I'm a data scientist. I feel your pain. I write neat ML algorithms and yet I hate 98% of everything that passes for AI these days
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Im not great at coding but I have been attempting to use AI as one tool to teach myself to get better. From my experience AI is good for very basic and repetitive processes. Its can reproduce a stand alone function and sometimes it'll interact with other functions correctly. But trying to use it to troubleshoot any issue is like making photocopies of photocopies of photocopies. After a while it becomes meaningless gibberish.
I don't work in IT, but I work in a specialty retail setting where I do technical support for materials. Last week I was helping an annoying repeat customer and as I was helping him load his material into his brand new Tesla, he decided he needed to tell me all about its full self driving, and how on his 3hr drive the other day he used chat GPT to write a white paper about some bullshit while the car drove itself, then he had to get chat GPT to give me a summary of the white paper. (some scammy sounding marketing BS.)
It took every ounce of professionalism I had left to just give him the "uh huh, thats cool. yep. good for you." instead of going on an angry anti musk/tesla/AI rant.
I work in IT and we have to go through a whole process to get a licence to use it, so I've just not done that. Other people on my team have, it's a ticking time bomb and I'm just sitting here watching them all ignore the obvious signs.
Just last week someone was complaining about the AI randomly adding files to our code, and when I mentioned yeah these AI keep deleting customer data and stuff, they just brushed it off. We're in an industry that's super regulated so this is gonna end with legal action I'm sure. I've also watched people use AI to automate basic tasks, and when I've reviewed what they've done it's all completely wrong, to that point that if the wrong person sees it, we get a full audit and the entire team is placed under constant supervision with a lot of our access heavily restricted for months.
Meanwhile I'm just sitting here doing more and doing it better without AI. It's not worth pushing back because I already cop enough flak for stuff other people do or don't do. I hope the company gets destroyed in a massive lawsuit, it won't, but god it would be awesome.
If you're in a tightly regulated industry, take DETAILED notes and store them off-site for when the lawsuits inevitably hit and they go hunting for someone to pin the blame on. Make sure that it's clear that a) you didn't use the stuff that breached regulation, and b) you know who did.
“you’re in IT and you don’t embrace AI? wtf is wrong with you?”
This is always hilarious to me. "You're an expert, unlike me, and you're not whole-hog into this thing that's in your field of expertise and not mine, while I am? What's wrong with you?"
The arrogance of the capitalist class is beyond amazing.
Aye, same boat here. I protested quite vocally, but politely, when our CEO wanted to stick copilot everywhere. Got reprimanded in private by my manager. CEO still stands firm on "you should use AI for everything!"
I tried, they didn't want to hear it. I don't really know what else I can, or should do. I just don't use it, and have blocked it from my sight as well as I can.
I will still be honest and tell people why I am against it if someone asks, I won't lie, but I'll just keep quiet unprompted. Holding on to my "told you" for an appropriate moment I guess.
I don't really know what else I can, or should do.
Well, if they insist so much on using it, you should oblige.
Hey AI, make this email I have to send twice as long.
Hey AI, take notes about this meeting while I do something else.
Hey AI, reply to this company wide Teams post with the most empty, meaningless, long winded reply possible.
Damn, you were right Mr. CEO, this AI is helping me write sooooo much better ;)
Except your manager now "tells you" that your productivity should be +50% and if it isn't...
Nah, fortunately my manager is a good guy, CEO is just a pissy finance guy who got butthurt being disagreed with publicly and probably was on my manager's ass about it. He mainly criticised me, that I should've come to him first to discuss my concerns, and he would've helped me bring it up to thinskin execs privately.
I disagree with him, but get his point. I mean, the CEO did ask for comments during the meeting, I had comments ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kinda sounds like CEO wanted to fire you, and manager had to stick their neck out to keep you.
I mean, even if he did want to, he couldn't. Labour laws in my country are fortunately quite robust. I'm pretty sure my manager didn't score any extra points with him, though, that's for sure.
Ill do you one extra even. One of our customers, a lawfirm, has asked we remove AI from their environment over privacy concerns. We, as their IT, are still trying to push and sell licenses to our other customers and even use it ourselves.
All against the wishes of the actual workers themselves in my company. The execs and sales team is pushing it so hard and ignoring that a literal law firm is super against it.
Surely this will turn out well. I let that customer know that we're still pushing AI, and management is very pro AI still. It might be a good idea to look for a different IT provider if that goes against your values.
Surely this will turn out well.
I've had the privilege to watch people who intentionally pissed off lawyers to try to make a quick extra buck.
Interestingly, the lawyers promptly pursued legal action, and everyone agreed to settle out of court for some reason...
It almost felt like fucking with someone on their home court is a stupid move.
