Mastodawn

Bill Caputo 6d ago

Randulo.com (Randy)

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 Mar 19 at 6:46am.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

Funny thing, no average non-technical person probably even heard of AJAX and CSS, but these revolutionized the web, tho not always for the best.

Klaus Frank Mar 16

CSS depends on how old you are. There is a high change that people around the age of 30-35 encountered it back then in the early days of social media when you still were allowed to customise the CSS on your profile page almost everywhere...

nieuemma 6d ago

@randulo Ajax is a soap, right?

Randulo.com (Randy)6d ago

@nieuemma It's a cleanser

Aral Balkan Mar 16

@randulo So fuck the environment, the real issue is branding?

Virginicus Mar 16

@aral @randulo IME, when someone has actually done something clever, they tell you exactly what they did. When they say something vague like“AI”, they’re covering something up.

Randulo.com (Randy)5d ago

@Virginicus @aral or they don't know.

@aral @randulo It's not what they are saying

gnaddrig 6d ago

@aral @randulo
No, but branding is something one can legitimately think and talk about.

spilt infinitive Mar 16

@randulo it's usually just a lie. It's not "powered" anything, in 99% of cases it means "we've replaced our call centre staff with a chatbot" or "we added a button that lets you summarise something the exact same way as 6 other pieces of software you already have installed", or maybe "we let machine learning algorithm to set prices in a way to maximally rip you off personally"

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@jimbob Well, most marketspeak is either a lie or an exageration, right? But the use of the term shouldn't be considered a GoodThing™ in your ads. 😂

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@jimbob To the person who replied Get a fucking grip, I say, that's not respectful disagreement.

@randulo @jimbob You should actually get a grip though

@jimbob @randulo In the case of “AI-Powered” computers, it means, this computer needs to be connected to a proprietary centralized rental service to use all of it’s features.

The Man from Maybury Hill Mar 16

@randulo But what are these very good use cases?

Androcat Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo

"Firing some people in order to increase investor dividends"

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@androcat @zebulonmysterioso Sad, but also true.

Androcat Mar 16

@randulo @zebulonmysterioso

"The purpose of a thing is what it does"

Omnivore Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo

What is the word that means [describe situation]? LLMs are useful as an interactive thesaurus.

degenerating degenerate Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo If you write code, fact is today's coding AIs are great. If you explained what you can do with them in 2026 to someone to 2016, they would just laugh in disbelief.

If you don't write code, well, naturally this is hard to feel. But that's why there are two different camps about it.

Heckin' Chonker Mar 16

@hopeless @zebulonmysterioso @randulo In my experience they still need a human providing guard rails. In the hands of novice devs they often just enable massive amounts of slop.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso One is what Google translate has been doing forever (before we were saturated with AI and LLM terms).

I have been collaborating with a Brazilian musician for several years. We share no language. We comminicate via Gmail, which automatically translates the messages, passing them betwen English and Brazilian Portugese.

Asking for explanations of some things is also a good use. Of course you have to check for accuracy.

Matthew Martin Mar 16

@randulo Businesses have stakeholders, any of which can tank the company. Customers, investors, government, community. AI is for investors, it is the promise of replacing labor with capital and redirecting that income to investors. I don't think it will play out that way, but no one asked me. Customers we're not asked and that's my marketing exists, so the opinion of consumers won't matter, just change the consumers mind with ads.

Toilet full of bugs Mar 16

@randulo If I see any kind of 'AI' label on a product it puts me off using it. It might as well say 'contains unreviewed slop'. If pouring slop into your product doesn't diminish its quality, it was a lousy product anyway.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Mar 16

@randulo honestly there should be an option called "it depends". For apps like Confluence, Bear, Notion AI can be a game changer. For some not so much. If you need to synthesize large amounts of info, llms are the way to go, and a lot of the AI powered apps that I found useful are those whose function is to store a lot of data

@liztai @randulo If you need to synthesize large amounts of info **and you don’t mind the enormous loss of fidelity**, llms are the way to go.

@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...

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Mar 16

@nazokiyoubinbou is there any social media that is even remotely neutral about AI? Yes but it exists in China 😆 @randulo

verifiedsabakan

disability_flag

@liztai @nazokiyoubinbou @randulo and shitter, probably

verifiedsabakan

disability_flag

@randulo @liztai @nazokiyoubinbou or not, they are probably very pro ai

neocat_googly_woozy

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@nazokiyoubinbou 💯

The general public think all chatbots are ChatGPT and have no notion of LLM or "AI", so yes.

Randulo.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.

@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.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@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

@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.

Randulo.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.

@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.

mirabilos 6d 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.

@randulo AI dates back to Clippy.

Gen-AI is what I think you're talking about.

Gen-AI powered is a problem.

Gen-AI assisted is different.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@chad I protest the use of the I in AI, as it is not intelligent in any definition I know of. But here, it's just another adjective, and I think a mistake to "brag" about it.

