Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

I'm in no way an AI hater. It has some very good use cases. But in the commercial world, if you are promoting a product or service, the phrase "AI-powered" translates to "didn't read the room". The majority probably don't see that as a plus? (I could be wrong!)

Boost if you will to get coverage. The results will be interesting if enough people vote.

EDIT: I should have said "hater or lover". But the question was strictly concerning the use of that language in promo and advertising.

AI-powered is a positive thing
0.7%
AI-powered is a negative thing
99.3%
Poll ended at .
Show threadNazoMar 16

@randulo Well, I'll tell you one thing, posting this on Mastodon is going to give you pretty overwhelming votes on the negative side. It would be interesting to see a more general populace vote, but my suspicion is that negative would still win by majority. My bet is still by quite a lot.

As far as I can tell, those at the top are just wildly disconnected in every single possible way to literally everything below them. Including the systems they're actually forcing all this into...

Some, I suspect, don't even know what their own business actually is or does...

As a side note, it has struck me on more than one occasion that if there is any position in a business that could be replaced by a LLM without causing massive problems, it's the way overpaid jobs of those at the top...

Show threadRandulo.com (Randy)Mar 16
@nazokiyoubinbou Yes, I realize that. My question isn't "do you hate (or like) AI", but what do you think of the use of "AI-powered" as a flex, a quality? I think you're right, that investors will be impressed, but that a lot of potential users will dislike it, even if the product is just what they need. (The "powered" claim is meaningless, regardless.
Show threadNazoMar 16

@randulo All I can tell you for sure is the general attitude I've seen here on Mastodon is very close to 100% that that particular flex is negative with lots of memes of people turning away or etc in response when they see that.

How well that reflects the world as a whole I can't say because every day when I log on about half of my feed consists of people saying over and over "I hate 'AI' and everyone who has ever used it!" (to such an extent that some of the hate has gone beyond reasoning even.) So, in other words, there is definitely a bias here that doesn't necessarily match the world as a whole, thus making it hard to really judge the overall feelings.

That said, everything I've seen does seem to support the idea that even the average person sees the flex as a negative.

Show threadRandulo.com (Randy)
@nazokiyoubinbou Yes, Mastodon is a guaranteed anti-AI audience except for programmers who love using the tech but don't try to talk it up. AS I said, it's a technology and I neither hate or love it. The current implimentations like Gemini can do impressive things but are they worthy of attention? Not always. For example, it ingested a short story of mine and generated a two-person podcast discussing it. It sounded very much like two real people discussing the story. I didn't post that anywhere
Mar 16 at 3:27pmWeb
Show threadNazoMar 16

@randulo I think it's too lossy to be used for summaries. It's like trying to get the complexity of a concert with a recording on an old cassette from someone sitting in the back.

Most of the uses I can imagine up for them are more small time. For example, an author quickly testing out a concept to see how it feels in play. Everything I can think of would be fine with a local LLM and no need for server farms and compromising personal info for oneself and everyone one knows to achieve that. (People forget local exists.)

The true issue isn't even LLMs, but the way they're being used — forced into things, gathering data illegally, etc. Unfortunately, remove the LLMs and those behind them still do that stuff with something else...

And, to that end, the flex is absolutely negative.

Show threadRandulo.com (Randy)Mar 16
@nazokiyoubinbou Yes, local would be the way to go, but it still needs to be trained. If that can be done, it'd be great.
Show threadNazoMar 16

@randulo Bear in mind that a lot of what goes into the training is an obsession that they should be trained to act as a general assistant. ... -And that's the one thing they most should not be doing.

Long term, if people don't have a kneejerk uncontrollable hate towards the tech (which they might at this point thanks to all the abuse) I would say the best solution is a community run actually open model where stuff that is actually free and open and submissions that can be appropriately licensed, etc etc are used for training. It would be a slow process that would never produce something as fake-smart as the current models — and that's a good thing in its own way because it should not be used as a "general assistant."

As it is though, when the bubble pops, the tech likely will die.

Show threadmirabilos6d ago
@randulo @nazokiyoubinbou especially programmers hate it here on the Fediverse. Well, most. And we’ve got tons of each reasons, sufficient for about 500-600% needed to forbid it entirely.