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TJ Draper

Any company right now: You want some AI?

Me: Not particularly, thanks

Company: Got it, here's a big huge heaping helping of AI

Me: No thank you please

Company: Make job go fast, do vroom vroom on your career:

Me: I don't really…

Company: We put AI IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT

Me: Kinda but not really

Company: Here's AI tools for your software engineering

Me: These are really obtrusive and in my w…

COMPANY: YOU WILL LOVE OUR AI

Me: …

84 comments
Veronica Olsen 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇴🌻

@tjdraper I still have no idea what to use all this so-called "AI" for. I'm happy to use new things if they are useful. This mostly isn't.

Of course, Machine Learning has been around for quite a while and has a lot of use cases. I have used it successfully to enhance video. But the stuff they're pushing out now is 99% utterly useless and only exists to inflate stock prices because we're in a bubble.

F4GRX Sébastien

@veronica @tjdraper I cant wait for the AI bubble to burst. Popcorn everywhere.

Veronica Olsen 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇴🌻

@f4grx Same. I want to go back to making useful things with Machine Learning.

Probertd8

@veronica @tjdraper I'm sorry to hear that.
But these problems are usually down to human error!

Jeremy List

@veronica @tjdraper I struggle to imagine a world where someone could invent a universal function approximator without a lot of people finding it very useful. The mind-boggling part is where someone thought "The next word that a sycophantic redittor would most likely type" might be a useful function to approximate.

sortius

@veronica @tjdraper yeh, the most useful use-cases seem to be stuff like DLSS on video cards, enhancements for video/images, or even using it to help with scientific analysis. Basically anywhere that you can throttle it down to very simple sets of rules, it works wonderfully.

Outside of that it's a theft and bullshit machine

F4GRX Sébastien

@tjdraper even @nextcloud could not help themselves. I wish there was a nextcloud app to hide all this shit, even if it's disabled.

guenther

@f4grx @tjdraper

The thing is, there's an effect where nontechnical people will start believing the ads after a time. So when @nextcloud has to compete with Microsoft/Google/etc for contracts from big companies/governments, at some point some idiot in a meeting will say "yeah but Google Docs 365 has the AI thing, we should take that one because it's super awesome", and then nextcloud needs something to point at so they can say "yeah no problem dude, we got that too" and not loose the contract.

F4GRX Sébastien

@guenther @tjdraper @nextcloud I know that, so I dont complain that much. I also have to be honest, all the nextcloud AI stuff is disabled by default. Thats important and good.

Nextcloud does VERY important work and I am thankful for that.

Andrew Bartlett

@guenther @f4grx @tjdraper @nextcloud Before we were all dunking on AI folks were using LibreOffice to take notes at conferences.

Being all buzzwords the type ahead would be pretty likely and folks marvelled at the speed.

Teknikal_Domain

@tjdraper

1. Invent thing
2. Realize thing may be helpful (read: profitable).
3. Pitch thing as Next Big Thing™
4. Advertise your ventures with the Next Big Thing to consumers
5. Be told about the massive payoff for Next Big Thing from your CEO buddy who totally didn't hear it from his CEO buddy too shareholders.
6. Realize consumers don't want the Next Big Thing
7. Shove it down their throats anyways
8. "See? This thing is the Next Big Thing! It's everywhere! Everyone uses it at some point"
9. Profit???
10. Goto 1

@tjdraper

1. Invent thing
2. Realize thing may be helpful (read: profitable).
3. Pitch thing as Next Big Thing™
4. Advertise your ventures with the Next Big Thing to consumers
5. Be told about the massive payoff for Next Big Thing from your CEO buddy who totally didn't hear it from his CEO buddy too shareholders.
6. Realize consumers don't want the Next Big Thing
7. Shove it down their throats anyways
8. "See? This thing is the Next Big Thing! It's everywhere! Everyone uses it at some point"
9. Profit???

Kevin Caccamo

@tek_dmn @tjdraper So true... Except, replace "useful" with "profitable" and you'll have a more accurate picture of reality.

See: ads in the Windows start menu.

Martin Hamilton

@tjdraper <AI keyboard driver disapproves of this text>

David Marland

@tjdraper COMPANY: It costs us money to run these AI servers. We’re increasing your subscription.

Urzl

@tjdraper I wish my employer understood this as well as I do.

