To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
Nah, not for mosy people. I think that’s actually more common with people who use local models (maybe that’s what you were saying though?). My, albeit few, interractions with “normal” people have been pretty scary with how much they use AI in many ways. Most of my friends are very tech savvy and my family goes to me about stuff like this so they don’t use any either (because I’ve taught them, not just told, how bad and dangerous it can be). It’s not very often I talk with anyone else about this but, as said, the times I have it’s been real scary.
Doesn’t help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.
Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of “don’t be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them” that customization isn’t making a damn agent, it’s adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!
I’ve been “adjusting the prompt and saving changes” with Claude code for the past 9 months (it’s not ready to have a baby yet), it has been steadily improving over those months, a lot of that seems to be in the models and harnesses provided by Anthropic, but not a small part of it is the customization of the prompt to do what I want the first time instead of making me redirect it constantly.
Just the other day I was pissed off. My dad missed some deadline to request money from the government. I told him to call them, they might be able to do something anyways. He was like “nah, they’ll never do that, why would they have a deadline if they do it after the deadline yadayada”
Then a few days later he told me “oh that gpt thing told me to just try, I might be lucky and they pay out even after the deadline, he was very reassuring, so I’ll try calling them!”
Man chatgpt would fucking tell you to try your luck if you’re 12 years over the deadline, but god forbid your son tells you the exact same thing and you even consider calling them lol
There was some research recently that showed the same thing. People who are “dug in” on a topic, usually a political topic, will shut down when a person tries to persuade them of an alternative, but are much more open to hear the same arguments from AI and actually reconsider their position.
I believe this is a big reason why X-Ai was so important for conservatives to get off of the ground, they were afraid all the crazy would start wearing off if people asked the “woke” models for the truth.
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
Same, it’s a tool everyone will use one day, it’s just bad today.
Remember the first mobile phones? Sucked dirt, and we’re stupidly expensive. Then they got cheaper and better, today they almost give them away and the charge lasts a week and you can phone almost anywhere on the planet.
I bet you can make a cheap “AI” chip for using the trained model, it seems the training is the ruinous thing today.
Remember when they predicted heavier than air flight to be centuries in the future just the week before the wright brothers flew? Me neither I wasn’t born then, but it’s an interesting example IMO.
The difference here is that a cheap AI chip won’t fix the fundamental software problems with LLMs. We might reach a point where they can produce output faster, but as long as what’s actually going on is probabilistic next-token prediction in a static vector database, that just means faster mistakes as well.
There’s an odd psychosis going around where people become convinced that actual AGI can be derived from this technology. People who should know better just shut their brains off when it comes to token prediction, because they’ve had very compelling “conversations” with the predictor. They forget that the actual model is static, has no internal state, and doesn’t even “remember” what you’ve said to it.
What it has is a context window, and your entire conversational history - both what you’ve said and how it has responded - gets shoved into that window when you interact with it. (Or depending on the chatbot harness, saved in “memory” files that it can retrieve when the context contents indicate that would be useful.)
That’s why the bots seem so weirdly forgetful one moment and like they’ve got photographic memories the next. Stuff that is in the context window and has its “attention” will influence the tokens it produces, but whether or not the right things are in the context window and it’s including them in the token prediction is a crapshoot.
I know right. “AGI” !!! Nah that won’t happen tomorrow Kevin.
But with thousands of the smartest engineers and researchers working on it, we might get a smarter AI. I mean the human brain thinks in similar ways. +a lot of other stuff of course, but maybe that stuff can be emulated, simulated, for “the next step” forward (still no agi lol).
Yeah “AI” stuff gets a lot of hate around here but I think it works pretty well as a tool for things like information gathering and analysis. Wouldn’t trust it to go off taking actions by itself either though.
It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
And this argument about different definitions is fundamentally dishonest under a comment that say broadly we don’t like AI. I have my definitions of interesting, useful and fun. But if I would make a post about, I would be torn apart here, lol.
If I’m trying to fasten something, and the screwdriver fucks up half the time, then yeah I’m going to nail it together instead. Or use glue, or anything but an unreliable screwdriver.
Thats the thing. AI doesn’t fuck up all the time and has gotten genuinely useful for some things in the last months.
But a huge amount of you doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, generating an insufferable, ignorant circlejerk, drowning out every interesting discussion you can have about this topic.
That is what people have said, every day, on repeat, for the last three years. Explain why it is better now instead of three months ago, when it was definitely not fucking up all the time and then I will copypaste that back to you for what was said three months ago for the same question.
Which standards are you gonna hold it to? The benchmarking involves using standardized testing, but they typically just feed those questions into the testing data, so the tests have to be constantly updated, and when they are, you will not be surprised to learn that the machines goes back to fucking up the answers all the time.
Experts in their fields do not use this shit because it is wrong on the things they know, but, oh wow, it must be totally right about the things I don’t know anything about? Every time.
If I had an employee that fucked up as often and confidently as LLMs do, I would terminate their employment. I don’t have the time or patience to redo all their work because I can’t trust them. If a brand had quality issues at as high a rate as LLM output, I would avoid buying anything related to that brand.
