I’ve wanted that at least since reading Remake by Connie Willis. (The ability to do it on my own as an individual on my PC.)
I think we’re talking about different things.
In terms of writing quality, AI adds no value. What it does is save time. However, in my calculations, the amount of time saved is negligible, and not worth the cost of communicating so generically. Other people might make a different calculation, and that’s great for them. I’m not out to stop anybody from using AI.
I tried to phrase the OP in such a way so as not to throw out the baby with the bathwater: I acknowledge that it is useful and valuable for some things. I, however, would prefer to decide which things I want to use AI for, and which I do not.
I am also seeing students turn to AI to do their writing for them, rather than learn the skill. I am on the fence as to whether all educated humans really need to be good writers: I’d like it, but I can’t do technical drawing and I can’t weave, so there are other essential crafts I get by without just fine. The trouble is, it has a knock-on effect on their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, and for me that is a major issue.
I think that a lot of that “the results suck” criticisms come from people who are skilled or interested hobbyists in art, writing, etc. To the novice who just wants the weird arm deleted from their image or Aunt Sally facing forward, AI can be amazing and very helpful even if artists say it’s all trash. Likewise, someone less skilled at writing or composing thoughts might appreciate generative writing even as others complain about how bad it is.
(This isn’t to guess at your ability to make photos of open collar shirts; your mention of AI assisted photo editing brought this to mind)
I agree with everything you say here (a +1 would’ve done, but not with the character minimum here).
Mark my words…the Butlerian Jihad is closer than we think.
Yep this; it’s a game changer for businesses of all sizes in terms of getting illustrations, artwork, voiceover, royalty-free music etc.
And I disagree with some of the sentiments upthread; it’s not that it’s being shoved down people’s throats. People aren’t being forced to go to CGPT or DeepSeek. They are useful tools.
That’s not to say that such progress will necessarily continue. But it’s the nature of business / the economy that when you have technology that is disrupting things, people try to jump on that train lest they be left behind.
From Googles perspective, I don’t think they care if advertising is effective. All they care is whether they can sell ads. And they sell ads by promising a certain number of people will see those ads.
The “shoving” comments are mostly aimed at apps like MS Office, & Edge that are trying be as “helpful” as the widely derided Clippy from about Win95. And which distracting interference cannot be switched off.
Google’s search results are similar. Show me the pages you found, and only the pages you found. Not some incompetent AI-generated summary including the bad sources you found equally weighted with the good ones.
An unobtrusive “summarize this” command hidden 3 layers deep in a hamburger menu is fine. But showing the summary first just means I have to scroll past ever more clutter to see what I want to see, not what they want to show me.
That is the shoving down being objected to.
Yep I agree with that. There might come a time where we want the AI response first (or only) but that time is not now for most people I think. It is annoying when you want the straightforward, terse response.
Good writing is an exercise in organizing ideas and creating clear, compelling prose that aids in all other areas of communication. Not everyone needs to be capable of making technical drawings, or writing great poetry, or weaving a basket, but everybody should be able to write a short essay at a passible level. That is basic cultural literacy.
Until they get undermined by someone else promising to be able to deliver a statistically guaranteed number of customers purchasing those products instead of skipping over ads. Selling to potential customers through broad advertising is they way we’ve done things since at least the Roman era because it wasn’t possible to create an inexpensive agent capable of targeting individual interests and desires. An AI agent that can tease those patterns out of your search and viewing history (which doesn’t take any kind of sentience, much less consciousness; just a well-trained model that sees what you are interested in and is able to predict how and when you will be most pliable) is a whole different level of sales ability.
These companies are definitely trying to ‘shove’ AI features at their users whether they want them or not, but at least these applications are apparent to the user. When they start sneaking them into media and products, collecting information about you and providing feedback to unspecified end users of your ‘data’ to compile a profile that knows you better than your mom, your dog, and your proctologist, then we’ll be truly good and fucked.
Stranger
Agree completely.
Oh, the demand will still be there, but a lot of companies will have either overestimated the short term demand, and go broke, or botch the implementation, and go broke. The web survived the 2000 crash quite nicely. A bunch of companies didn’t.