I’m in a similar boat, senior level IT, but I feel like I’m the only one of my peers who can see ai for what it is, I mean, I don’t hate it, it’s a tool. I do hate the tools who use it though.
I do think ai will fundamentally change the world similar to how the internet did. But, just like the early internet we’re in the midst of a bubble. This time the bubble though is full of toxic gas, and inflating it has caused so much environmental damage. We never learn our lesson so this time it’s going to be so much fucking worse. To top it all off we have the absolute worst possible stewards to guide us through when it happens.
I'm in the job hunt and man....the circle jerk around AI is just..... inescapable.
I don't get it. By the time you write "a good prompt" I will have written something usable and passable. The level of effort to debug whatever the prompt gave me vs my code is, let's say, roughly the same.
So...what time am I saving?
The only thing this helps is people who can't code. And we just assume that it's passable code only because it works.
Hell I'm at a point of commit very wrong code to GitHub under an MIT license just to start poisoning Copilot.
You actually don't have to worry about poisoning their models, they're already well on their way without any of our input. Broken vibe coder projects are probably already filling github at an alarming rate.
Hell I'm at a point of commit very wrong code to GitHub under an MIT license just to start poisoning Copilot.
I'm way ahead of you. To...uh...poison the AI...not just because a bunch of my code is shit...
Not at all. I'm in IT and my entire org is against it.
I'm a sr. devops engineer and I abhor this shit.
I don't really know what to do. Considering a career change. I'm trying to use my company ERP to talk to a counselor about my feelings around all of this.
Our current state of things is one of blind compliance where people are using AI to generate slop that will be evaluated by a different AI. No one is really doing much anymore at all. It feels like things are over. As people "embrace" AI (as they're told to do), they're literally training their own eventual replacements. It doesn't matter that things aren't there yet, they're starting to get replaced by the shit that's in use now.
It doesn't matter that things aren't there yet, they're starting to get replaced by the shit that's in use now.
This is what I keep trying to convince people of, too, even others who hate AI. I come from customer facing support in cloud infrastructure in my previous role.
They upped the cost of high level enterprise support while making it so that non-paying support contracts couldn't even talk to a human anymore. Made us feed every ticket into the AI. Of course none of this new profit or savings was passed on to our salaries and it was a move designed universally to piss customers off. We had a customer satisfaction feedback of over 95% positive (almost unheard of) and it was the only metric they really used for our performance given we were all remote.
Hell, they replaced the INTERNAL IT systems with it. Couldn't open a generic support ticket for yourself or your workstation without first doing a runaround chatting with the AI.
It doesn't matter in the slightest that it's not good enough, that we know it can't complete all the necessary tasks. It has the appearance of good enough so they'll flog it for short term profits and call it a day. Not gonna dox myself, but this is a big company, you know it, have fun guessing. I wouldn't be surprised at all to know others are following this pattern.
I am fairly certain I know the company.
Telk me it's Broadcom without telling me it's Broadcom.
I’m trying to use my company ERP to talk to a counselor about my feelings around all of this.
I'm pretty confident ERP isn't "erotic role play" here but I'm not sure what it is.
Fuck... yea, I meant EAP.
Honestly I'm just as infuriated and we have an arguable use case for it.
I work in av and we're looking into camera tracking for presentations with AI.
The amount of time and effort we are putting into using AI over just motion tracking with two cameras is just...
Like, AI makes us immune to fishtanks, but introduces false positives like statues, paintings, false negatives, and nobody puts any thought into what happens if the AI is ever wrong?
Real case scenario, I had an AI solution locked onto my crotch when I was wearing tan pants... whaddya do? Your share holders flew all over to hear your presentation. I guess you just have to swap pants and hope for the best.
If you track movement, you can always get rid of the extraneous movement or give your presenter CPR to get them moving again. Like, you can physically point to the problem and instantly understand with the old systems.
It me.
I’ve been pretending to use AI to appease my bosses for months. They tell me they can really see the difference it’s made in my productivity!
I made sure I got them to pay for my personal account so they can’t check my actual usage.
Every month I try out the same prompt about HTML email bugs for funzies just to read the incorrect hilarity. I try to at least know the UI so I could pull it up if I ever had to do something on a screen share. Hasn’t come up yet.
It's just not the disruptor it's advertised to be (smart AI that is better than ten employees). The fact that it's being shoved into everyone's faces and threatening or actually replacing people's jobs (inadequately or not) means it is a very large disruptor. Fixing the mess left if we ever get a chance to get back in control is going to be fun.
And it's not just LLMs. The whole everything-in-a-cloud shit, the constant monitoring of clicks to determine productivity, the forced obsolescence of working equipment for new crap that doesn't. We hit a peak in tech quality some time ago, the LLM factor is just another thing on the pile of junk.
