone to write it themselves.
There are always creative ways to squeeze extra performance out of code if you spend enough time on it.
Certainly less time than it would take someone to write it themselves.
I mean, sure - for you and I, who aren’t qualified to write that specific code, maybe we can promot the electronic idiot to get there. Of course, neither we nor the electroic idiot knows where there is, and at best we will copy in exisitng better code that we should have imported from a library. So we gave up automated updates to avoid reading the manual pages.
In contrast, for domains I’m an expert in, babysitting the electric idiot is always a complete waste of time. I can just call the correct library, the correct way, on the first attempt.
Today’s AI really highlights exisitng technical debt. If there’s already a mountain of it, I can see how the learning model may help wrangle it, and how it may be hard to see the added costs.
If it can’t output ~50 lines of code that is reasonably common from textbooks with one minor modification, I’m not clear what the benefit is
It’s certainly not faster
I already stated I kept prompting it for over 30 minutes and it still hadn’t fully completed the problem
Kibblebits wants to make the information known so newer models can train on it and win at life
I’ll be surprised if there is any information to be had. Most people stop at this point because it either never happened or they never actually put any effort into it which is why it failed.
I usually stop at this point because it’s a complete waste of my fucking time. I already know where the relevant sources of information are, and the current AI models have proven themselves to be incapable of distinguishing between firmware versions or subtle differences in model numbers. I try things again every once in a while to see if anything has improved, and so far, no dice.
I am basically a script kiddie and Anthropic Claude helped me design a small app for myself that was way beyond my own capabilities and it even went as far as documenting in comments what each bit of the program did for me, to help me understand the logic.
I only have access because I got a free year of Perplexity.ai because I had a paypal account (barf, had to have it to get paid for gig work).
I see it as very useful for anything technical, it helped me through some troubleshooting a hardware issue with my monitor I was having trouble pinning down by browsing forums.
I would never purposely divulge personal info to an LLM, anything that’s shared has had personal info stripped.
I am basically a script kiddie and Anthropic Claude helped me design a small app for myself that was way beyond my own capabilities and it even went as far as documenting in comments what each bit of the program did for me, to help me understand the logic.
This is the good shit, right here!
AI does shit tier work, but it provides access to new skills.
If you learned anything from the experience, you’re a programmer, now.
Welcome to the crew.
Don’t be afraid to toss out the training wheels (AI) when it gets in your way, and try to enjoy the ride.
Exactly, it’s a tool. It’s potentially useful, in certain situations, but I’ll be the one deciding if I want it at all, if it’s useful and what it’s useful for, not some company. If they tell me to use a table saw to clean my teeth, I’m going to tell them to go fuck themselves. Nothing wrong with table saws, but fuck any company that tells me what I ought to be using a table saw for.
Its okay at like 1 thing that is actually helpful and thats just not worth the cost of, umm, literally everything else on the planet. Congrats, on the trillions spent tho ig.
At least it makes crosswords easier
That’s like using a machine to lift weights at the gym for you.
Literally among the most damaging things you can do to yourself with AI. Edit: if they aren’t being sardonic.
