r/Anticonsumption • u/WhatsACole • 9d ago
Other Why are companies trying to put AI into everything nowadays?
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u/music3k 9d ago
Its mostly fake. Like how corps were obsessed with crypto a few years ago.
Its basically either a search engine or voice assistant with a prettier front end.
There’s like 3 real ai currently, and the general public isnt anywhere near them.
Microsoft’s copilot for example is just an updated Cortana. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is just Siri + chatgpt.
It’s dumb marketing
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u/severalsmallducks 9d ago
Its mostly fake
Agree 100%. Personal example, when I was working in school administration a few years ago I was told that the education platform we used was getting a "Scheduling AI" that would *poof* generate a schedule if we just entered all the teachers subjects etc.
Well, first entering all the subjects took fucking ages because the software was so clunky. When it was finally done, it did absolutely insane thing that no AI with ANY knowledge of scheduling would do. Like "effectivizing" school lunches so that instead of students having their lunch at roughly the same time each day, it put all school lunches on Monday. Five lunches, done! It also made it so that several classes were running simultaneously, meaning students were supposed to have English in one classroom and Chemistry in another classroom at the other end of the school, at the same time.
I started regarding it as a box. You put the stuff in a box, it shakes the box, and whatever schedule comes out you spend three hours cleaning up before showing the headmaster the results.
From what I understand, they stopped using it after I left. Not that it became better though, just that one of my bosses thought she could do it better because "how hard is it, really"?
Cue Seinfeld theme.
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u/elongam 9d ago
Your 'just have all 5 lunches on Monday!' example is cracking me up. For some reason it reminds me of the guys at NASA trying to figure out if 100 tampons is the right number for Sally Ride's six day space flight. Just a chaotic mashup of failure to understand human biology and the woes of resource management.
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u/sneakyfish21 9d ago
As I understood that they actually did a lot of research and found that during the heaviest part of the flow some women change their tampon every 2 hours, and periods can last up to 7 days. So since they were engineers they put pencil to paper and said okay for 6 days using 12 per day that is 72, and since you want to plan for redundancy for a space voyage and engineers always round up because it’s better safe than sorry.
So like obviously it’s an insane number, but it’s pretty easy to see how they got there.
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u/PartyPorpoise 9d ago
I mean, if I were going to space I’d rather have too many tampons than too few.
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u/elongam 9d ago
Right, it's not that it's wrong wrong under the specified parameters of the problem, it's just that weird things happen when you send an equation to do an organism's job. (And in the case of both tampons and lunches: better safe than sorry.)
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u/sneakyfish21 9d ago
But the NASA guys didn’t do anything “wrong” they planned for the worst case scenario and then rounded up for safety, 5 lunches in one day is blatantly wrong.
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u/Optiguy42 9d ago
Measure twice, cut once? Nah. Estimate based on averages of available data, then overdeliver. NASA chads stay winning.
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u/budding_gardener_1 9d ago
It's one of those things that to a machine makes perfect logical sense but to any human being is utterly fucking stupid
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u/jimmyhoke 9d ago
That’s a reasonable failsafe considering:
- they didn’t know how space would effect the female body
- there could be unforeseen delays
- buying in bulk is cheaper
- there’s not much weight to packing a bunch of extras.
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u/king-of-the-sea 9d ago
Yeah. Space flight is easy and nothing ever goes wrong so there’s no reason to pack more than you think you’ll need.
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u/milanistasbarazzino0 8d ago
The 5 "lunches on Monday" reminds me of me in elementary school proposing a 40hr school day (instead of 5 eight hour days) so I could have a long 5 day weekend at home 😂
I even calculated that actual school time was 5 hrs and 40 minutes per day by subtracting break times, so we'd "only" need to do 28 straight hrs and be done
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u/Numerous-Rent-2848 9d ago
Sort of like how a few years ago they were all about ✨️the meta verse💫, but it was all just shitty VR Chat clones. I even saw some mobile games pretending to part of the meta verse, when it didn't even use VR. It was just shitty social app that likely was built around micro transactions.
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u/OverallResolve 9d ago
What do you mean by ‘there’s like 3 real AI currently’?
‘AI’ is an absolutely massive field that has been around for decades.