Chris Adams Mar 16

@randulo @liztai for me it’s strong negative if the lead is “AI!” rather than real benefits to me, especially if they pull a Copilot and raise prices.

As a contrast, I use the Newsblur feed reader which recently launched a feature that uses LLMs to synthesize feeds from sites which don’t have them. The ethical/copyright/externality questions aren’t erased but that’s at least a feature real people have requested for years, not some PM trying to show they shipped AI on their promotion package.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@acdha @liztai Good point, too that using an LLM isn't actually "powering "it, but the tool is used and for a good purpose, I think.

Chris Adams Mar 16

@randulo yeah, one of the weird things about the LLM discourse is how much it's driven by wild over-hyping of what would be a useful tool without the hype. People really want to put it in unsafe situations but it's not like those are the only problems in the world.

@randulo "AI-powered" is neither a positive nor a negative thing; it's an empty placeholder for signalling "we're not behind the times". If this was meant to inform a consumer about the actual technology being used, they wouldn't be using such a broad concept (which would be equivalent to calling Tokyo "Asia"). AI has been used for a long time in a variety of cases under different names, but nobody was hearing about it. Now that LLMs have become all the rage and are talked about everywhere as "AI", companies are taking this as an opportunity to show relevancy. The sentiment being elicited depends on the individual's relation to the concept of "being/staying ahead" or immortality projects in general. However, it's not the same as the question of using AI (again, mostly LLMs or VLMs). Since I'm not aware about your goal with this survey, I can't really comment on what question would be more suitable to receive more accurate results, but I'm afraid that the range of interpretation for your current one is too broad to get a representative answer.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@hostia I agree, as someone else posts, the term is bogus to begin with, as if blockchain-powered meant something, even then the blockchain may have been used in the profuct.

Olivier Stuker (he/him)Mar 16

@randulo hey @tagirijus is this the bubble you're talking about? 😂

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@holzchopf @tagirijus In the sense that it will eventually disappear as did "with Blockchain", one could probably say "bubble", if that's what you mean?

Olivier Stuker (he/him)Mar 16

@randulo No, I mean in the sense that Mastodon is an AI sceptic bubble (tagirijus' words)

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@holzchopf Yes, no question about that! I don't think it's worth my time to hate on it publicly, even though I have the same objections most have. It is IMO neither as good or as bad as most people say. Two extreme fringes, and here it's the negative one.
Maybe more an echo chamber?

Olivier Stuker (he/him)Mar 16

@randulo yes it was definitely meant in the sense of echo chamber

Manuel Senfft Mar 16

@holzchopf @randulo yes, lol. :D

@randulo Generative AI has no good use cases. It chews water, land, hardware, and power in vast quantities, stealing human creative work wholesale, casting human workers aside while channelling money into the pockets of the most evil and unprincipled men on the planet, who are already wealthy beyond any reasonable measure.

Get a fucking GRIP.

Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧Mar 16

In the 50s through 70s they used to put the word "Sugar" in front of the names of breakfast cereals (to which a huge amount of crystalline sugar had been added) and it really helped them sell better. Until people finally realized how undesirable that really was and it started having the opposite effect.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@pieist I think I do recall that! Sugar Snaps! No, SMACKS!

bewilderbeast23 Mar 16

@randulo Pls name some good use cases. I need to know where I'm wrong when I think generative AI has none.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 16

@bewilderbeast23 I did. Anything where a small artistic endeavor cannot afford human work but a machine could do it easily. Here's an example:
I used to use it for album covers. Music makes no money, and I can't pay a decent sum for an actual artist. Now I make my own covers, mostly my own photos. I already mentioned translation. Again, something I couldn't pay for.
One NOT good one is thinking it's your girl (or boy)friend. I hope that phenomenon disappears fast, it's dangerous.

✨pencilears✨6d ago

@randulo @bewilderbeast23 as an artist, it makes me sad that so many people decide that instead of just giving it a try, and making some stick figures, or a photo collage, for their projects, people turn to ai.

AI makes hyper-polished images with bad bones. It's charmless, and it lacks to heart of outsider art. It also signals that whatever is inside is also likely to be slop.

@randulo
The term “AI” is in itself scammy, so unyone using that either doesn’t know or care about. How is that supposed to create any positive expectation for an “AI-powered” product?

(Also your on Mastodon, redo this poll on X to get the opposite result. )

@randulo
I actually mean it: There have been companies building basien filtering techniques for decades and now their suddenly big into selling “artificial intelligence” while changing literally nothing about their product.

(“Yeah, but the customer likes to hear that!” )

toadjaune Mar 16

@randulo when I see a service boasting "AI-powered", my gut reaction is "that's probably not a good integration in your product"

Like, are you advertising your fork to be steel-powered ? Anything to be electricity-powered ? Do you advertise the database technology or the web framework your website uses ?

As a user, it shouldn't matter what technology you use to solve my problem ; only how well you solve it.

I understand that's not how marketing works in the current hype, but still :/