Part of me wants to share my reasons against AI at work. Some possible reasons I’m thinking of sharing are cooking the planet, you don’t know when it is hallucinating so how do you trust it, critical thinking rot.

No boss is going to be persuaded by “cooking the planet”. Nor do they care about critical thinking rot.

But the hallucinations? That they’ll care about.

Pick something non work-related that your boss is an expert in. Engage the AI in that something until it generates a whole bunch of hallucinations. (My favourite thing is to have an AI hallucinate bands that don’t exist, albums that don’t exist, songs that don’t exist, lyrics that don’t exist, etc.: All of which is trivial to verify and prove wrong.)

Here. I just generated this conversation in Deepseek for you to show you how easy it is to get an AI to hallucinate. I just asked a question about an almost completely non-existent concept (“inukpunk”) and got it bloviating a bunch of idiocy before catching it with the fact that what it claims is a thriving literary movement doesn’t actually exist.

Note: I just asked it a three-word question and it created from whole cloth a breathtaking amount of text on a subject that doesn’t exist.

My boss was quickly convinced against AI when he tried to introduce it into our workflow by sitting down with a user to “guide” their use of AI to “help” their work and then seeing how, even with his “guidance” it was almost impossible to get something useful out of it. When he was tinkering with it to see if it was plausible, he didn’t account for the time spent correcting the never-ending stream of errors (assuming it was part of the learning curve) but once seeing it in use he realized how not only did it add little to the abilities of the workers, it actively detracted from their productivity.

So provide something similar. Record a session with your boss’ AI of choice. Make a note of time and place of each failure. A count of corrections and how long it took to spot the mistake to correct it in the first place. Print this out, ideally with handwritten annotations of each error and time. Put that on his desk.

And keep doing that.

Time after time after time.

People actually doing something instead of raging on social media to “raise awareness”. People actually engaging the supposed beneficiaries of their (usually middle-class white) largesse. People less interested in labelling and finger-pointing and more interested in getting out there, getting their hands dirty, and helping.

Keep talking that way if that’s what helps you be happy with yourself when looking in a mirror.

The truth is that degenerative AI has no useful business model, is quite literally burning up the planet to feed having no viable business model, is killing economies while it has no useful business model, and is in general dumbing down the world, all while having no prospects for ever being a viable business.

I’m glad that your story about your dog is enough for you to burn down the planet with a clear conscience.

Buh-bye.

Do you want me to list the techbrodude technologies that were “not going anywhere” in past decades that have effectively died outside of tiny die-hard communities still living a delusion?

Remember when the Metaverse was the next great thing that wasn’t going anywhere? Remember when cryptocurrency was going to wipe out banking forevermore? Remember when NFTs were going to revolutionize artists getting paid for their work? Segway or its somehow-lamer cousin “hoverboards”? Augmented Reality? 3D TVs? Theranos? Google Wave?

Hell, just go visit the Google Graveyard for a list of “hot” technologies that withered and died on the vine. (And quite a few lame technologies that shouldn’t have ever even been on the vine.)

Remember all that?

But this time the techbrodudes have it right, despite there not being a viable business model; despite every AI vendor in the world burning through money faster than dumping that same cash into a forest fire. It’s not going anywhere!

Every grift has two parties: the grifter and the sucker. You’re not the former.

See to me, Lemmy at its most left barely qualifies as left wing from what I see.

I’ve seen a lot of people cosplaying as leftists here, but prick an American leftist and they typically bleed a fascist.

Whose definition of “leftist”?

The Communist Party of China is throwing a whole lot of money at AI in its various forms integrating it into all kinds of services. They’re not against it. They’re against the willy-nilly shoving of it into everything without any thought given to its negatives. Is that leftist enough for you?

Or do you mean the faux-left of the USA (which is, on its most extreme end a, moderate centre-left in sane parts of the world)? If that’s the “leftists” you mean, I’d guess it’s largely based on (focusing here on LLMbeciles and other popular degenerative AI forms):

1. The environmental disaster (in terms of energy used to train and operate, as well as the water costs) that the rapacious capitalists cause with their grossly inefficient LLMbecile implementations.
2. Most artists, being educated more than the average, tend to lean left and the main applications of degenerative AI is aimed straight at them.
3. The mass theft of human culture from around the world to feed the machines, only to have them churn out shit writing, shit pictures, shit music, shit videos, etc.
4. The very obvious fact that the technology cannot ever actually be profitable; it’s clearly a pump and dump stock scheme that’s sucking money away from actually productive elements of society to line the pockets of grifting billionaires.
5. The general pairing of LLMbeciles and other degenerative AI forms with techbrodude “consent, what’s that?” bullshit. It gets crammed into places nobody wants it, there’s no plausible way to turn it off (Microsoft…), there’s no way to be sure it has been turned off when you try (techbrodudes are prone to being lying sacks of shit).

In general, “leftists” don’t like degenerative AI because they’re on the whole better-educated than “rightists” and thus know shit like the points I brought up … among dozens of others. And they’re smart enough to know that if crony-capitalists are pushing it as the greatest thing since sliced bread it’s probably bad for humanity.