A human being or company can make some amount of mistakes and that’s completely understandable, and I think it’s perfectly fair to hold LLMs to that standard. That said, with a human being I can stress how important some task is and they don’t double or triple check their when it is that important, I can not and will not trust them. If I tell a company “hey this is important to me”, they will usually make extra effort to make sure it’s correct, and if they fail to do so, a decent company will make an extra effort to make things right. An LLM will offer an empty apology and spew more bullshit at me that I still have to verify.
The fact that AI gets things right often enough for you is great. Maybe I have higher standards, maybe I need higher quality output, or maybe I have trust issues. Everyone has a different threshold. Just because yours is much different than the people here doesn’t mean their opinions are invalid, and the way you dismiss everyone’s opinions and insist that it’s good enough makes you seem just as insufferable and ignorant as you accuse others of being.
The fact that LLM output has improved is great, but it is still so far from meeting much less exceeding my threshold that it’s beyond frustrating to keep being told over and over that “no bro, it’s good now”. I’ve been hearing that for over two years and it’s still not close to where I would trust it to answer questions, much less perform actions on my computer with access to my personal data.
You need to learn that some people are different than you and understand where they’re coming from if you want to have an “interesting discussion… about this topic”, rather than getting frustrated that people don’t agree with you and rage quitting.
Of course it is, I also listen to music other times when I don’t treat it as a tool, but for pleasure and entertainment. But I also use it at times only as a tool, that’s all.
So you don’t see any merit in current AI at all? Do you thin it will vanish like the blockchain fad?
I see plenty of merit in AI. AI has already been used to do really meaningful things for humans, such as in medicine, mathematics, etc, lots of stuff in the research fields and stuff.
But it’s very important to remember that the more work we offload to robots, the worse we’ll become at doing that work ourselves. Neural pathways deteriorate when not used. And I don’t want to become an expert in code review, because I don’t think that’s fun. I want to remain an expert in producing code. And when AI does the reviewing part, too, what the fuck am I left with? Being some kind of DevOp, orchestrating the agents of my laptop? That’s not fun for me.
Maybe in the future AI will actually be able to do quality code and quality software development methods the entire way from idea to production, but I want to code. I am a software engineer. It’s what I was trained to do, and it’s my craft.
It’s like asking someone who is into pottery for a living and has a small business where they do everything by hand, to give that up in order to make cheap ceramic/porcelain plates with no ornamentation, no soul, in a factory. They wouldn’t be interested. That’s me.
I think AI is like being given an automatic screwdriver with the speed maxed to shit. If you pay super close attention, you might be able to do things faster, with hypervigilance and expert knowledge. In most cases, though, you won’t. Congratulations, you have screwed in 100 screws, mostly incorrectly and stripped, when everyone else did 30, and you have fucked over the people who have to fix your shit.
I think AI agents are a lot like a chainsaw - they can save you a lot of time vs other tools for the same job, but… you can also screw up with them rather easily.
Fortunately, I just write software with LLM agents, if it comes out badly I can start over with nothing lost but time. My experience of the last few months has been: it actually writes some pretty good software, if you know anything about writing good software with teams of people and apply that knowledge to managing the LLM agents. If you’re just some guy who doesn’t really know how to write software, LLM agents aren’t always going to save you from yourself, just like a chainsaw won’t.
I’ve had Gemini downright lie or completely fuck up before and it’s not a rare occurrence. That means you have to verify everything anyway and hell at that point maybe you should have just looked it up yourself.
Repeat for months on end. It is always wrong in different ways. It even finds new and unique ways to be wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Every time.
Personally, I just think the dipshits who use LLMs are just fucking morons that don’t realize it’s wrong, or they wouldn’t use it because it is still shit. But, fuck me for not wanting to use the planet-destroying technology that lies for pennies.
At first I was bit mad to be called a dipshit, but hey, what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed. Lol, you’re right of course. It’s just ChatGPT 3.5 that finds all those bugs in the Linux kernel.
You just don’t know, don’t you. You probably even don’t know the difference between a chatbot and an Agent. All you know is empty phrases and hyperbolic statements. You know, it’s fine. Get your upvotes from your
ignorant, uninformed circlejerk and yell at the clouds. Good luck.
Those bugs that generative AI found in Linux were some old bugs that, and I cannot stress this enough, required elevated access to your system and only crashed the machine. Basically, it wasn’t found because it never actually affected anybody, but sure, take your win. You were lacking them.
And hey man, if you caught some strays on that comment, maybe consider going outside. There are people out there that could enjoy being around you if you stopped talking about AI! They are rather nice because they typically like other people and don’t call them Luddites for not wanting to kill the planet tp avoid writing an email.
But, sure, let’s play the dumbfuck game where AI proponents use their definitions to pretend that a chatbot (a thing that doesn’t really matter to LLMs in general since they’ve existed for fucking decades) and an agent (basically the same shit as an LLM but directed) are things that truly matter in the discourse. They don’t. People that don’t want their brain rotted from the inside out just hate AI. Not wanting to turn your brain off seems pretty fucking normal to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you because the thoughts in your head are a nightmare to experience.
My issue is that people have been saying “yeah, it’s a bit iffy, but it’ll get better” since 2022. It’s been four years. When is it actually gonna get better… enough?
