Just heard this today - co worker used an LLM to find him some shoes that fit. Basically prompted it to find specific shoes that fit wider/narrower feet and it just scraped reviews and told him what to get. I guess it worked perfectly for him.
I hate this sort of thing - however this is why normies love LLM’s. It’s going to be the new way every single person uses the internet. Hell, on a new win 11 install the first thing that comes up is copilot saying “hey use me i’m better than google!!”
Frustrating.
I’m a student, I’ve strictly removed myself from this fucked up story. I’ll be it, in my CS class with about 125 student, I’ll say 87℅ of them use chatGPT, probably even more. It’s easy to see that almost everyone in the class cheats, I spend about 5 days on a project or lab, they spend only 1 day. Its not that they’re good at CS, this is after all an “introductory” CS class, and at the moment were learning data structures. Everyone hates data structures, and the people I talked to said “yea I spent a day on the linked list lab and got 100” it is so rare for me to get a 100 in this class, and I spent 5 days on that lab.
I’ve completely removed myself from using chatGPT and other LLM’s. for fuck sake, I’m using a query based search engine called marginalia search, because even the internet has been fucked with unreliable information.
I love it because now I don’t have everything at my fingertips, I do have a few things with the search engine, but you have to conserve the words that you use and not everything will pop up. For example, You can’t just search “how to concatinate numbers in c++” you need to say “string concatenation c++” since you’re using too many keywords
Because of this, I’ve started checking out library books from my university, and what’s so funny is that the books I checkout aren’t due for months in advance because no one checks out books anymore. I got a book on C/C++ reference guide and it isn’t due till January of next year.
You are my spirit animal. Id hire you just based on this comment.
Ok, but how much are people willing to pay an “AI” to find sneakers?
How long can “AI” grifters dump money/resources into these free services?
If “normal people” had to pay the actual costs, I’m sure that many of them would look for their own sneakers.
Personally I don’t need/want a machine to pick my shoes for me in the first place.
Anyway I guess my wider point is that people will stop using “AI” so much when they actually have to pay for it.
I have found no use for trivial stuff as I don’t trust what it outputs. If I have to verify its answer, I might as well just research it on my own, it’s literally more work to ask and research than to just research
At work, the only use I have found is to provide fake data so I can run some tests as I work on confidential stuff I cannot use directly. For example, they other day I asked for 30 super hero name, last name, gender and DOB table just to pick from. I could easily do it by hand as it does not have to be accurate at all, but it was faster to prompt than to just randomly type and I did not care if it missed the prompt (very rare scenario IMO)
Sponsored search results suck, but sponsored LLM results are gonna be wild.
LLMs are good at templates or starting points for standard documents or communications and coding examples
BUT … you have to double check every single word
This happens because search engines have become worse and worse over the years. Unless you’ve installed adblockers or have a pi-hole. Not to mention that many search results Google returns are just AI generated websites. And the average person isn’t going to pay for Kagi to get a better search engine.
Enshittification squared. Create a service that customers come to rely on. Then turn the service into shit to squeeze more profit out of it. Then create a new service that replicates the functionality of the old service customers relied on. Then enshittify that. And so on.
Yes. That is how the internet will be used, to a significant degree. Even today AI represents an extremely powerful and astonishingly human-adapted user interface.
The internet brought a vast quantity of knowledge together and made it accessible to anyone, in theory. In practice you need arcane knowledge to get what you want. You need to wiggle the mouse just so, need to know the abstract structure of the internet, the peculiarities of search terms, … it’s eminently doable but it’s not natural or intuitive. You must be taught how to use it.
If you put a medieval Tamil farmer in a room with a ChatGPT audio interface they could use it and have access to all of that internet knowledge.
I understand a lot of the backlash against AI but I don’t get hating on it because of how good of an interface it makes.
Yeah, and how does that Tamil farmer fact check their black box audio interface when it tells them to spray Roundup on their potatoes, or warns them to buy bottled water because their Hindu-hating Muslim neighbors have poisoned their well, or any other garbage it’s been deliberately or accidentally poisoned with?
One of the huge weaknesses of AI as a user interface is that you have to go outside the interface to verify what it tells you. If I search for information about a disease using a search engine, and I find an .edu website discussing the results of double blind scientific studies of treatments for a disease, and a site full of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and supplement ads telling me about THE SECRET CURE DOCTORS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW, I can compare the credibility of those two sources. If I ask ChatGPT for information about a disease, and it recommends a particular treatment protocol, I don’t know where it’s getting its information or how reliable it is. Even if it gives me some citations, I have to check its citations anyway, because I don’t know whether they’re reliable sources, unreliable sources, or hallucinations that don’t exist at all.