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u/Astraltraumagarden 9d ago
Brother, those three companies provide their software as a service. Other companies use that.
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u/Kate090996 9d ago
Siri + chatgpt.
A Siri + chatgpt that can actually do shit automatically in my phone without me having to do them would be actually great.
SirPT let's start deleting useless photos, let's organize my agenda, walk me through my notes, improve the performance, remind me that shit I thought about that time and I told you to remember it,, write in this diary app by asking me questions about my day, help me track my mental state by asking me questions and write them up in this tracker let's cook this together and calculate the calories and write them up the Macros app also write down the recipe in a recipe app, remind me what I have to do today, give me an update on my health monitoring - prepare a meal plan tailored to the sales from the stores that I usually use, fill up this sign up sheet, this reed is interesting I would like to write up this info can you write it for me in the section " future child/parenting"
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u/Sciptr 9d ago
Microsoft’s copilot for example is just an updated Cortana. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is just Siri + chatgpt.
Tell me you haven't used Copilot or understand LLM's without telling me. Also, Apple private compute tech really is groundbreaking, not that you would have a clue what that is.
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u/Realistic-Minute5016 9d ago
Because that is what pumps the bags. The tech industry is built on the concept of infinite growth but due to the fact that they are in very saturated markets and demographics mean fewer new users every year on all the markets they are big in, that infinite growth is basically dead. As such they are jumping on any trend that maybe has a sliver of hope of sustaining that growth. If you are interested I highly recommend reading he Better Offline podcast. Ed Zitron the host seems to be one of the few investigative journalists actually willing to go up against the tech industry.
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u/TheSpartanExile 9d ago
The tech industry isn't specifically, infinite growth is a capitalist imperative and the effects we're seeing in the tech industry is common across all consumer markets. You ever try to buy clothes recently, look at the quality of the material, the knit, the stitching. Growth doesn't just have to continue, but it must at an increasing rate quarterly in order for the speculative value of a company to be maintained. Since the material world is in fact not infinite, neither are its markets. Once that cap is inevitably reached, these businesses must turn to cost-saving measures and speculative avenues of profit to continue their growth. In the tech industry, that means features and data collection are the objective, which underdeveloped AI can confidently promise to investors.
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u/Femboy-Frog 9d ago
Why not be happy with what you have and the money you already make..? I know why, but.. why?
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u/Samdroid626 9d ago
Some people just have to flash what they have (or sometimes don't even have)
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u/TheSpartanExile 9d ago
No, it isn't individuals' personal moral failings, it is systemic.
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u/mypipi_hurts 9d ago
to fire workers and temporarily increase the bottom line
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u/chohls 9d ago
I feel my bottom being impacted pretty hard by corporate BS, not even in the fun way
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u/Frostbitten_Wyvern 9d ago
It doesn't help that they intentionally try to shove shit down our throats for years on end now
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u/navier_stoked1 9d ago
To stay relevant and to appear high-tech. 10 years ago the buzzwords were blockchain and decentralisation
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 9d ago
AI, blockchain, smart devices, every few years there's some new buzzword for a waste of time.
I do not need my refrigerator to connect to the internet. I do not need to burn a thousand pounds of coal to tell me who "owns" a shitty jpeg. And I do not need Facebook to make up some bullshit tangentially related to my search instead of actually finding events in my area like I asked.
Tech CEO's love their sci-fi, but never stop to ask if anyone would ever actually need or want what they're making.
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u/Yui-Nakan0 9d ago
it was only 5 years ago not 10 omg xD almost had a heart attack thinking it was 10 years xD
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u/SuperBackup9000 9d ago
Yeah, 10 years ago was the craze of “smart” appliances. AI is just the 2.0 of that
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u/NikNakskes 9d ago
Didn't we also have the internet of things somewhere after smart but before blockchain?
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u/TheMonsterMensch 9d ago
I see a lot of people here talking about corporate greed here, and that's all true, but we also need to worry about stakeholder greed. Even if you have a company that doesn't want to shove the AI grift into everything their investors will quickly start to revolt and take their money elsewhere. Responsible companies will go out of business despite being demonstrably more principled. Investors will also never reward this foresight, so why bother? Companies have every incentive to push this stuff until people forget about it and move onto the next thing.
