Mastodawn

AkaSci 🛰️4d ago

Check out this insightful article by Ed Zitron about "how LLMs are the perfect grift to exploit an economy dominated by do-nothing managers and executives disconnected from any real work, and how the facade is crumbling as companies pay the true cost of AI."

- AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot.
- LLMs Are Built To Coddle Losers
- The AI Industry Is A Grifting Machine
🤔
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
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Revenge of The Business Idiot

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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Pete Muller 4d ago

Ed Zitron:

"LLMs impress the writers who do not want to write, the coders who don’t want to code, the researchers who don’t want to research, and the lawyers that don’t want to actually understand case law. Those that desperately tell you how powerful AI is and that you simply must use it are looking for you to validate their own laziness or distaste for effort, and those who are impressed with LLMs’ outputs tend to be people with low standards."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
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Revenge of The Business Idiot

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

AkaSci 🛰️4d ago

More from Ed Zitron:

"While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable.

I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
3/n

Revenge of The Business Idiot

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

AkaSci 🛰️4d ago

More from Ed Zitron:

"The aggression with which AI boosters and execs act toward those who aren’t impressed suggests a genuine intellectual and moral weakness. Nobody who’s this insistent, aggressive and violative with their language of “it’s here and if you don’t adopt it you’re stupid and dead” has ever been right about anything. Nobody this desperate, insistent and forceful has ever had good intentions, good vibes or brought good omens — they are always bearers of some kind of con."

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AkaSci 🛰️4d ago

We don't have to agree with everything in Ed Zitron's insightful essay but it is definitely thought-provoking and it challenges conventional thinking on AI.

"I see LLMs as a violation of everything that great computing stands for.

It is inefficient, power-intensive, environmentally destructive, and inherently sold based on things that it might do, providing far more value to scam artists and con men than it does to its end users."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
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AkaSci 🛰️4d ago

"Edward Benjamin Zitron (born 1986) is an English author, podcaster, and public relations specialist.

He is a critic of the technology industry, particularly of artificial intelligence companies and the generative artificial intelligence boom of the 2020s. He hosts the Better Offline podcast, and writes the Where's Your Ed At newsletter.

Ed lives and works out of Las Vegas, Nevada, as well as NYC."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Zitron
https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
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Ed Zitron - Wikipedia

Apply The Ripley Doctrine!4d ago

> We don't have to agree with everything in Ed Zitron's insightful essay

Why not? For fear of annoying the new AI idols or their followers?

Riley S. Faelan 4d ago

@glitzersachen
@AkaSci

Somebody's got to be the contrarian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ

Life Of Brian - "You are all individuals"

YouTube

Apply The Ripley Doctrine!4d ago

Note sure how this is the answer to my question...

I originally asked, because this pressure, to not position yourselves against AI figures (rightfully) so large in Ed Zitron's essay.

We should have more courage. If we cannot formulate any opposition of our own, we should at least wholeheartedly applaud those who do, and not keep a critical distance.

AI as sold by the grifters is an existential threat. That it doesn't work, doesn't matter, it's still poison to human societies.

Vis-a-vis such a threat, an ambiguous opinion is (sorry) treason. People are either for humankind of for the grifters. There is no middle ground any more[1].

[1] Not my fault. The propagandists of the grift have heated up --- by lies and disingenuous propaganda --- any discourse around it to an extent that a reasoned argument is NOT POSSIBLE.

The only answer to “it’s here and if you don’t adopt it you’re stupid and dead” can be: Ok, if you play it like this, you can get nuked (from orbit). We can also break rules (of societal discourse).

In the end the discourse has already been killed by the pro-AI faction. No need to pretend we are still carefully weighting pro and contra in a reasoned discussion.

The enemy is already setting fire to our house. The question whether this is a war is not an open one.

Nicolas Dufour 4d ago

@AkaSci I'm starting to understand why this essay is so bitter : that sentence "I deeply love technology, and feel it made me the person I am today" says everything.

@AkaSci desperate and aggressive. Hmm.

teledyn 𓂀 4d ago

Sane people do not torch their own home to steal from others. IMHO

Tito Swineflu 4d ago

@AkaSci There's such a huge disconnect between those who actually do things and those who manage. I can't imagine what the end game is. Just some bro in a room by himself, pumping his fist in the air as an army of bots "engages" with his "product" while the rest of humanity shuffles around a desolate wasteland scavenging what resources they can find?

Frank Shinneman 4d ago

@AkaSci
I’m so old that I remember when these exact statements were made about the (at the time) new 4-Function calculators! When Japan dominated their production, the people so feared their accuracy that banks commissioned models built into an abacus and required tellers to visibly confirm the calculation in sight of the customers.

CMDR Yojimbosan 🅅⁂4d ago

@fshinneman @AkaSci I mean at one level, yeah people are going to be suspicious of change, especially changes that are opaque to inspection.

But at the other level, using electronics to perform maths is not really the same as presenting statistically average word selection as if it were actually representing "thought" and "understanding".

As was once said, "Anyone who says differently is selling something"

Annika Backstrom 4d ago

@fshinneman @AkaSci Who could forget the standard calculator disclaimer, "Calculators are based on AI and can make mistakes. Please verify all output."

Jargoggles 4d ago

@annika @fshinneman @AkaSci
And let's not forget how they needed to be hooked up to a diesel generator and guzzled gallons of water.

William B Peckham 3d ago

@annika @fshinneman @AkaSci I will run that on my abacus and double check that calculator. (is it clear yet that AI stands for Automated Incompetence?)

Frank Shinneman 4d ago

@AkaSci No fan of overblown AI but the arguments against dont benefit from fear mongering or adhominem attacks. There are plenty of economic and social justice facts that are very valid.

Florian Ledermann 4d ago

@AkaSci
Regrettably, we have made precisely these people our bosses, and our bosses' bosses, consistently for the last 25 years 🤷‍♀️
(in the grand scheme of things, exceptions apply)

MidgePhoto 4d ago

@AkaSci #DouglasAdams wrote in the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul or the other of that pair of #SciFi books that a tech bro became rich by realising that people who wanted #decision #support software wanted an argument constructed that seemed to support a decision they had already made.

@AkaSci LLM (and similar) results are at best, slightly worse than mediocre. But there are plenty of people who are happy with (or don't recognize) sub-mediocrity as long as it's fast and cheap.

Simon Bitdiddle 4d ago

I've had a theory for a while that this is just the near end-state of Boardroom Solipsism: Meetings between people who have little to no exposure to what's going on and establish a communal delusion and carry that to other meetings, spreading it across the company.

Powerpoints become the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cavern, showing a reality sculpted to a narrative that everyone agrees on except objective reality.

Moritz Negwer 3d ago

@simon_bitdiddle @AkaSci "boardroom solipsism" is good!

rotsaruckz63 3d ago

@AkaSci well said, former programmer here, I find that the only people impressed by AI (idiot assistant) outputs are low IQ, and lazy (as shit) individuals.