We have yet another Town Hall today where they'll run the usual agenda -
1) Hooray for incomprehensibly obscure accounting trivia!
2) Shout out to our colleagues in India!
3) AI is coming for your jobs so everybody should use it for everything!

ResearchBuzz

@tjdraper @neurovagrant honestly. LinkedIn has a prompt now: "Start a post, try writing with AI." why the HELL would I want to do that?

Advanced Persistent Teapot

@researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant let's be fair, most of the posts on LinkedIn already read like they were AI generated, with all that hustle culture bullshit

ResearchBuzz

@http_error_418 @tjdraper @neurovagrant This is true. If it's not the most autistic-hostile place on the Internet it's because other places said hold my beer

Kichae

@http_error_418 @researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant
Oh no, that's not true at all.

They're much less cogent and coherent than that. That's how you know they're written by groupthink.

Pseudo Nym

@researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant

To blend in with the herd, avoiding predators?

Have you read most LinkedIn posts?

Dan Lyke

@pseudonym @researchbuzz I am still working on breaking down the "OMG AI is amazing" thing within my working group (and looking for another job), but I think my boss had an epiphany when we watched a video together that was all about tying tools together to take a prompt and automatically post the resulting LLM generated bullshit to LinkedIn and a few other sites.

ResearchBuzz

@danlyke @pseudonym there is a reason I’m gettting preoccupied with tightlydefining search spaces….

Urban Hermit

@danlyke @pseudonym @Researchbuzz "plausibly accurate" is not a product anybody should sell, certainly not by putting more untrue crap online.

2 examples of LLM content in the wild: A kite museum in Texas was said to have a display on "The Age of Mastodons" because the LLM didn't know how the word "kite" modified the word "museum".

A garden center had a review of a night club in their Facebook feed because the club was called "Dahlia".

ResearchBuzz

@Jennifer @tjdraper @neurovagrant I got a notification that it was so-and-so's birthday, so I went into the LinkedIn Messenger to send them a happy birthday note.

The message box was populated with "Happy Birthday" and the message "Write your message with AI."

WHAT? It's a birthday message. It's HAPPY BIRTHDAY. My time is not so freaking valuable that I cannot turn a few neurons into a coherent happy birthday greeting without the help of a computer.

Sheesh.

pies

@Researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant To fool the hiring AI your future employer will use into thinking that you're active in your community.

Paul McO'Smith III

@tjdraper

Me: Look I can help you with this... I have a...

You: glares at me.

Me: ...Large Language Model that can interpret the reasoning behind your thinking...

You: now narrowing your eyes...

Me: ...and suggest other potential outcomes.

Stoneface Vimes

@tjdraper fortunately, not that it's relevant since I retired, carpentry has very little opportunity for AI to intrude itself into lives. Not much use for IT in a hammer or a saw.

Celine warns of Idiocracy

@capnthommo @tjdraper But only, if they are "analog". If they were electrical, AI could improve the rpm to match the task at hand and you wouldn't have to think of how to handle it properly.

/s

Stoneface Vimes

@cihi1970 @tjdraper well to be fair I've encountered young chippies who weren't actually that good if it came to manual tools.

Kichura

@tjdraper Meanwhile fedora: We admit that AI packages are in our dnf list but you are allowed to remove them, no pressure.

Proxfox Virtual Environment 🦊

@tjdraper what's better about this is:

> We put AI IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT

they did not put AI in your mouse drivers or even an api client to speak to an AI, they just put a web view of chat.openai.com into the mouse drivers. such low effort it's laughable.

Traffic Cone Carlie

@tjdraper
I need an AI which will get my mouse to select what I'm flailing about and try to find. So if that actually worked I would love it.

Androcat

@tjdraper And you thought tree pollen was invasive?
WAIT TILL YOU TRY OUR AI!!!!

Resting Facebitch

@tjdraper Engineers and content people share the same pain.

It's slowing me tf down!!

Alexander Trivia Dragonson

@tjdraper my employer sent me an email yesterday: Technical writers should learn how to be prompt engineers! Here are some unpaid professional development seminars about it.

So far, I can quietly ignore that. At some point, though, I will likely feel forced to tell them that I never want to put myself in a position where a future client (or employer!) thinks I'm capable of working with a large language model.

shimst3r

@tjdraper as someone who's involved with both msft and gcp as a partner, i still can't believe how much money they dump on us in order to promote their ai technology. nobody wants to use it and they know it, so they feed it to you with a golden spoon.

