“What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?”

Wages. They’re trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.

  • @UnderpantsWeevil
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    44 days ago

    Somehow, all AI manages to do is strip the innovation and creativity out of the most exciting career fields.

    The rote physical labor of polishing the end product, marketing it to the masses, and distributing it via service sector retail facilities seems to stubbornly persist.

    • MudMan
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      44 days ago

      Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, I haven’t integrated any AI in my personal workflow at all beyond… I don’t know, maybe not remembering something and finding that faster than a classic search engine just to remember the name.

      But in the places around me where I do hear people picking bits of it up I see it used for what? Proofreading and rote, repetitive tasks? I don’t know that it’s productive at all for even that, beyond expensive, custom-trained ML processes that have little to do with commercial generative AI.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        23 days ago

        not remembering something and finding that faster than a classic search engine

        That’s more a consequence of Google Search capitulating to the ad sales side of the business at the expense of search efficency. Same thing happened to Yahoo and Lexus Nexus.

        where I do hear people picking bits of it up I see it used for what? Proofreading and rote, repetitive tasks? I don’t know that it’s productive at all for even that, beyond expensive, custom-trained ML processes

        Amazon has heavily invested in generative AI for its screenwriting and book sales business. Consequently, their original programming has suffered and their book marketplace flooded with crap.

        • MudMan
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          03 days ago

          No, I don’t think that’s the case. For one, I don’t use google for search, I’m not an animal.

          But for another, I don’t use AI search to replace classic search, I only use it when a) I already know the answer but I can’t remember it, and b) the query is so fuzzy it’d take too long to refine on classic search. Think of “hey, what was the name of that movie where the Home Alone kid was with Frodo Baggins and one of them was nuts?”

          Incidentally, I just tried asking that to ChatGPT and it got it right.

          As for the other thing, I don’t know if that’s accurate, but if it were, it’d be exactly what I’m talking about. Not saying people won’t try, but if and when they do, they’ll learn pretty quickly that it’s a bad idea.

          • @UnderpantsWeevil
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            23 days ago

            I don’t use AI search to replace classic search, I only use it when a) I already know the answer but I can’t remember it, and b) the query is so fuzzy it’d take too long to refine on classic search.

            Google used to bill its search software as high quality artificial intelligence capable of returning useful answers to fuzzy questions and reliable responses to repeated inquiries. Only recently has the search engine prioritized “new” information over reliable sources and begun aggressively injecting ads into every search.

            Modern AI is nice because its not overflowing with Ads and it does appear to weight the results by usefulness rather than newness. But how long do we expect that to last in a market where consistency and clarity are at odds with revenue generation?

            • MudMan
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              33 days ago

              Well, it could bill whatever it wanted, and it was pretty good at parsing queries, but it was all smart programming over dumb code breaking down whatever you wrote. It certainly couldn’t handle natural language and fuzzy requests particularly well.

              BUT the flipside of that is that, ads or no ads, you can’t trust gen AI results at all. Which means you should never, EVER ask gen AI any question you don’t already know the answer to or aren’t willing to verify.

              And if you’re going to verify it (and potentially learn it’s wrong and research it all over again the classic way) you are now taking longer to get the same answer with AI.

              It’s getting worse the more it relies on being a parser for classic search, too. Anything that isn’t page 1 results on Google or Bing it just won’t acknowledge, so the worse classic search gets, the worse newer AI search gets, too.

              I genuinely thought that would be a good application when they first came up with AI chatbots, but… yeah, no, I was wrong. At least outside the specific use case I outlined above.