And people who trust their LLM and don’t check its sources end up poisoning themselves when it tells them to mix bleach and vinegar to clean their bathrooms.
If LLMS were being implemented as a new interface to gather information - as a tool to enhance human cognition rather than supplant, monitor, and control it - I would have a lot fewer problems with them.
Why would anybody hate on endless free CPU cycles? It’s like handing out candy. Just gotta keep that “investor” cash flowing…
Unfortunately youre right. If it wasn’t completely owned by massive corps pushing techo-facist ideology and mass surveillance, i could maybe see it as a positive thing. But it will not be used for good in the long run.
Right. So that is what we need to change.
Around me ppl use LLM for pretty much any question they cannot answer, ranging from tech support to life advice.
For free? That won’t last forever.
I’ve been moderating tech conferences for a couple of years now and this is the use case case that’s been bubbling up the most recently. A lot of “this is the future of how we will interact with the web” or “let’s ditch having to search for things ourselves, let’s just ask the propmt to give us the answer”.
I see a lot of frontend developers promoting things like LangFlow to “push UI/UX into the future”.
These people are so clueless about how capitalism works. There will be an entire industry built around brands manipulating LLMs so their products are chosen. It will be like SEO x 1000
I keep trying to explain this to people and tell them to quit using it and use their brains, but nope. Truly people are dumber today than ever.
I spend significantly more time keeping AI at bay than using it.
- It is not good enough to write code at the expertise level I’m usually required to work at. I’ve spent more time fixing generated code than it would have taken me to write it from scratch.
- It hallucinates too much for me to trust any information provided by one
- Security of AI companies is about the same as IoT companies with the difference being that if IoT leaks my data it’s going to be incompetence and not malice - I don’t trust AI with any of my local data.
- AI agents require to be given even more access and permissions and that’s just not happening.
- I contact support when I’ve exhausted what I can do myself and as a result AI chatbots are an annoying obstacle that can’t help me and I have to waste my time going through to reach a person that actually has power to help me
What? As a person with wide feet, there are sizes that are specifically made for wide feet. This isn’t anything they couldn’t have learned from a normal search engine.
Are you kidding? Normies would love nothing than to never learn how to do anything ever again and have all their needs catered to them
Windows won’t even have a keyboard in 5 years, you’ll have to call a service team for that. How antiquated! We will all speak to “computer” like Star Trek!
Windows won’t even have a keyboard in 5 years… We will all speak to “computer” like Star Trek!
It’s called Alexa and it’s extremely mediocre.
My mother is constantly googling things and reading me the AI overview. And I know LLMs make shit up all the time, and I don’t want AI hallucinations to infect my brain and slowly fuck up my worldview. So I always have to drop everything and go confirm the claims from the AI overview. And I’ve caught plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations. (One I remember: she googled for when the East Wing of the White House was originally built and the AI overview told her the year of a major renovation, claiming it was the year it was built, but it had been built much earlier.)
my friend recently told me she was frustrated that it didn’t find underground burning man type things in brooklyn that are kid friendly….
i can’t get her to understand how stupid it is to expect that to work.
i once tried to use it to find dog beaches in california and it sucked at that too (because a different friend wanted to).
i think it might be worse at finding real life practical things than anything else.LLMs can be useful in some limited contexts and when you are aware that they aren’t magic. They also shouldn’t be relied upon for anything super important.
Personally I’ve found utility in LLMs for non-critical stuff, like writing scripts for a video game I’ve been playing where it can comb through the scripting documentation and spit out answers to requests much faster than I could read and write my own script.
I never understood how people order shoes online except if they already have that pair. I go to a real-world shop and try 10 pairs and honestly, 8 of them aren’t so great. I wouldn’t know how that works with Amazon or an AI.
I’d never buy any kind of clothing online. I’m not especially vain, I don’t even wear makeup, but if I can’t tell how it’s going to feel and look on my body, why would I trust it?
most shoe sizes are the same. i wear 11.5. i’ve been wearing it for 20 years and probably had 100s of shoes of that size.
only time i ever have a different shoe size is for leather dress shoes or boots. which are typically sized down from a standard shoe size.
yeah, I’d say size is about right. not entirely, I have shoes plus or minus half a size, especially sport shoes (I don’t own more than one pair of dress shoes). And some brands are off, though they seem to be consistent with it. But mostly size works out for me as well. They seem to do a good job with that number. I meant more generally how they fit. They’d be all the right size and I’ll try them and walk around the aisles in the shop and some shoes are just way more comfortable to walk in than others.
I just got a pair of Adidas on the Costco website for $16.76. I took a gamble and they are NICE. I can’t believe I got that deal. I’ll chance it at that cost.