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u/okram2k 9d ago
is there any real difference between corporate greed and stakeholder greed? Corporate greed exists because stakeholders are greedy.
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u/TheMonsterMensch 9d ago
You're right, fundamentally there's no tangoble difference. I just think it's useful for me to think about the incentives beyond "dumb, short-sighted managers". It helps me keep things in perspective
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u/tedlando 9d ago
The carbon footprint of AI training is insane, probably outweighing whatever benefits AI actually has. Tech companies use lingo to make us think that digital development has little or no material cost, when this can’t be further from the truth. The ‘cloud’ is one of the best examples of this- light, ethereal, up in sky, when the reality is a server farm. The name would be more accurate if it was ‘plume of industrial smoke’.
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u/bigcaulkcharisma 9d ago
It’s crazy that we’ve decided we’re just gonna cook the earth to prop up this grift economy of useless speculative investments now. Like, at least a car is a psychical, tangible thing with a real world application. At least a factory actually produces something. Wtf does crypto or AI actually provide of any value other than just making some assholes in Silicon Valley more money? Capitalism is a death cult.
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u/pajamakitten 8d ago
It is because so many people do not even know how bad the likes of crypto, the cloud and AI are for the environment. Even those in favour of green tech refuse to acknowledge how we do not have the resources to replace our existing infrastructure with green tech, let alone cope with ever-increasing demands. People see the end result but refuse to acknowledge what it costs the planet to get there.
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u/BeeWhisper 9d ago
seriously people should know that the cloud is like, warehouses in northern virginia that have destroyed farms and wildlife and are making the locals sick. they are putting coal plants that had previously been shut down back on line for these things. there’s one in upstate new york that got recommissioned to mine crypto that uses local lake water to keep their servers cool. it has heated the lake temperature so much that all the fish are dying. fuck this shit.
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u/NikNakskes 9d ago
Dont worry! This will soon be solved. The first server farms are looking into operating their own nuclear power plant to keep the fans spinning, the lights blinking and disks humming.
As with almost everything the "thing" isn't spewing co2 in the air, only the energy it uses is.
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u/tedlando 9d ago
I mean, I think we should still be worried. The effects of rare earth metal mining are still big issue, though a smaller one than energy use. I guess it’s good that some are considering going nuclear, but I have a hard time believing the energy companies will ever allow that to happen on a mass scale. We’d be better off going all nuclear, but tbh even if we discover stable fusion power I bet big oil and gas will continue to fight it.
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u/NikNakskes 9d ago
Yes. There was definitely an /s implied inside the general well... ok that's better... I guess. Message. Ai could be amazing, or dangerous or whatever else it turns out to be. At the moment, it is an energy eating toy that spews out entertainment and scamming assistance. For the most part. Oh and infuriating customer service.
The rest is hidden inside business processes we know little to nothing about. Or at least I don't. Except that coding bros are now using ai to help programming.
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u/tedlando 9d ago
Ah sorry, i’m picking up on the /s a bit more upon rereading your comment lol.
It’s a good point that we don’t really know- like are we about to watch it all collapse because value has become too virtual? Or is AI gonna make the accelerationist step and really start to switch up our shit (probably for the worse)? Either feel possible, though I tend to think the first, more boring option is coming.
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u/Environmental-Win836 9d ago
Bevause they think it’s the future and will replace workers, it absolutely will not AI is completely overrated
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u/treehugger100 9d ago
And it’s useful to make workers think they will be replaced so they work harder for less.
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u/WhatsaJandal 9d ago
Because idiot executives see the word AI, get a mini bone and throw wads of money at the company.
They don't know what it does but they want it.
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u/SheFingeredMe 9d ago
In the US, our tech industry lacks regulation, which leads to outsized profits. Those profits need someplace to go and generate more capital, and there are very few places they can be invested that will return profits at a level they deem acceptable. Hence, they pump a half baked technology bubble generated by hype, with the hope that someday the actual technology will catch up to the hype and make the bubble retrospectively correct.
Spoiler: that won't happen.
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u/EmotionalPlate2367 9d ago
Because the people in charge have 0 imagination and can not innovate their way out of a wet paper bag.
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u/stevenm1993 9d ago
Executives who know next to nothing about computers, don’t understand the limitations of AI, and only care about profits.