Based on my understanding of the underlying tech, it will always have some level of making shit up. That, combined with the fact that all of these companies are spending more money running data centers than they have coming in, implies to me that this tech (at least in the current form of cloud-based chatbots) isn’t staying around long-term. No one is actually making money off of it except the hardware vendors. None of these AI companies are what my grandpa would’ve called a “going concern.” So I haven’t felt much desire to get into it.
I typically like new technology as it comes out, but I haven’t found LLM’s to be very impressive or inspiring.
„This sub-par product of an evil mega corporation that uses their market power to shove this product down everyone’s throat is all I’m willing to tolerate.“
As bad as Antrophic and openAI are, their product is better and they don’t embed it into phones and search engines. (Not saying they wouldnt‘t if they have the chance, but they haven’t)
It makes sense. I’m not spending a dime… I’m not signing up and giving my credentials out to any other AI … I already have Google . Gemini is good enough for the things I look up monus occasionally being dead wrong which all of them can do. I don’t make stupid memes or videos.
However I also have never spent a dime on AI, and I don’t use Gemini. I run Qwen3.6 on my graphics card, or use opencodes free tier. Deepseek-v4- flash is pretty good.
I’ve read a comment recently that Googles local Gemma models hallucinate less than Gemini, but I don’t know if that’s true, since I hardly use Gemma and Gemini not at all.
I recommend downloading some local models and a harness like pi or opencode if you want to play around an have the hardware for it.
Tech savvy groups have always included a significant amount of well established people unhappy with how technology is being implemented or used - who then, yes, yell at clouds. Hell, a lot of us still literally yell about the Cloud.
Paraphrasing a management quote I found a few decades ago - if the engineers aren’t complaining about something, it’s not because they’re happy. It means they’re complaining where you can’t hear them.
I‘m not fully in favour of LMMs by the way. They have their quirks, to put it mildly and are not suited for everything. I think they’re most effective with with someone who knows how to use them and when not to use them. I’m also highly suspicious against those AI companies and their CEOs.
No, I’ve decided not to use a tool that isn’t fit for purpose. Studies have consistently shown that people think they’re much more productive on LLMs than they actually are, and the side effects of cognitive debt and skill loss aren’t worth the often imaginary productivity gains.
Combine that with the awful financials of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google’s Gemini, and you’ve got the makings of a really nasty situation.
Say I come to depend on Claude Code for all my coding, and build an entire workflow around it. I get used to spending thousands of dollars a month for access, and tell myself it’s worth it for the imaginary productivity gains (although what’s actually happening is that I’m just producing a shit-ton of garbage code no one has any hope of understanding).
Then Anthropic reaches the point where they run out of investor money to spend, and fold because even charging developers like me thousands of dollars doesn’t even begin to cover their costs, and I’m one of their rare customers who are loyal, versus the bulk of developers who use up their free allotments of tokens and then model-hop.
Now what? My workflow is broken, I’ve forgotten how to code, and nothing I’ve produced recently is human-readable.
No thanks. I’m not an old man yelling at clouds, I’m a software developer who can recognize a problem when I see one.
I often wonder as well because being a news reader makes me assume others are also following the news more closely than myself. When I test this theory by talking to people around me, I learn that maybe I’m more alone than I thought.
At least with social media I get to follow the news with all of you, my fellow nerds
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
Yeah. My point though is that’s on purpose. The tools being built are not meant to help workers. It’s meant to replace them. Which it can’t really do. Which is why none of this makes sense and everyone is flailing.
Good job putting to words one of the core issues I’ve had with using LLM chat for work. Stop trying to design an entire fucking system or solution and just answer the damn question I actually asked, by using natural language to search documentation and existing implementations.
I would tell it to only answer exactly what I asked, but sometimes I do get value from it “exploring” on occasion. It’s just so much damn worse with it than my newest junior co-worker who is known on our team for getting hours deep into tangential rabbit holes before coming up for air and asking seemingly nonsequiteur questions.
I read somewhere that teaching people about how LLMs work is way better at protecting them from the harms of LLMs than trying to convince them not to use them.
This would include prompt engineering i guess! Which to be fair i do not know about.
The advantage I perceive with the AI agent vs junior co-workers both going down their respective rabbit holes, the AI agent costs less time and money to get their “in depth report” and you don’t have to kindly explain why it’s off track when it gets horribly distracted by something irrelevant, you can just flush the context and start over.
I do find myself a bit upset when I’m in the middle of a long context development with an LLM agent and that context gets lost for some reason - re-explaining everything from scratch can be exhausting, to avoid having to do that you can actually instruct the agent to create a file explaining to future agents what it “knows” about the discussion at the moment. Some agents are starting to do this automatically like Claude’s MEMORY.md file and similar. Another semi-cool thing is: you can read these files yourself (if you have the patience) and if you see anything in there that the agent “got wrong” you have the opportunity to fix it. Asking a junior colleague to thoroughly explain everything they think they know about a project gets to be a very wearisome endeavor both for the junior and whoever is reviewing their “understanding” of the project.
I’ve seldom been described as a normal person, but in my job, I have to get things right or there are problems for real people. So whatever tools I use have to be reproducible in their results, transparent in how they give their answers, and verifiable. So that precludes LLMs, which are automated bullshit firehoses with opaque, constantly mutable workings.
Those are exactly the properties that should never apply to a system whose output actually matters.
