Mastodawn

The key weakness in AI agents is that they're a lie. They don't work. They just don't fuckin' work. You can't set a hallucination engine to work doing tasks. It's pants on head stupid. The hype pretends this isn't the case and hypothesises a fabulous future where they work *at all*. This is a lie.

A useful model for "AI agents" is that they're the current excuse meme for AI. They're not a thing that works at all, now or in the fabulous future. But they're *such* good material for hypecrafting. No sausage at all, but *my god* that sizzle.

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DistroWatch Nov 10

@davidgerard "You can't set a hallucination engine to work doing tasks."

You can if your goal is to produce a lot of material that is not correct, or it doesn't matter if the material is correct.

I think that is what people tend to miss about the drive to get AI into the world. The people pushing it don't care if it's accurate, it might even be better for them if it's not, they just want a lot of material that looks passable to some people. They want filler and propaganda and misinformation.

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John Maxwell Nov 10

@distrowatch @davidgerard That's the high end of the spectrum of grifters here. On the low end, they're high on their supply, and actually believe the bullshit.

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DistroWatch Nov 10

@jmax @davidgerard The people the hype worked on probably do believe, unfortunately.

The AI industry seems to work in parallel with the social media and entertainment industries. This conversation brings to mind a quote from an article about Spotify: "Its goal isn't to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop."

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David Gerard Nov 10

@distrowatch @jmax AI boosters tend overwhelmingly to be someone who was one-shotted by a really impressive demo, and no mere numbers on how shitty this stuff is at scale will ever convince them.

also. over and over. I find that AI boosters are literally unable to tell good from bad. they are literally unaware that their slop is actually shitty. they think you're *lying* when you say you can tell good from bad. they think you're having a go at them.

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DistroWatch Nov 10

@davidgerard @jmax I notice this with developers in particular. AI bots tend to generate terrible code, so the people who say it writes well enough or that it saves them time... Make me wonder how bad their normal code is.

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George B

@distrowatch @davidgerard @jmax

It's built into my editor at work and I've found that it helps with repetitive tests on legacy codebases.

I still have to replace a lot so how much better it is than copy, paste, and modify is still debatable but it feels easier which helps with the motivation hurdle.

I've also noticed that I don't mentally register when it gives me pure crap and I need to delete it unless I deliberately make a mental note so it's easy to remember it being better than it is.