Pseudo Nym

@tjdraper

Now, have an LLM write this. See, the give away is that this is direct, forceful, and satirical.

Default LLM output is wishy washy and bland.

I swear, this is all Clippy's revenge on us for not letting it help us write our term papers.

Badgey from lower decks

Kote Isaev

@tjdraper Just as kind of joke, asked Gemini to make a CLI tool to base64 a JSON file or back for nodejs. It pooped out a piece of code with a tiny and fatal error.
These pipelines of matrices algebra do not have mere idea what people ask them and what word salads they produce.

Dallas (Join Something IRL)

@tjdraper

... Just be sure to click 'accept' on the EULA! Nothing weird in there at all!

Pixin

@tjdraper It honestly makes me a little nostalgic for the crypto craze -- at least that was dangled in front of people as a temptation, not crammed into previously-working system whether you want them or not (usually with no opt-out).

pies

@tjdraper AI in most cases just means "better auto complete" and I think it's pretty useful as that. I use GitHub Copilot and it saves me some boring typing of lists etc.

Your Autistic Life

@tjdraper

Prego spaghetti sauce: now with AI! Your mouth won't believe what it tastes! Or will it? We're not sure. Haha!

#AI #SpaghettiSauce

Helge Wurst

They're just finishing what the advertising industry started. Somehow we went from "would you have 3 minutes to participate in this survey" to "maceration in our thorny product is mandatory so we can feed your exudate to the machine. The machine is always hungry. The machine must be fed. To serve the algorithm is to serve humanity."

Molly 🏳️‍⚧️

@tjdraper Someone at GitHub wouldn't stop emailing me about incorporating AI into our development workflow. There are ethical concerns, security concerns, environmental issues, just, so much.

🪶 Scribe Thorium 📜

@tjdraper

They also do that to your clients.
"Hey, your freelance provider is too expensive, too slow, too human and wants respect. Make them an almost free sweeper of our AI shaite to make it shine!"

Philip Cardella

@tjdraper I know, right?

Open Google maps: wanna try our maps AI?

Me: are you going to make some place up for me to go? How is this any different from your usual WTAF directions?

Wenzel

@tjdraper can't even press the spacebar in #Notion anymore… it's a freaking nightmare!

зміцер

@tjdraper «IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS» — wait so that's what gave me “Error in LogiAIPromptBuilder.exe” error!!

I thought I had a virus! (I didn't investigate further her because if was the end of Friday and I was leaving the office when I saw that error)

Uriel Fanelli

@tjdraper actually they do something different.

-

Hi Big Company, did you know with OUR AI you can fire 20% of white collars, you know, the expensive ones.


-

Really?


-

yes, we did this for your competitors. We cannot share details, but look how many people they fired.

This is how they behave today.

Earthling

@tjdraper ... you started this aaaaall wrong... 😏

you might have been more successful making weird n ridiculous demands, wgich could have not fullfilled 😆

Vincent Biret

@tjdraper Logitech pushing AI features you have no way to opt out from through the software that helps you set mouse sensitivity got me really pissed last week...

Jonathan Gerhardson

@tjdraper this seems like the appropriate reply guy opportunity to point out that the movie HER features Joaquin Phoenix enjoying an upper middle class lifestyle as a GREETING CARD WRITER during a time when AGI exists. Sure, that's the joke. But this needs to be pointed out more often.

Lesley Carhart :unverified:

@tjdraper @fbajak instagram. I absolutely never ever want to ask bing ai anything in the search box.

Matt Palmer

@tjdraper you'd think that if AI were as good as it's claimed, it could have predicted that many people would hate having AI jammed down their throats, and so it wouldn't have happened.

biggestsonicfan

@tjdraper Please check out the nightmare that is flux.ai

Kris Sargent, MD

@tjdraper "Kinda but not really" is truly from the heart.

Pure magic.

DELETED

@tjdraper AI needs to die the dirtiest, smokiest death possible. Just smoldering and everyone pisses on the stinky carcass to celebrate the restoration of humanity's collective sanity.

rojun

@tjdraper Oh.. This is how AI takes over the world uncontrollably . It's already begun, but we thought it just a nuissance and benign.

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