I just had a thought. The people pushing for AI use get fined when the make huge mistakes, basically a speeding ticket. But they’re pushing AI on people that get fired or go to jail if they make a huge mistake, more like A DUI. So they’re saying “use this thing that makes the kind of mistakes that I’d fire you over, and take responsibility of it”.
I use the AI agents to write software which is reproducible in its results, transparent in how it operates and verifiable…
Trust an LLM to switch on a light? No. Trust an LLM to write a diagnostic script and tell me what problems it notices in 3MB of log files, then write another script to patch the problem? Only if I actually understand the problem it finds and how the solution it creates is going to work.
They reduce some tasks that used to take weeks to a single day activity, they are NOT universally applicable.
No reason you can’t use LLMs to write deterministic scripts. Handing off every task to an agent is a crapshoot, but they do help with some tasks. At the minimum - writing regression tests.
Don’t these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?
It’s difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.
To me, it’s not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.
Other employees are so incompetent (you know how incompetent your co workers are) that agents are producing better work and making fewer mistakes than they would on their own. The fact is, for most people, the mistakes it makes are no different than people mistakes.
Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. “All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait…” While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.
When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. “Don’t say anything, and eventually you’ll be put through.”
Yes, I’m a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank’s human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.
(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn’t a complete bust…)
My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks.
I don’t really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don’t use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?
There are loads of reasons normal people aren’t using AI Agents. This article doesn’t give any of the ones I’d think of.
The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don’t understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.
It’s not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they’re not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. “Normal people” accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little “normal people” jobs and “normal people” lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It’s signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.
Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It’s not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it’s still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.
The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don’t like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn’t charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over… well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it’s no secret there’s also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.
Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It’s been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They’re not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with… the charity of the ultra wealthy? That’s nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we’re redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).
I’m not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn’t see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.
And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that “using” something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren’t asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it’s simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they’re not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.
None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren’t reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it’s not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.
It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.
If a scalpel manufacture became 10% (currently AI is at this level) of our total economy but only .006% (percentage of surgeons to population) of people needed them it would be a major problem.
Because everyone is using this ai. They just don’t realize it yet.
If you’re buying from me you’re paying for generative ai and that’s going to be the case for most businesses. I hate yet to meet a business owner not using it. Our small business centers have classes on how to use it.
You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.
Or defer to AI, when you ask them a quesiton that can be simply answered or even googled, that doesnt have a AI results. and ends up with a overcomplicated summary that leads to more questions.
Even before computers I didn’t need, nor want, anyone’s help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human’s independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly “AI” subscription.
At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.
Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.
All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.
Fundamentally, they cost way, way too much to run. LLMs are useful tools (I use them a bit for data analysis and coding help) and the people who use them for that kind of thing might pay the full cost in some form (not as individuals but their companies might). But they’re trying to push them into everything and people who can’t think for themselves and want them to help them write emails and such are not going to foot the bill. Not even close.
I think they’ve realised that forcing universal adoption is the only way that this could work, to get everyone hooked on it then jack up the prices. But regular consumers will never, ever be the ones paying the enormous costs of LLMs. Even companies will start to realise that there is no point paying huge amounts just for everyone to be able to outsource writing emails and basic tasks to LLMs. And short of any huge breakthrough, they are incapable of doing most jobs.
It’s not difficult to understand. This whole AI bubble is just a push to get enough people, a critical mass, over a threshold that they start paying for the usage. The Bubble was waiting for the money to run out which is what built the bubble. The money is running out and the subscriptions are ready for purchase.
Maybe but even there there are limits on how much they will be willing to spend for junior level programming no matter how much of a ship fast fix broken methodology they adopt.
I hold the opinion that if people talk about LLM’s instead of AI they are inherently more understanding of the tool and therefore more qualified to use it.
The edge case is software development, for the bog standard stuff I write at work it probably helps me get work done about 15%-30% faster and with costs of $200-$400 USD a month the math actually works out. At current prices anyway. Also the electricity costs of running open weight models is even cheaper and if there is a pop HW prices may make that an obvious choice too. The worst case IMO would be a slow boil of prices to recoup the unsustainable growth then a slow decline to wherever normal ends up. In that case everyone is left indignant.
They definitely can be useful as a part of a “productivity machine,” for some people. But yeah, they’re not the whole solution. An LLM alone is much less useful without harnesses and tools.
I suppose one of the difficulties in trying to build a one-size-fits-all thing is that everyone has a different set of use cases and workflows needed for productivity. Each person’s own “productivity machine” might be useless for other people.
Most people (maybe even most tech-oriented people) just aren’t AI-fluent enough to be able to build their own agentic workflows with enough fidelity to actually yield a net-positive effect in productivity. It’s not a user-friendly process for the masses (yet).
I don’t work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn’t already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist
But surely you need a program to direct your attention to those programs, otherwise how would you know what you’re supposed to be doing? You need to have another power hungry program running that uses a full center worth of processing power to… *checks notes* …do what your google now homepage used to do.
Its pretty good at giving correct answers but god its slow and expensive. You gotta print and post like 2 million letters asking your question, wait for the concensus to be achived, wait for the comittee to conbein and compile the answer, then wait for the answer to come back.
