this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Fuck AI

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

I ordered some well rated concert ear protection from the maker's website. The order waited weeks to ship after a label was printed and likely forgotten. I went to find a place to call or contact a human there, all they had was a self-described AI chat robot that just talked down to me condescendingly. It simply would not believe my experience.

I eventually got the ear protection but I won't be buying from them again. Can't even staff some folks to check email. I eventually found their PR email address but even that was outsourced to a PR firm that never got back to me. Utter shit, AI.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago

I'm glad you mentioned the company directly as I also want to steer clear of companies like this.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

That would've been such an easy disputed charge and get the plugs somewhere else. I'm not wasting a second on something like that, just telling my credit card company they didn't uphold their end of the deal, and that's that. I will lose hearing out of spite if this happened to me, because I'm an idiot.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

I will lose hearing out of spite if this happened to me

Genuinely admire your self awareness

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I've lost hearing for stupider reasons. Spite seems downright reasonable to me.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

That's really good to know about these things. They've been on sale through Woot. I guess there's a good reason for that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Wow, that’s extremely disappointing. I had a really positive experience with them a few years ago when I wanted to exchange what I got (it was too quiet for me), and they just sent me a free pair after I talked to an actual person on their chat thing. It’s good to know that’s not how they are anymore if I ever need to replace them.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

Alright I don’t like the direction of AI same as the next person, but this is a pretty fucking wild stance. There are multiple valid applications of AI that I’ve implemented myself: LTV estimation, document summary / search / categorization, fraud detection, clustering and scoring, video and audio recommendations... "Using AI” is not the problem, "AI charlatan-ing" is. Or in this guy’s case, "wholesale anti-AI stanning". Shoehorning AI into everything is admittedly a waste, but to write off the entirety of a very broad category (AI) is just silly.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

I don't think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn't understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn't trust an AI summary for anything important.

Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in "population of london", i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don't want a guessing machine to tell me.

Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it's hard to take any of it seriously.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I don’t think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn’t understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn’t trust an AI summary for anything important.

This right here. Whenever I've tried using an LLM to summarize, I spent more time fact-checking it (and finding the inevitable misunderstandings and outright hallucinations—they're always there for anything of substance!) than I'd spend writing my own damned summary.

There is, however, one use case I've found where LLMs work better than alternatives ... provided you do due diligence. To put it bluntly, Google Translate and its ilk of similar slop from Bing, Baidu, etc. suck. They are god-awful at translation of anything but straightforward technical writing or the most tediously dull prose. LLMs are far better translators (and can be instructed to highlight cultural artifacts, possible transcription errors, etc.) ...

... as long as you back-translate in a separate session to check for hallucination.

Oh, and Google Translate-style translators really suck at Classical Chinese. LLMs do much better (provided you do the back-translation check for hallucination).

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Its just a statistics game. When 99% of stuff that uses or advertises the use of "AI" is garbage, then having a mental heuristic that filters those out is very effective. Yes you will miss those 1% of useful things, but thats not really an issue for most people. If you need it you can still look for it.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I think this problem will get worse because many websites that's used for "your own research" will lose human traffic to watch ads and more bots just scraping their data, reducing motivation to keep the websites running. Most people just take the least resistant path so AI search will be the default soon I think

Yes, I hate this timeline

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's so annoying because you're correct. I'm finding it harder and harder to use a search engine for things. Hell, the web in general is becoming unusable. It's all shit.

rant

here's my pesonal gripe. Imagine looking for a solution to a problem and find a reddit thread in your search engine of choice. Wording in the description seems to match your exact issue and it's one of the first results. You click on it and...

What i'd do to that smug fuck if I ever got my hands on him aside, me behind a VPN and deleted reddit account can't find the answer. But i can go to chatgpt without logging in to answer my fucking queries and it does it with more efficiency than looking at random sites for things, which most of the time are just sloppy shitty mirrors of Stack Overflow or Quora that BLATANTLY copy content from those websites and just use slightly better SEO...

Also, reddit did this in because of the API shit they pulled. AND THEN THEY SOLD FUCKING ACCESS TO GOOGLE. So me, a fucking person (as far as I know anyway), isn't privileged enough to view the fucking crumbs of information that google just fucking gobbles on a daily basis. Fuck that. This is a move that makes me feel less important than my fucking roomba.

I just feel so mad. I want the old web back. I just want my duckduckgo to work well.

Sorry for the rant.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Eventually they will pay AI companies to integrate advertisements into the llm's outputs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Omg I can see it happening. Instead of annoying intrusive ads, this new type will be so natural as if your close friend is suggesting it.

More dystopian future. Yes we need it /s

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Using AI is telling people they shouldn't care about your IP because you clearly don't care about theirs when it passes through the AI lens.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Stop making using AI sound based

[–] IrateAnteater 9 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

The only time I disagree with this is when the business is substituting "AI" in for "machine learning". I've personally seen that work in applications where traditional methods don't work very well (vision guided industrial robot movement in this case).

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

i use AI every day in my daily work, it writes my emails, performance reviews, project updates etc.

.....and yeah, that checks out!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I used to work in a software architecture team that used AI to write retrospectives, and upcoming projects, and everything needed to have a positive spin, that sounds good but mean nothing.

Extra funny when I find out people use AI to summarize it. So the comical cycle of bullet points to text and back again is real.

I had enough working at the company when my team was working on the new "fantastic" platform, cut corners to reach the deadline on something that will not be used by anyone... and its being built for the explicit purpose of making a better development and working environment.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

LLMs != AI
LLMs strict subset of AI

Pls be a bit more specific about what you hate about the wide field of AI. Otherwise it's almost like saying you hate computers, because they can run applications that you don't like.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I use AI as a tool. AI should be a tool to help with job, not to take jobs. Same as calculator. Yep people will be able to code faster with AIs help, so that might mean less demand, at least for IT. But u still gotta know what the exact prompt u need to ask

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