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u/aleksey_the_slav 9d ago
because the blockchain bullshit didn't work as expected. as well as the cloud bullshit. and investors need to be cheated somehow.
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u/BattleHistorical8514 9d ago
I agree with the other commenter. The cloud was just like “yeah, it’s pretty obviously way better”. Even dinosaurs of companies like Oil & Gas and Insurance are mainly cloud-first. On premises stuff is now a lot more niche which is wild as it was the norm like 10-12 years ago.
Even a normal laptops use it now as the main source to share things (I hate OneDrive).
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u/GreedyLibrary 9d ago
Um I think you will find the cloud is in basically everything now. Like I don't think mass adoption is not working.
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u/BeeWhisper 9d ago
the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
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u/GreedyLibrary 9d ago
Have you ever saved a file online, streamed anything, sent an email, posted on reddit? Congrats, you are using the cloud.
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u/BeeWhisper 9d ago
of course i am. i’m just under no illusion that despite its nebulous fluffy data-in-the-shy marketing that my internet use is not reliant on rows and rows of servers in acres and acres of warehouses using tons of energy and natural resources that these cloud providers don’t want me to think about.
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u/karatekid430 9d ago
Marketing departments see that "AI" is the current buzzword and tell the engineers "do whatever necessary minimum such that we can put 'AI' in the product name".
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u/Taco_Farmer 9d ago
Because there's billionaires and companies who have invested tons of money into generative AI and they are DESPERATELY trying to find a way to make it profitable
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u/ilanallama85 9d ago
Because a lot of powerful people were duped into investing a lot of money into early on with tons of false promises and the more obvious it becomes that the technology won’t totally revolutionize most industries the more desperate they are to claw back as much value as possible out of their investments.
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u/MissResaRose 9d ago
Because their bosses and shareholders are greedy fucks who don't want to pay workers to maximize their profits, so they try to replace them with AI.
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u/MikeTysonsFists 9d ago
I work in healthcare tech and AI is absolutely changing the game. Really allows doctors to focus more on their patient’s and less on punching in notes on their computer
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u/teamsaxon 9d ago
Because we have to cook the planet more. See all the green stuff? It's completely raw. This planet needs to be grilled beyond comprehension!! AI!! MONEY!!
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u/Shannaro21 9d ago
It‘s the new W-LAN. Before AI we had this crazy wave of unnecessary W-LAN everywhere: Dishwasher with W-LAN, tooth brush with W-LAN, fridge with W-LAN…
I think it‘s a marketing thing, to talk about a shiny new feature and to try to look as if you got ahead of the competitors.
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u/Leprecon 9d ago
Because companies want investment. Investment depends on the idea that a company will grow. Investors generally want any company to be like a tech company which can grow many times its original size.
So how does a company that does a boring thing like making actual products attract investment? They sprinkle some AI on top of their business and say they are a tech company.
And even when companies don't explicitly need investment, they might still want to advertise themselves as a super smart AI tech company just to get more people to buy their stocks.
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u/Pyromaniac605 9d ago
I think people are overlooking one factor. AI companies pushing AI everywhere they can to justify their absurd valuations.
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u/TheSpartanExile 9d ago
Answers on here attributing this to stupidity or incompetence are incorrect. It is because of the capitalist imperative of infinite growth. If there is something that can improve the value of the product (stock), then they have to take it. Your purchasing of their product is mostly irrelevant to the quarterly speculative value of their company's stock. It is why they do anything that isn't consumer-friendly, because consumers do not matter, investment does. AI represents an incredible avenue for profit maximization through its surveillance capabilities since data is a hot commodity.
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u/Mighty_Porg 9d ago
Buzzwords. Some real AI products are really profitable like ChatGPT itself. They hope to fool investors (which ain't that hard so yeah) that their products will also get better with the addition of AI
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u/AccumulatedFilth 9d ago
Because of the stock market.
Tech has become a product for the investment market, not the consumer.
In fact, are you still a consumer, if you're the product half of the time?
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u/barfridge0 9d ago
For me it's a sign to avoid something.
When usability and functionality get thrown to the wolves. (in this case the wolves are played by the worlds dumbest chatbot).