They could at least streamline it a bit, maybe call instead of mailing the answer, and save a bit on the post by just having a dedicated radio signal that blasts the question to the entire population instead of having to send everyone a letter.
google has been found keeping information on you that they explicitly said they wouldn’t. I can’t recall the specifics. but apply that to any megacorp like this
They don’t have to, since it’s not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.
They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that’s not their business model at the moment, but it’s probably finding it’s way into the next version in some capacity.
If you’re concerned about data retention, you’d want to select an inference provider that is listing ‘ZDR’ (zero data retention) as a feature.
For example, a lot of the Chinese open weight models have become quite capable and because their weights are available end up like generic vs brand name medicine where there’s multiple providers serving them with different production conditions.
Because enterprise use will often be worried about data retention or sending data to China, the alternative providers usually offer things like US-only inference or zero data retention.
If you’re not going to use it all that often, a la carte API use is going to be way cheaper than a subscription, probably better results than a free plan with a closed model provider, and give you more control over the process.
yes. if you still feel the need to do this, sanitize your inputs. strip it of all personal data. don’t upload the whole file with metadata, paste the scrubbed text that you want rewritten in with the prompt.
I’ve always argued that vertical integration is the only way you’ll make LLMs somewhat accepted and useful. The article is making the same point. Having a virtual girlfriend like in “Her” isn’t appealing to the average person, but certain results achieved by an agent without seeming like the BS output of an LLM may be seen as useful.
I know quite a few people who have bought into agents 100%. Its wild to hear them talk about letting an agent run for days on their personal computer, grinding away on some task. The way they talk about it, you would think they were babysitting a child or something.
Removes [your first step to be able to remedy a problem] your awareness of what’s going on around you in the real world. [Many people feel very unnerved by it because of this aspect.]
… I was going to share a link here to whatever first video I found of any of the many videos of thieves sneaking into people’s homes while they’re oblivious on VR, but someone has created a VR game called thief sneak, where the wearer of VR can play a thief sneaking into people’s homes, making it too hard to find the videos of that really happening. The potential for irony now, seems obvious…
Also good for plain old text manipulation. Bylaws for one of my orgs were like 15+ years out of date. Ask for a detailed read flagging any inconsistencies, check that all references point to real sections, and read the state code and related statutes on these 3 web pages, and provide a working draft and redline document with explanations for changes.
That was a 4 hour job that took about 15 minutes, and there is no risk because you have to read the output anyway at the end. It takes maybe three iterations on target sections once you do a full read-through, but as a human it was going to take two or three iterations no matter what.
Besides crafting homeassistant automations that was probably my best use so far.
Edit: But you’re right, if you’re using it to find out how many rocks to eat in a day or how many letters are in the items on your grocery list, or the best recipe for horse paste that’s a waste of everyone’s time.
We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren’t paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics… They’re practically engaging in a boycott.
I mean this is quite biased article. My dad is the most basic user ever. Lately he’s thriving just using the simple google ai results and ai features in word. It’s fucking surreal to me a 76 year old man suggesting me to use ai and he says that it made his life way easier.
Ai is a tool. Hating or loving a tool is just fanboyism. Its no different than worshipping (or hating) photoshop.
I think there were already some research findings, how software developers tend to drastically overestimate how much AI helped them, while AI was actually hindering their productivity. It could be the same case here.
What AI is really good at is spitting out plausible sounding garbage, pretending it did some comprehensive research on the topic, and making people feel like it’s helpful without neccessarily being so.
Yeah its a great tool if your work is based on regressive data. What people think it can progressively develop new things and invent. Which I highly doubt it’ll be anything like that any time.
I see ai like Xbox Kinect. When it was first released it was like future of everything. Now we use it for Face ID. We just need the bubble to pop so companies can actually develop for the good of humanity
Except that the damage it’s causing, just so someone can avoid reading a little, goes waaaay beyond a matter of opinion.
I do genuinely think AI is soulless and that alone is enough, but entirely separate of that its implementation is nothing but environment destroying, health fucking, brain sucking, garbage being used to spy on people. It’s all the bad shit that ever Cyberpunk and adjacent media ever has been warning against with none of the cool stuff.
Also it is definitely different than hating photoshop but if that’s where you’re at I’m going to save myself the anyeurism trying to explain it.
What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”
For fuck’s sake.
To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
They are not using agents. Most people use LLMs as Google on steroids.
Google on LSD (the hallucinate results)
99% nudify apps
Nah, not for mosy people. I think that’s actually more common with people who use local models (maybe that’s what you were saying though?). My, albeit few, interractions with “normal” people have been pretty scary with how much they use AI in many ways. Most of my friends are very tech savvy and my family goes to me about stuff like this so they don’t use any either (because I’ve taught them, not just told, how bad and dangerous it can be). It’s not very often I talk with anyone else about this but, as said, the times I have it’s been real scary.
Doesn’t help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.
Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of “don’t be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them” that customization isn’t making a damn agent, it’s adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!
I’ve been “adjusting the prompt and saving changes” with Claude code for the past 9 months (it’s not ready to have a baby yet), it has been steadily improving over those months, a lot of that seems to be in the models and harnesses provided by Anthropic, but not a small part of it is the customization of the prompt to do what I want the first time instead of making me redirect it constantly.
lol it’s true. My mom sends me screenshots of AI chats every fucking day.