Or do you genuinely believe people like Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, or Zuckerberg, or … are interested in humanity?

Get rid of votes and worthless Internet Points and a lot of that would vanish. Of all the things to copy from Reddit and Twitter and their ilk, voting was the dumbest thing that Lemmy copied.

The singular of data is not anecdote.

For every claim people make of how “Gen AI saved my <insert whatever>” you can find a dozen stories of people being actively harmed by Gen AI.

Stopped watch and all that jazz.

When generative AI was first taking off, I saw it as something that could empower regular people to do things that they otherwise could not afford to.

Except, of course, you aren’t doing anything. You are no more writing, making music, or producing art than is an art director at an ad agency is. You’re telling something else to make (really shitty) art on your behalf.

Organize your community and talk to your grocers if they’re not complying with the national movement to sever ties with American product. Pit the grocers one against the other.

My friends in Ottawa are reporting Made in Canada tags everywhere, including Canadian-sourced produce. My parents in Winnipeg are reporting the same. A friend in Calgary is saying it’s surprisingly easy to get non-American products now. I don’t know where you are, but it’s definitely a growing and widespread movement over most of Canada.

They are, indeed, the USA of apples. Tasteless and an utter disappointment.

The 51st state stuff. The implied threat of military takeover. The disrespect to our elected officials. The ludicrous tariffs. The endlessly toxic right wing shitfuckery coming across the border in endless waves.

What’s not to like?

I was 12 or 13 when I first encountered this story and my takeaway from it was that engineers are kind of shit at their jobs.

Let’s assume for a moment that the constraints are plausible (they’re not, as Zron pointed out): given this overwhelming lean toward unforgiving harsh reality … why were there no security checks, etc. in place to deal with the inevitable occurrences when someone would be in a place they’re not supposed to be upon launch? Good engineers plan for failures of systems, not just their presence. If those rockets are such utter and complete death traps, why was the security around them so lackadaisical? The engineers who set up that system probably also set up a 15cm wide stairway up 150m to get to the rocket without providing guide rails.

Tea for me, but otherwise … uh … the 18 book pile next to my right elbow has room for roughly two more books of the same average thickness before it becomes a second pile.

0-fee CUs are approaching unicorn status. I’m jealous! :D

So kind of like Blackadder but with a whiny toddler voice instead of Brian Blessed’s incredible booming voice?

To me this sounds like an argument against a capitalist-focused implementation of payment systems. Ones in which banks design the system, run the system, and take fees from the system at their leisure. (Interac, for example, takes fees too.)

What you need is a humane cashless payment system. One that doesn’t lock out poor folk and charge ridiculous fees to both vendors and customers.

Where I live there are two major cashless payment systems and they are so ubiquitous that I haven’t seen cash used in anger in over a decade. Indeed the last time I had local cash in my hand at all was last summer when I needed it to go to Canada, getting it exchanged for CAD on entry and then having to suffer through carrying around wads of cash, having an increasingly heavy and bulgy coin bag, all so I could do things that here would be the quick scan of a QR code or even just waving my phone in the general vicinity of a terminal. (Note: I saw the cash, carried the cash, but didn’t use it here at all. I had it only to use in Canada. While still here the rest of my transactions were done the civilized way.)

It was quite the reverse culture shock, let me tell you.

I said that the systems here were ubiquitous. How ubiquitous you might ask? Street vendors with food carts use it. Small hole-in-the-wall restaurants and shops use them. Buskers use them: you just go up to the busker, look around for the QR code, scan it, and pay. No throwing change or bills.

So what are the fees like?

Most people will never see a fee. The one I use most, for example:

• I can withdraw up to the equivalent of about CA$4000 per month without a fee. (In local terms that’s a ludicrous amount of money. If you’ve got the kind of money where you can routinely do this, you’re well into “fuck off money” territory.) Anything over that limit is charged the onerous fee of 0.1%. (No, that’s not a typo.)
• Note: that’s withdraw. Paying for goods and services within the system are free, no cap.
• P2P transfers (end-user to end-user, not business) are capped to about that same CA$4000 per year and anything over that limit is charged that same 0.1%.
• On the commercial side, the transaction fee is typically around 0.6% per transaction.

It is interesting to note that I know all of these fees because they’re clearly explained on my payment provider’s terms of service and web site. (I also know all the fees from both sides on international transactions, but that’s out of scope since I don’t use this system for international purchases.) Now try to get a complete picture of the fees you pay when using Interac. Interac itself is refreshingly open about its fee structure, but getting the fee structure out of a bank without first opening an appropriate account and being a customer is an adventure and a half.

What?! A techbrodude firm that doesn’t care about things like “privacy” or “consent” or any other such things that get in the way of being rapacious plunderers?!

SAY IT AIN’T SO!

So you have to keep more money on premises until it’s worth depositing, thus increasing your exposure should you get robbed. (And what planet are you on where only customers get robbed, not stores? I want to live there.)

Handling cash has costs and risks both. A decent online payment system (by which I mean not credit cards since those are ludicrously expensive!) cuts back on both.