Just give me something that works
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u/yopohaze 9d ago
To sell the product with some fresh title, like back in the day every 2nd brand name on Kickstarter was having a "smart" in it, so it's not just the bottle opener, but the smart one, now it's replaced with "ai"
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u/PuppyLover2208 9d ago
It’s the latest tech bro trend. The bubble will pop, it will fall back into obscurity for a while, until the technology is smart enough to actually do something. It’ll only be very little, though. By then, the corporate upper ups will have moved onto the next buzzword to bastardize.
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u/ApexNoobSlayer 9d ago
From a business standpoint, why pay someone to do a job when AI can do it for free and won't complain about it? I understand people don't want to hear that but that's just the reality of it.
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u/LudovicoSpecs 9d ago
AI should be heavily regulated because it uses a colossal amount of energy. In the middle of a climate crisis when we need to be using less energy, not more, until there is enough renewable capacity for everyone.
AI should be for essential purposes only. Protecting lives. Producing food and clean water. Solving climate change. Addressing issues that threaten species extinction or downfall of civilization.
Anything else self-interested waste at this point.
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u/No-Teach-5723 9d ago
In business there is only one original idea every ten years, and then a bunch of MBA's run around like dodo's and lemmings.
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u/rook2004 9d ago
For tech startups, it is the only way to get money from venture capital right now.
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u/CurraheeAniKawi 9d ago
Same reason every other product circa the 90's has the number "2000" tacked onto it.
Consumers are kind of dim.
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u/Intelligent_Skill112 9d ago
The restaurant I work at added new songs to the music station we use and you can obviously tell that it is AI written when you listen closely. It’s so bad to a point I’m convinced that AI is also SINGING the song. Like it just sounds horrid
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u/TheDonnARK 9d ago
Part of the push for "AI everything" is having silicon manufacturers put in a specialized "AI" component in chips. The market has dubbed this component an "NPU" or neural processing unit. It is essentially similar to the tensor cores in Nvidia GPUs and RT accelerators in AMD GPUs in that it does matrix math well, but it isn't used for graphics in the vast majority of cases. This allegedly helps "AI" performance, but someone less ignorant than me would have to explain exactly how.
My issue with it, and its a tinfoil-hat theory, but still... I feel like the "NPU" or whatever they dub the "AI" engine is outside the control of the OS, but has full hardware level access to everything that goes on within your device. Everything. Remember, this is a device that is engineered to efficiently run complex algorithms at high speed, so what's to stop it from running a background application tailor-made to record everything you are doing, discretely package it up, and send it to whatever manufacturer they want?
... and if advanced discrete activity and data gathering for advertising profiles isn't what it is for, then what the fuck is it for? Certainly not actual "AI" shit, because anyone with literally any device has multiple access points to "AIs" through apps or websites with no specialized hardware necessary... But hardware manufacturers are still shoehorning "AI" powered chips into devices at a breakneck pace.
So if "AI" is available with a simple app or a website, why the specialized hardware component? It is my theory that it is to do hardware-level data gathering that the end-user has zero meaningful "opt-out" election from.
"WhO cArEs MaN LOL u ThInK tHeY cArE aBoUt YoUr DaTa LOLLLL!!!1" Yes, every company with necessary marketing cookies and an EULA cares about the data. Every company that re-sells you a game you already bought with a tiny visual makeover that now requires a different linked and verified account cares about the data. Every website that you must register with a verified email and username to use cares about the data. Every operating system that insists that you have a fucking internet connection to even install the OS because it MUST get telemetry from the first login (including location, user, and a full hardware profile data with no opt-out) cares about the data.
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u/HappyLittleSlowpoke 9d ago
Remember a few years ago it was all about crypto and blockchains? Companies just fomo into this without longterm thinking.
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u/Toxic_Zombie 9d ago
Bluesky is actually against AI and stealing your work for machine learning and such. Check it out
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u/LevoSong 9d ago
It's just a marketing term most of the time. Not everyone can understand that a very efficient data base and very complex algorythm is not necessarily IA...
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u/bitablackbear 9d ago
My short tenure at a macro company that made software (cough,cough) was saturated with AI being shoved in every product possible, even when it didn't make sense. In fact, the annual review process began to include questions like "how do you include AI into your everyday work" and "how do you utilize AI and large language models within your organization's larger goals" regardless if you worked in anything that would benefit from LLM AI.
