Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone’s pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson’s voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?

If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.

As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.

But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.

I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.

At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.

Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They’re literally planning for what they’re going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization… in five years. I wish I was kidding.

The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.

Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.

Do you honestly think your choice of words in this post led to you being heard and understood? Or do you think that everyone is just being mean bullies? THiiiiiiink hard about this one.

It doesn’t matter where it came from, if you’re steeped in this kind of language it’s a massive signpost that you’ve handicapped your own intellectual abilities in a profound way. Healthy, normal people with regulated feelings and stable perspectives grounded in reality do not frequent the communities that use this kind of language.

It’s a red flag that will always make the outside world laugh and reject what you have to say, and if your instinct is to retreat back into the places that use this language, you are going to absolutely SUFFER in life, this is a warning coming from a place of compassion, you HAVE to believe me.

I am a well educated person who uses these forums and many others with regularity and I have many opinions on tech after working in both marketing and the tech sector for a long time.

That out of the way, I will simply skip over any comment that says “normies” unironically. Especially over and over.

This isn’t fucking 4chan, communicate like a human like the rest of us. You don’t get out of being one of us. I don’t even know your take because it’s so distracting and immature and condescending.

Otherwise people should think ahead.

The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems “fuck you, got mine” and I’m done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I’m sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.

You do NOT get a choice about getting an education in a vast, vast majority of life paths in the developed world.

I know a lot of people and exactly two of them are working in the field they got degrees in. You cannot always control the direction of your life, anything from medical issues to family emergencies to economics in your region can profoundly impact your chances of landing a career in your chosen study field, or even just getting a simple job that can pay back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as the interest snowballs.

Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone.

This is true.

Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.

This is utter garbage. Judgemental much? Maybe your own experiences and feelings aren’t the same for everyone.

I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It’s often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that’s already happening.

In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.

There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it’s WFH the company managers and owners don’t have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that’s the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.

I’m trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we’ve been through a lot together.

Let’s just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.

Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.

We should leave AI to the realm of producing fringe/impossible porn, like it was meant for and like what everyone actually wants from it. All this “search engine” stuff is just cover like when you buy some non-lube products like groceries along with the tube of astroglide at 1:00 AM.

Yah I’m so happy every major internet and tech company is deciding to deliberately power every system we use with random word salad generators, there’s no chance will cause any problems.

When someone is disappointed in something, the very worst way you can make progress in changing that person’s mind is flatly telling them they’re wrong.

You didn’t change anything with your reaction here, I still live in the world with useless, annoying AI. Like most people. I won’t now look at it and think “Hmn I should reconsider how I feel” As I try to refine my search results so it doesn’t feed me complete garbage.

I’m absolutely sure it’s helping some people in specific instances, but we’re not at the point yet where it’s helping people broadly, so I fucking DARE you to say any of this in a larger community where average people with non-coding jobs have to sift through AI bullshit all day.

I know it’s going to help in the future with a lot of things, but it’s also going to get worse before it gets better, and I’m not some lone voice, so you have to get over yourself here, you’re not anywhere close to the majority of opinion here, even on the tech/singularity/cult forums there are plenty of people fed up with the current state of marketing and AI being shoved into everything. I stand by every last thing I said here. People in your position are deliberately not reading the negative things people feel about this tech in it’s current state, but there are a LOT of people who share this feeling.

And you know what? You should embrace it.

Because if people didn’t voice their discontent, it won’t get better. The whinging pushback against criticism just boggles me, like people are so caught up in the cult that they can’t see it as another product that has to be refined and shaped before people can use it and enjoy it in any capacity.

Several top links from “How do people feel about AI”

https://www.tomorrowsworldtoday.com/artificial-intelligence/85-of-people-dont-like-ai-but-its-coming-anyway/

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/artificial-intelligence-consumer-sentiment/

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2023/10/consumers-are-voicing-concerns-about-ai

https://hbr.org/2024/05/ais-trust-problem

And of course, THIS VERY ARTICLE: https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai

I have rolled back, uninstalled, opted-out, or ripped apart every AI that every company is trying to shove down our throats. I wish I could do the same for search engines, but who uses the internet broadly anymore anyway.

I am impressed by the tech, I think it’s amazing, but it’s still utterly useless.

I have never, ever needed to interrupt my day’s schedule to generate a convincing picture of Luke Skywalker fighting Batman while riding dinosaurs, I have never needed to have a text conversation with someone who seems “almost human,” I mean, christ that already describes half the people I know and wish were more normal. I have never needed an article summarized badly, I enjoy reading things, I enjoy writing emails, so I can’t figure out why they would make tools to take away the small pleasures we have. What exactly are they thinking?

Yesterday I gave it one more chance, asked one of the apps, I forget which, what tomorrow’s weather will be like, the thing forecasted a hurricane coming right for me, a news event from last year. I’m so over AI, please someone notify me when it’s really useful and can take over the menial, tedious tasks like managing my online accounts and offering financial advice or can actually help me find a job opening in my field.

All these things have been promised, and seem more out of reach than ever.

The MOST impressive thing I’ve seen AI do is make really, really convincing furry porn babes. The things are good at mixing features in images. Sometimes.

Would you play this? I would not.

Not only will people play it, they will play it in droves because at the end of the day, people are fluid, and fluid flows in predictable patterns.

You and I may be offended at the very idea of playing a game surrounded by fake people acting real, but for the average kid growing up in a world where reality is already a tenuous concept online, it will just be another strange experience in a growing list, and it might be really fun because of the things a game can do with complete control over the population of the “MMO.”

Would you upload your personal data and voice to Open AI for it to make a a birthday wishes call to your mom?

Not in a million years. The next generation will though, they won’t see any issue with it.

Unless something radically falls apart and makes people spurn electronic media entirely, some great Butlerian Jihad of the 21st century, we are going to see things get a LOT worse before they get better.