I loved the image generation for about 20 minutes.

I am not against AI but I am against how it will be used. Bit of back story I have worked with “AI” type of learning software for the last decade and have seen how business evolve the software.

Great example is working with UCaaS and CCaaS, phone systems if you aren’t familiar. There is a little function known as metrics that providers can use to score agents and users calling in. By itself this is great knowledge to have as you can isolate what what is commonly said, build frequently asked questions for example or have an AI that can tell you those. However in the last five years or so I have seen this technology being used to abuse workers and not provide help to customers. These same metrics can now measure voice levels, frustration, activity level to extreme detail, verbiage, emotions, etc. It can build a spreadsheet report on who is a good worker vs bad. Now what it doesn’t consider is if the employee is having a bad day, going through a divorce, or something terrible that may be affecting them. Tech doesn’t care and will flag you as a bad employee if you drop below a threshold. And it remembers.

On the flip I have seen a demo of AI being used for emergency routing. Say someone calls with their cell to report a fire. The same AI tool with the right integrations can look where the caller is calling from. Pull up cctv or activate police cameras near. Identify if other calls in the immediate area are reporting issues. An example I saw within a minute of calling in the system would be able to provide all the info that the dispatcher needs to know even if the caller couldn’t tell them where. This tech could help save hundreds of thousands from accidents to domestic abuse.

What it boils down to is not the technology itself but WHO and HOW it will be used. So for all these people willy neely installing AI on every device because it is free look at recent example of tech being obsolete once it is no use to companies. You are being fed slop to make you comfortable with AI having access to everything, even intimate moments in your house. In the next decade when companies change how they are using AI it will be to late to claw back those freedoms.

Look up what is happening to Nest and Ring right now. Companies want to earn your trust with cheap products and fun but your best interest is not at the top of that list.

Part of my job means i have to deal with complaints from individuals who are, lets say, fucking dumb.

Being able to put their unhinged 2 page long, zero punctuation rant into copilot and ask it to summarise the key points, giving me something tangible that I can follow up on saves me a huge amount of time and work.

But ai slop, fkn hate it

I don’t hate AI. It can be quite helpful when I go to where IT lives and ask it a question sometimes.

What I don’t want is that AI to have unlimited access to my devices and just be a ‘thing’ that is constantly watching me in the background.

It’s like if my neighbour is a mathematician, and I’m having trouble figuring out a complex equation. It’s very helpful that I can go next door and knock on his door to ask him. But that doesnt mean I want him sitting in my house forever looking over my shoulder.

I used to loathe all things AI. I used to abhor AI coding agents, too.

I actually pushed back against some AI initiatives at some of my jobs.

Fast forward to now, AI does about 60%-80% of my work on a given day. It saves me boatloads of time. Coupled with figma and dev tools MCP servers, it sucks slightly less at CSS. I’ve cobbled together some pretty solid rulesets and tactics for context building that have recently let me tackle an entire month of work in ~2 days, meeting company best practices and code coverage and even gathering demo screen shots for me without me having to do it myself.

I probably spend about $500/month on various AI services now, but I’m cranking out at least 3x what I used to (and being paid commensurate to that output, only way to justify it). It can’t last forever but I have succumbed, reluctantly at first, if only to get what I can from it before it blows up.

As for AI image gen, no. Video? No. Anything ChatGPT or Grok related? No.

I’ve always hated generative AI and everything it stands for.

It doesn’t matter if you like it or not.

We should think about what to do with the current AI hype (or bubble), or How a better AI should be made, etc.

Generative AI was vaguely funny when it created trippy, acid hallucination images and incoherent druggy ramblings of text. I know an author who fed their own content into an early LLM (small language model?) and the bizarre, yet undeniably “his” stuff it produced was worth a laugh. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, but it was kind of amusingly quirky.

What was depressing is how quickly people began to claim AI content was “theirs”. As someone who ran a fiction-creating community, people were so eager to latch on to what AI would spit out that they began to create convoluted things for the early models to “depict”.

I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

I was amused by the idea initially. I am in favor of seeing ACTUAL AI someday for no other reason than it would be proof that humans are gods who can create sapience without genetics. I even generated my avatar with AI.

But seeing how it wasn’t much better than chatbots before it, how it does not know anything and uses no intelligence to give you factual responses with 100% accuracy to even be good for information, and how it is taking jobs away from creatives in ways not even fiction thought would happen has made me hate what is currently being called “AI.”

When the money and energy sucking slop that currently is being billed as “AI” is what tech bros are using to rob us now. It is garbage. It will remain garbage. It will suck as much money as possible into the tech bros companies and waste energy to the Nth degree while doing it. It is a the biggest con / scam of this century.

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

I like “AI” like I like plastic. Technologically it’s amazing! It allows us to do many things that would have been impossible or very difficult before!It has many different uses! Average people use it terribly! Business people use it for awful things! It is poisoning our reality in a pervasive manner that will persist long after I am dead!

So yes and when it became overly marketable.

I also really enjoyed when “AI” models made distinctly uncanny images rather than “realistic” soulless images. I have an image of a weird-looking baby and a chicken-man screaming at each other and it is distinctly hyper-perceptual. Good times! (update: I found it)

When I first saw the game “AI dungeon” it blew my mind. It actually used gpt-2.

Anyway the game later had to get worse to manage cost of servers and seeing them struggle to make it work was just sad to watch.

I remember there being youtube essays going over how this is one of the reasons free AI services open to public are just unmaintainable but then chatgpt/gpt-3 came out and that whole topic was closed to look at this shiny new thing instead.

I’ve not loved nor hated AI. I’ve been both impressed and irritated by what it can do.

But, one thing has been pissing me off lately. My wife and I often share funny videos throughout the day, and over the past few weeks, about 1/3 of them have been real video, 1/3 of them have been obviously AI (like talking babies), and the other third are deceptive AI. (Something that looks impressive yet believable, until you see the SORA watermark, or find an inconsistency in the background)

There was a time where I could watch a video of a dog doing tricks and just think “that’s adorable!” but now I have to check everything I watch for watermarks, missing teeth, and scrambled text in the background. I have to verify it’s authenticity before I can decide how I feel about it.