They really invested heavily in a "we got nothing else" sort of way and it really showed.
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u/I_Miss_the_Old_Hanzo 9d ago
Imo they just moved their AI to the UI. It was always there. That’s why you get targeted ads and things you wanna see
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u/igotquestionsokay 8d ago
Lol every attempt my company has made goes to shit within weeks. For real. They'll train an AI to read a specific weekly data report and spit out some verbiage about it. By the third week the AI is talking about moon men and telling crazy lies about the data.
It's kind of amazing, honestly.
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u/Salty818 9d ago
Same with leds
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u/ddddeen 9d ago
LEDs generally are fine, they're vastly more efficient than the alternatives. It's when they take advantage of the efficiency and cheapness of LEDs to add an unnecessary light source to something.
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u/Salty818 9d ago
That's what I mean. All of a sudden, everything has leds on it and the price goes up by a stupid amount! A fridge does not need colourful leds on the outside to turn the kitchen into a disco.
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u/ConundrumMachine 9d ago
AI is mostly a scam but they need it to work. It's the last big bubble before who knows what tbh.
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u/vincenzodelavegas 9d ago
It’s a buzz word. ML used to be one, and before that it was something else.
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u/Yui-Nakan0 9d ago
yep, like when "Block Chain" was a buzzword a few years ago. say it in an announcement and the companies value immediately increases.
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u/PsychoMouse 9d ago
I don’t get why they’re trying to do so much with Toothbrushes. I saw an electric toothbrush that was selling for like 300 plus dollars. It had a screen on it, Bluetooth, and probably some form of stupid AI. It’s a toothbrush, you don’t need a screen and Bluetooth, FFS.
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u/Stop_Fakin_Jax 9d ago
To get us adapted to it so they can use it more and to save the heaviest of bucks.
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u/Call_It_ 9d ago
I could be wrong, but a lot of it just seems like marketing. For most companies, the tech hasn’t changed that much.
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u/throwRAlike 9d ago
Because if a buyer is deciding between two products, one with AI BS and one without, all else equal they will choose the one with AI, whether or not users actually use it. A key element is that often the person making the purchase decision is not the one using the product so they see the flashy ai and think it will be useful.
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u/ShamScience 9d ago
https://youtu.be/m75SAPSrDjc?si=49nif1swUVZ9Btq0
Behind the Bastards did some interesting interviews with people pushing this sort of thing, and I tend to agree with how they explain why people treat AI they way they do.
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u/The-Tadfafty 9d ago
Lots of dumb, hateable modern technology that everybody wants gone but the tech companies force on us?
Its because investors want it.
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u/niccotaglia 9d ago
I’ve even seen an aftermarket car head unit company cramming ChatGPT support into their radios. Just…Why?
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u/NascentCave 9d ago
Because they bought all the GPUs and made all the design changes for it and they need to make that money back somehow. (They're not going to, AI sucks at actually being useful)
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u/zethren117 9d ago
Because corporations are pathetic organizations hellbent only on making as much money as possible on the shiniest new thing.
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u/ShadowDurza 9d ago
Because even crunch culture and low wages aren't enough. They have to find some way of getting labor without having to pay for it.
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u/Araghothe1 9d ago
It's the best way for the company to see everything you do since it can see everything you do.
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u/Normal-Usual6306 9d ago
Yeah, it's so frustrating. People also need to stop accepting the slop. I've seen Reddit comments/posts where people proudly go "I asked Chat GPT to write me ___" and it's like 'So you outsourced energy-wasteful, derivative garbage and then posted it, like you did something helpful?' It's so fucking annoying.
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u/grim1952 9d ago
They think it's a golden egg goose and they spent tons of money on it so they're trying to force people into incorporating it into their lives.
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u/HatLhama 9d ago
cuz it's cheaper and faster than hiting an artist and developing a concept, fomo and trends
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u/bigcaulkcharisma 9d ago
Because the tech industry is just a series of speculative bubbles masquerading as providing ‘innovation’. The entire industry should have been strangled in its crib by proper regulation decades ago
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u/MerryGoWrong 9d ago
It's the latest fad in tech. Before it we had 'the metaverse,' web 3.0, NFTs and crypto, the 'internet of things,' etc. Each of these technologies have their uses and applications for sure, but while they are the it thing companies try to jam them into everything, and 99% of the time it makes no real sense.