Just the other day I was pissed off. My dad missed some deadline to request money from the government. I told him to call them, they might be able to do something anyways. He was like “nah, they’ll never do that, why would they have a deadline if they do it after the deadline yadayada”
Then a few days later he told me “oh that gpt thing told me to just try, I might be lucky and they pay out even after the deadline, he was very reassuring, so I’ll try calling them!”
Man chatgpt would fucking tell you to try your luck if you’re 12 years over the deadline, but god forbid your son tells you the exact same thing and you even consider calling them lol
There was some research recently that showed the same thing. People who are “dug in” on a topic, usually a political topic, will shut down when a person tries to persuade them of an alternative, but are much more open to hear the same arguments from AI and actually reconsider their position.
I believe this is a big reason why X-Ai was so important for conservatives to get off of the ground, they were afraid all the crazy would start wearing off if people asked the “woke” models for the truth.
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
i know some tech people that uses it.
[removed]
Same, it’s a tool everyone will use one day, it’s just bad today.
Remember the first mobile phones? Sucked dirt, and we’re stupidly expensive. Then they got cheaper and better, today they almost give them away and the charge lasts a week and you can phone almost anywhere on the planet.
“AI” will be the same, in some years I guess.
If it does get better, it will be with technology other than LLMs, because LLMs don’t get cheaper per unit of usage as usage scales.
I suspect that we won’t have actually useful AI of some sort until LLMs get out of the way. They’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now.
I bet you can make a cheap “AI” chip for using the trained model, it seems the training is the ruinous thing today.
Remember when they predicted heavier than air flight to be centuries in the future just the week before the wright brothers flew? Me neither I wasn’t born then, but it’s an interesting example IMO.
The difference here is that a cheap AI chip won’t fix the fundamental software problems with LLMs. We might reach a point where they can produce output faster, but as long as what’s actually going on is probabilistic next-token prediction in a static vector database, that just means faster mistakes as well.
There’s an odd psychosis going around where people become convinced that actual AGI can be derived from this technology. People who should know better just shut their brains off when it comes to token prediction, because they’ve had very compelling “conversations” with the predictor. They forget that the actual model is static, has no internal state, and doesn’t even “remember” what you’ve said to it.
What it has is a context window, and your entire conversational history - both what you’ve said and how it has responded - gets shoved into that window when you interact with it. (Or depending on the chatbot harness, saved in “memory” files that it can retrieve when the context contents indicate that would be useful.)
That’s why the bots seem so weirdly forgetful one moment and like they’ve got photographic memories the next. Stuff that is in the context window and has its “attention” will influence the tokens it produces, but whether or not the right things are in the context window and it’s including them in the token prediction is a crapshoot.
I know right. “AGI” !!! Nah that won’t happen tomorrow Kevin.
But with thousands of the smartest engineers and researchers working on it, we might get a smarter AI. I mean the human brain thinks in similar ways. +a lot of other stuff of course, but maybe that stuff can be emulated, simulated, for “the next step” forward (still no agi lol).
Interesting times lie ahead.
What’s your local phone app+model?
I got off the grid but can’t be assed to find a good model
[removed]
Yeah “AI” stuff gets a lot of hate around here but I think it works pretty well as a tool for things like information gathering and analysis. Wouldn’t trust it to go off taking actions by itself either though.
Aka reliable technology
It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.
Most people didn’t even trust algorithmic automation before agents came along. lol
So you’re decided not to use a useful tool, because you don’t like it. Gotcha.
I once thought the fediverse was full of cool, techsavy people. Turned out it’s full of old people yelling at clouds.
You have your definition of useful, I have mine. Maybe predictability is important to many others, but not to you.
Besides, “not liking it” sounds like a pretty legit reason for not using something, lol. Would you listen to music if you didn’t like it?
Music is NOT a tool.
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
And this argument about different definitions is fundamentally dishonest under a comment that say broadly we don’t like AI. I have my definitions of interesting, useful and fun. But if I would make a post about, I would be torn apart here, lol.
If I’m trying to fasten something, and the screwdriver fucks up half the time, then yeah I’m going to nail it together instead. Or use glue, or anything but an unreliable screwdriver.
Thats the thing. AI doesn’t fuck up all the time and has gotten genuinely useful for some things in the last months.
But a huge amount of you doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, generating an insufferable, ignorant circlejerk, drowning out every interesting discussion you can have about this topic.
That is what people have said, every day, on repeat, for the last three years. Explain why it is better now instead of three months ago, when it was definitely not fucking up all the time and then I will copypaste that back to you for what was said three months ago for the same question.
Which standards are you gonna hold it to? The benchmarking involves using standardized testing, but they typically just feed those questions into the testing data, so the tests have to be constantly updated, and when they are, you will not be surprised to learn that the machines goes back to fucking up the answers all the time.
Experts in their fields do not use this shit because it is wrong on the things they know, but, oh wow, it must be totally right about the things I don’t know anything about? Every time.
[deleted]
Act civil in the comments, dude.
Cool. Now in three months, I can repaste this reply back to you! Thank you!
If I had an employee that fucked up as often and confidently as LLMs do, I would terminate their employment. I don’t have the time or patience to redo all their work because I can’t trust them. If a brand had quality issues at as high a rate as LLM output, I would avoid buying anything related to that brand.