I retired early. Didn’t have the energy to deal with the shit show anymore. The last year of my career watching so many people sucking down the Copilot kool aid while producing worse output was exasperating.
For those of you still fighting the good fight with critical thinking skills, good luck!
I feel your pain. Our parent company has set a ridiculous goal of replacing 50% of processes with AI. As a developer I know that our processes are mainly based on automation. Systems that do automatic data processing without any human interference. AI can't make this process any more efficient than it already is. And yet these clowns demand we change it to involve AI. The fun part is that they appointed me of all people to oversee this AI transformation for our unit. Fun times ahead and my only hope is early retirement.
Been working IT for over a decade now. No, this has never been an issue for me. I voice my hate for AI anywhere and everywhere I can. My boss knows, his boss knows, our CEO probably has an idea of where I stand.
IT worker here as well, I think I'm the most anti-AI fellow in the place (govt secretary), none of the devs is using AI for coding, but our director uses chatgpt often to make the boring, bureaucratic texts needed to send for higher ups to ignore
Just here on Lemmy I'm a little concerned I'll get blocked from an ai community before I can block it myself
You're definitely not alone. The rift caused by the so called "AI" is hard to cross with any sort of rational argument, it seems to be based largely on emotions, hype and herd mentality (which, some may say, is how top managers usually operate, see e.g. [1]).
My personal principle for a very long time has been to choose my battles, as in, trying to not get involved in causes that are not worth it based on perceived impact, required effort and chances of good outcome. The "AI" bubble has been especially frustrating, as it inhabits an extremum of the "very important, very low chances of success" quadrant.
Nevertheless, if you're a hired employee or a contractor, it may be prudent to be pragmatic. How likely is it that you will be rewarded for doing something good for the company, such as convincing to change the stance on "AI"? How likely is it that instead you will be blamed for the inevitable fallout of the bubble, or just become a collateral, get laid off in the middle of what might be the biggest economic crash since 2008?
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
Ed's got a lovely newsletter. Here's another one that gives an example of a business idiot:
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/
There's a fair few of us at work with tremendous disdain for it who speak up on all hands company calls and the like.
I trust it to just about put together argparse arguments or convert an array from JS to a Python list. Anything beyond that gets super dicey.
Not quite, but I do feel like I have to back my skepticism with references and evidence
The biggest issue they should be worried about is the possibility of being sued for copyright infringement, because the AI regurgitated some of its training data. They should also be worried about the AI just being bad at doing everything and lowering productivity, but that’s less dangerous in my mind than the possibility of a massive lawsuit.
I run a company, but I don’t have employees yet. If I do hire engineers, AI will be 100% banned, and if I catch them using it, it will be grounds for immediate termination.
I'm old enough to say my opinion. And it's not kind towards 'ai', but I have seen real use cases now and then.
I wish I was at that point but I still have another 20 years left and I’m between jobs due to a layoff.
I see a stark difference in what the internet thinks and what people IRL think. Everyone seems to view AI through the lens of how it directly effects them. I personally think AGI presents an existential threat to humanity. If for no other reason than our own laziness.
So while artists and creators decry AI slop, and developers chuckle at the though of being replaced, cyber security experts are sounding alarms. These AI agents may be dumb at human stuff, but they're wizards at identifying, probing, and exploiting security vulnerabilities.
AI is a digital arms race that people are severely underestimating.
Lots of AI hate on Bluesky
Lots of untagged NSFW content, too, be warned
That's why I'm on Bluesky and not Xwitter.
The AI hate or the untagged NSFW content?
Yes
Conversations I've had about AI turned out disappointing and left me feeling like I was the crazy one. When I try to point out the very real issues with the use of AI, like the unreliability of the answers/outputs, the unethical sourcing of data, the environmental impact, just to name a few; people look at me or flat out try to explain to me that I'm some sort of luddite opposed to the technological advancement of humanity. "You don't understand, it's nothing more than another invention like the telephone or electricity. People were also scared back then because they didn't understand how it worked, but now everything's fine " was all I got in return last time, after taking 5 minutes to detail exactly why the generalized use of AI is problematic. Everything I tried to explain ignored and brushed off with a "you're just being hysterical" deflection. To me it feels like people who embraced AI are entrenched in their opinion and it seems a waste of my time to try to raise the concerns I have with them. Some seem moved by the greed of the effortless riches/solutions they believe AI will bring them, others just by laziness, as long as they don't have to write their 5 sentences emails they don't give a fuck about anything else. Other than waiting for it to turn to shit, and try to meditate the frustration away or something, I don't really know what else to do at this point.