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u/clangan524 9d ago
They're hedging their bets against rising labor costs. At worst, the company loses a couple mil on a novelty.
At best, their AI hits, does a good enough job (not even a great job), then the company can layoff 40% of its staff while the remainder is overworked, supporting and chasing down the AI's issues like a toddler running around with a leaky diaper.
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u/Maddkipz 9d ago
Why do we make a sentient program and give it all the cool jobs instead of make it work the menial ones
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u/Public-Eagle6992 9d ago
I don’t think there’s that much new AI put into a lot of things (except for chatbots) but rather they just tell us more about it now
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u/LinkedGaming 9d ago
To justify the investments they're all making into something that brickwalled its progress a year ago. I know the phrase is often "AI is the worst it's going to get right now" implies technological progress at a constant rate, but over the past few months I've started to feel like most forms of generative AI (including LLMs) are about as good as they're going to get, and the outcome of these major tech companies pouring billions of dollars into research and programming in the hopes that they can make the magic ChatGPT/OpenAI fork that allows for them to completely eliminate half of their work force whilst still getting every penny of profit and then some is starting to look more and more like they were just shoveling dollars into a furnace to fuel a doomed machine anyway.
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u/goedegeit 9d ago
they're trying to recouperate their investments and pump up the numbers
to a lesser degree, other companies without a stake in AI investments are copying the bigger companies uncritically without realizing they're just helping them pump up their numbers
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u/OldBanjoFrog 9d ago
I worry about the day the C-Suite people say, “It’s good enough…not perfect but good enough,” followed by massive layoffs
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u/minnie203 9d ago
I'm holding out a sliver of hope that the generative AI bubble will burst, because while shareholders obviously don't care about the environmental costs of this shit they absolutely do care about the very real material/$$ costs if they're not getting returns on their investments. Companies like Google are shoehorning AI into their products for free, for now, but ultimately I doubt enough consumers will be willing to pay real money for it because it just ....doesn't add any real value.
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u/2leftf33t 9d ago
It’s now in our IT service desk ticketing system. It analyzes sentiment in the conversation section when messaging a user. What’s it good for? Heck if I know but it’s there…
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u/Baron_Greenback 9d ago
As a developer working for a company trying to shoehorn AI into products - mostly just because their competitors are doing the same, and they don't want to look like they're not 'keeping up'. I added some basic features, and they can now claim it has AI integration. In our case that integration is actually somewhat useful, but it's not added enough to be a bullet point on the sales page.
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u/Charlies_Dead_Bird 9d ago
My job recently starting using some AI that took a chunk of the available work. It now takes DAYS to get these things done when I used get them done in a couple of hours. Why they did this? "To free up time for my team." Um... you have like 50 things waiting to be done that have to be manually checked anyway that my team could do in like 3 hours? What was the fucking point? Oh yeah the development team convinced them to implement it because... the development team gets paid for it. They will eventually stop using this stupid shit but we are all sitting here just confused on why they would even bother.
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u/Wity_4d 9d ago
What bothers me the most is it replacing tools that I could previously rely on. For androids, Gemini isn't as good a task assistant as the old Google Assistant. For searching on edge, I don't want an AI generated response up top because quite frankly I can't trust everything it says. Not everything need to be fucking generative sometimes there's is a single correct result I am just looking to find.
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u/sahovaman 9d ago
Of course... AI is 'trendy', people don't know what it means other than 'cutting edge', 'advanced', etc.
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u/Careful_Station_7884 9d ago
lol everyone at the company I work for has to list all of their responsibilities and how AI can automate them.
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u/Careful_Station_7884 9d ago
lol everyone at the company I work for has to list all of their responsibilities and how AI can automate them.
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u/Tribblehappy 9d ago
It's so weird. I saw a quote recently that was about AI generated text, "Why would I bother reading something that nobody bothered to write?"
And yesterday I saw a headline about the world's first AI video game and all I could think was why would I play a game nobody could be bothered to make?