A human being or company can make some amount of mistakes and that’s completely understandable, and I think it’s perfectly fair to hold LLMs to that standard. That said, with a human being I can stress how important some task is and they don’t double or triple check their when it is that important, I can not and will not trust them. If I tell a company “hey this is important to me”, they will usually make extra effort to make sure it’s correct, and if they fail to do so, a decent company will make an extra effort to make things right. An LLM will offer an empty apology and spew more bullshit at me that I still have to verify.
The fact that AI gets things right often enough for you is great. Maybe I have higher standards, maybe I need higher quality output, or maybe I have trust issues. Everyone has a different threshold. Just because yours is much different than the people here doesn’t mean their opinions are invalid, and the way you dismiss everyone’s opinions and insist that it’s good enough makes you seem just as insufferable and ignorant as you accuse others of being.
The fact that LLM output has improved is great, but it is still so far from meeting much less exceeding my threshold that it’s beyond frustrating to keep being told over and over that “no bro, it’s good now”. I’ve been hearing that for over two years and it’s still not close to where I would trust it to answer questions, much less perform actions on my computer with access to my personal data.
You need to learn that some people are different than you and understand where they’re coming from if you want to have an “interesting discussion… about this topic”, rather than getting frustrated that people don’t agree with you and rage quitting.
Who said all the time? The problem is most people can’t tell which half it’s fucking up. An unreliable tool isn’t useful
Hmm. They fuck up 50 percent of the time? I not only doubt that, I know that this is wrong. No offense. Do you actively use LMMs?
No. Because they fuck up so often.
Why would I keep using a broken tool?
Gotcha. You‘re one of those guys talking out of their arse.
I use music as a tool to relax. If the music isn’t relaxing, I don’t like it, and I won’t listen to it. See how that works?
No, it’s like using a jackhammer when you need a chisel. You have to repair most of the shit instead of doing it right the first time.
And you get progressively worse at using the chisel when you only use a jackhammer for everything.
I think music is so much more than a tool. But I‘m not here to argue over music. I get your point.
So you don’t see any merit in current AI at all? Do you thin it will vanish like the blockchain fad?
Of course it is, I also listen to music other times when I don’t treat it as a tool, but for pleasure and entertainment. But I also use it at times only as a tool, that’s all.
I see plenty of merit in AI. AI has already been used to do really meaningful things for humans, such as in medicine, mathematics, etc, lots of stuff in the research fields and stuff.
But it’s very important to remember that the more work we offload to robots, the worse we’ll become at doing that work ourselves. Neural pathways deteriorate when not used. And I don’t want to become an expert in code review, because I don’t think that’s fun. I want to remain an expert in producing code. And when AI does the reviewing part, too, what the fuck am I left with? Being some kind of DevOp, orchestrating the agents of my laptop? That’s not fun for me.
Maybe in the future AI will actually be able to do quality code and quality software development methods the entire way from idea to production, but I want to code. I am a software engineer. It’s what I was trained to do, and it’s my craft.
It’s like asking someone who is into pottery for a living and has a small business where they do everything by hand, to give that up in order to make cheap ceramic/porcelain plates with no ornamentation, no soul, in a factory. They wouldn’t be interested. That’s me.
Some tools are useless, period.
I think AI is like being given an automatic screwdriver with the speed maxed to shit. If you pay super close attention, you might be able to do things faster, with hypervigilance and expert knowledge. In most cases, though, you won’t. Congratulations, you have screwed in 100 screws, mostly incorrectly and stripped, when everyone else did 30, and you have fucked over the people who have to fix your shit.
I think AI agents are a lot like a chainsaw - they can save you a lot of time vs other tools for the same job, but… you can also screw up with them rather easily.
Fortunately, I just write software with LLM agents, if it comes out badly I can start over with nothing lost but time. My experience of the last few months has been: it actually writes some pretty good software, if you know anything about writing good software with teams of people and apply that knowledge to managing the LLM agents. If you’re just some guy who doesn’t really know how to write software, LLM agents aren’t always going to save you from yourself, just like a chainsaw won’t.
Good analogy! But I disagree.
www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/…/5226256
I’ve had Gemini downright lie or completely fuck up before and it’s not a rare occurrence. That means you have to verify everything anyway and hell at that point maybe you should have just looked it up yourself.
First of: When? Few months make a huge difference. Development happens fast.
Second: Gemini is not the top of the line. You could do worse - if you use the fucking LLMs from meta.
Use it two years ago. It is wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Use it a month later. It is still wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Repeat for months on end. It is always wrong in different ways. It even finds new and unique ways to be wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Every time.
Personally, I just think the dipshits who use LLMs are just fucking morons that don’t realize it’s wrong, or they wouldn’t use it because it is still shit. But, fuck me for not wanting to use the planet-destroying technology that lies for pennies.
At first I was bit mad to be called a dipshit, but hey, what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed. Lol, you’re right of course. It’s just ChatGPT 3.5 that finds all those bugs in the Linux kernel.
You just don’t know, don’t you. You probably even don’t know the difference between a chatbot and an Agent. All you know is empty phrases and hyperbolic statements. You know, it’s fine. Get your upvotes from your ignorant, uninformed circlejerk and yell at the clouds. Good luck.