I’ve played with AI for the generation of short stories, and my conclusion is that if I wanted to actually send the story someplace without being embarrassed it would take me more time to edit what comes out than write it from scratch.
People not so picky, sending stuff out without massive editing, are going to sometimes send stuff that will damage them (like those lawyers) or send stuff that will make them sound like fools.
I have seen AI generated stuff in the wild, and it has all been crap. Maybe it will get better, but maybe the effort that will have to be made to construct a good prompt will be just about that of writing it.
They often get the aggregate demand about right but they blithely assume they, and only they, will capture all of that market and their e.g. 9 near-peer competitors will simply evaporate.
With all 10 of them thinking alike, the end result is 10x overprovision to the actual demand. The resulting forced contraction is ugly for all 10. But somebody will survive by dint of deep pockets or deep-pocketed friends.
Moderator Warning
You are allowed to have whatever views you like on AI. However, you aren’t allowed to attack other people just because their views are different.
If this were an isolated incident, I would just give you a mod note. But given your history of insults and attacks on other users, I am upgrading this to a warning.
This is an official warning for attacking other users outside of the Pit.
I’m using AI, but creating stuff isn’t my top use. What I am using it for is as a very powerful and intelligent search engine. I can give it 50 articles, policies, or state laws and ask it detailed questions about those documents. I can have it search my work documents, spreadsheets, email, and assorted data for something and it excels at that. Beyond that, it does do a good job at writing stuff like policies based on some broad strokes and then you go refine from there.
They don’t have to push hard for me to see some value in it. Also, they are charging a pretty penny for the “good” versions that keep your corporate data within your control.
I wouldn’t say that. Just a couple of days ago when I was working on a Word file as usual, a Copilot thingie jumped into the cursor and started pushing its services in the middle of my screen. I realized a Copilot icon had appeared into my Word toolbar, impossible to remove. I have never used Copilot, or clicked to ‘Agree’ with anything concerning it.
This is shoving AI down people’s throats.
Yes several people are correcting me on this. I guess what I meant to say is that it is not only being shoved down people’s throats.
I agree that seeing AI suggestions added to apps, or even the primary interface is an annoyance most of us right now don’t want to see.
It actually took me some workshopping to get AI editing of photos to work. If I selected the tie area and put in text “Remove tie” or “Change tie to open collar,” I’d get weird results. It would change the tie to a different design, or put a face (!) in its place.
I eventually tried highlighting the whole shirt and inputting “open collar shirt.” It changed the entire shirt instead of matching the shirt style, but I can live with that.
Exactly. The Ai folks are preparing us for a paradigm shift and the media is distorting it into hype. It is the rare company that would require only an LLM and run without employees.
There is an array of markets available for Open Ai et al. Most applications are very narrow and do not require immense systems for learning and implementation. The software is more complex than a compiler but modern CPUs accommodate that. And, modern microprocessors are not F8s or COPS they are large scale computer systems on a chip.
My conjecture is that soon the Integrated Development Environment will have three inputs - a file that describes and dimensions the physical system - a behavior file of data gathered from the application - and a running conversation that constitutes the ‘Prompt’. The output will be a fully programmed single chip processor that fits the application. This device will be used to update the description and behavior files for the development process. Targeted operations may be described in C or Assembly as part of the prompt but most of the development will be conversational. And likely a very long. Perhaps we will get a better term than prompt.
Consumer products do not require a system that has read Moby Dick. For that sort of thing, files generated by the IDE can be uploaded to a larger system for generating tech manuals and ad copy.
Ai is a major paradigm shift. It replaces the traditional programmer, but you still have a guy (or gal) who knows about interactive dolls, or washing machines or model airplanes or bomb fuzes, engaged in the prompting process and evaluating the result to yield a product. And telemetry for behavior monitoring will require new equipment and skills.
Of course you have the monster cloud apps like a civilian version of Lavender the brings officer friendly into your kitchen, but those do not impact the broader Ai markets.
So, yes, Ai is being over hyped, but more by an ignorant media than the Ai corporations.