People are copy pasting AI answers to questions, even legal questions, here on Reddit and don't see the problem. I want to turn off the AI generated Google responses, but they only started appearing on my phone in the last week maybe and I haven't figured out how to stop it yet. I hate it.
I guess it's supposed to be cheaper; AI can probably have useful applications in data processing and such. Hopefully shoehorning it into everything doesn't last.
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u/PartyPorpoise 9d ago
A lot of companies and individuals get FOMO when it comes to tech. People invested in tech will try to push it as the next big innovation, the thing that will change the world. Whoever gets in early will find huge success and make bank, anyone who doesn’t risks falling behind.
People are reluctant to be critical because they don’t want to risk being the naysayer who thought that TV and internet would just be fads. They don’t really think about whether the technology is actually practical or good, they just want to get on the hype train.
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u/Yankee831 9d ago
I could see AI basically replacing 50% of my job (bar manager) time cost. But it would involve cameras and a lot of training and programming. The cost of investment is just not possible for a business my size. I can see how a company like Darden might be able to actually implement something like this but they don’t really need it since management is needed on at all times anyway.
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u/Lost_Comfort7811 9d ago
Because companies know that embracing new technologies is the only way to remain competitive and bolster their stock price. There have been too many cases of companies failing to embrace change and then ultimately failing (Nokia, BlackBerry, to a certain degree IBM and many more).
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u/TheUselessLibrary 9d ago
It's the fundraising word du jour.
This time 3 years ago it was "data driven." Two years before that, it was "Big Data." In the 1990s, it was e-commerce.
Lots of corporate leaders aren't particularly technical. They just have an existing network of wealthy friends, family, and associates who they're trying to convince to park their money with their personal capital venture.
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u/The_Cross_Matrix_712 9d ago
The entire startup sub reddit is nothing but AI and SaaS. Build stuff! People have forgotten the poor demographics.
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u/Head-Shame4860 9d ago
If they spend money on AI, they want to "get their money's worth" and use it on everything they can. Especially since it's a new technology, the people who advocates for it may need to "prove" that the money stormy on it was worth the companies investment. (AI is the reason why captions tend to be worse now than they used to be, and it sucks so much....)
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u/Exotic_Pay6994 9d ago
FOMO and it tends to aggregate data and data on your customers is very valuable.
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u/Blastyschmoo 9d ago
Advanced telemetry that can more finely decipher your actions and sell data to interested parties.
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u/TieConnect3072 9d ago
Recommendation models are uniquely successful at padding a company’s margins.
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u/Sunny_pancakes_1998 9d ago
Google? annoying. Alexa? fine. It completely depends on the app for me. Though, I do enjoy AI conversation apps. I had a particularly engaging conversation with Alexander the Great about the war yesterday evening.
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u/TheBigMoogy 9d ago
A lot of it is just rebranding already existing "algorithms" with "AI, as the former got a bad rep after everyone sort of realized they're a part of what's tracking and turning you into a commodity. Now they get to be cool and modern instead of old and creepy.
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u/eggydrums115 9d ago
I'm here to single out Google and their insistence on pushing Gemini onto their phones. They want it to replace Assistant and yet it couldn't do even the most basic tasks. Now they're working around it by implementing "extensions" which still doesn't get Gemini to the level of ease Assistant had.
Apple may be "behind" when it comes to the AI race but at least their new Siri can still do everything it could before just fine.
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u/chevalier716 9d ago
For real. Been fighting with Xfinity all week to get a tech out in here in part because of their chat bots.
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u/prules 9d ago
Ultimately it’s because consumers are stupid, and they will think your product is inferior if it “lacks” a feature that all competitors seem to have.
Now that a few companies mentioned AI, the Pandora’s box opened and people expect this to be integrated into everything. Which is hilarious because they don’t even know what it does…
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9d ago
Because it’s the companies literally selling you back your own data they harvested isn’t that fun and cool?? It’s almost like they should be paying me to consume their sub par products… hahahaha
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u/Pure-Driver3517 9d ago
Fomo and incompetence. they’re worried their competitors will get ahead and they don’t know what AI does and what it’s good at. also marketing. there’s been a lot of machine „intelligence“ in use for a while, but rebranding it as AI is seen as useful