In that case, maybe they should take down what they’ve released to production until they finish the development. It isn’t finished yet.
Those bugs that generative AI found in Linux were some old bugs that, and I cannot stress this enough, required elevated access to your system and only crashed the machine. Basically, it wasn’t found because it never actually affected anybody, but sure, take your win. You were lacking them.
And hey man, if you caught some strays on that comment, maybe consider going outside. There are people out there that could enjoy being around you if you stopped talking about AI! They are rather nice because they typically like other people and don’t call them Luddites for not wanting to kill the planet tp avoid writing an email.
But, sure, let’s play the dumbfuck game where AI proponents use their definitions to pretend that a chatbot (a thing that doesn’t really matter to LLMs in general since they’ve existed for fucking decades) and an agent (basically the same shit as an LLM but directed) are things that truly matter in the discourse. They don’t. People that don’t want their brain rotted from the inside out just hate AI. Not wanting to turn your brain off seems pretty fucking normal to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you because the thoughts in your head are a nightmare to experience.
My issue is that people have been saying “yeah, it’s a bit iffy, but it’ll get better” since 2022. It’s been four years. When is it actually gonna get better… enough?
Based on my understanding of the underlying tech, it will always have some level of making shit up. That, combined with the fact that all of these companies are spending more money running data centers than they have coming in, implies to me that this tech (at least in the current form of cloud-based chatbots) isn’t staying around long-term. No one is actually making money off of it except the hardware vendors. None of these AI companies are what my grandpa would’ve called a “going concern.” So I haven’t felt much desire to get into it.
I typically like new technology as it comes out, but I haven’t found LLM’s to be very impressive or inspiring.
I know Gemini isn’t the top. It’s all I’m willing to tolerate.
That doesn’t make any sense.:
„This sub-par product of an evil mega corporation that uses their market power to shove this product down everyone’s throat is all I’m willing to tolerate.“
As bad as Antrophic and openAI are, their product is better and they don’t embed it into phones and search engines. (Not saying they wouldnt‘t if they have the chance, but they haven’t)
It makes sense. I’m not spending a dime… I’m not signing up and giving my credentials out to any other AI … I already have Google . Gemini is good enough for the things I look up monus occasionally being dead wrong which all of them can do. I don’t make stupid memes or videos.
Yeah okay. I understand the monetary angle.
However I also have never spent a dime on AI, and I don’t use Gemini. I run Qwen3.6 on my graphics card, or use opencodes free tier. Deepseek-v4- flash is pretty good.
I’ve read a comment recently that Googles local Gemma models hallucinate less than Gemini, but I don’t know if that’s true, since I hardly use Gemma and Gemini not at all.
I recommend downloading some local models and a harness like pi or opencode if you want to play around an have the hardware for it.
Tech savvy groups have always included a significant amount of well established people unhappy with how technology is being implemented or used - who then, yes, yell at clouds. Hell, a lot of us still literally yell about the Cloud.
Paraphrasing a management quote I found a few decades ago - if the engineers aren’t complaining about something, it’s not because they’re happy. It means they’re complaining where you can’t hear them.
I‘m not fully in favour of LMMs by the way. They have their quirks, to put it mildly and are not suited for everything. I think they’re most effective with with someone who knows how to use them and when not to use them. I’m also highly suspicious against those AI companies and their CEOs.
No, I’ve decided not to use a tool that isn’t fit for purpose. Studies have consistently shown that people think they’re much more productive on LLMs than they actually are, and the side effects of cognitive debt and skill loss aren’t worth the often imaginary productivity gains.
Combine that with the awful financials of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google’s Gemini, and you’ve got the makings of a really nasty situation.
Say I come to depend on Claude Code for all my coding, and build an entire workflow around it. I get used to spending thousands of dollars a month for access, and tell myself it’s worth it for the imaginary productivity gains (although what’s actually happening is that I’m just producing a shit-ton of garbage code no one has any hope of understanding).
Then Anthropic reaches the point where they run out of investor money to spend, and fold because even charging developers like me thousands of dollars doesn’t even begin to cover their costs, and I’m one of their rare customers who are loyal, versus the bulk of developers who use up their free allotments of tokens and then model-hop.
Now what? My workflow is broken, I’ve forgotten how to code, and nothing I’ve produced recently is human-readable.
No thanks. I’m not an old man yelling at clouds, I’m a software developer who can recognize a problem when I see one.
Sir this is lemmy. Most people here just follow whatever the echo chamber tells them to. Thinking or referencing reality is typically not advised.
I know. Kind of sad.
Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.
Are we considered “normal people” though?
Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other "normal" people. By our definition of "normal."
And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, "normal." Often when an election happens.
I often wonder as well because being a news reader makes me assume others are also following the news more closely than myself. When I test this theory by talking to people around me, I learn that maybe I’m more alone than I thought.
At least with social media I get to follow the news with all of you, my fellow nerds
One of us! One of us! One of us!
Gabba gabba hey!
Quite a few of the people I know and consider “normal” openly dislike AI.
I’m not sure it’s a majority opinion buts it’s not an obscure one.
I think Ai hate might be the single most unifying position in the west right now.
I don’t think so. No average blue collar worker I know hates AI. They think its a fun, free toy.
Who’s houses are the datacenters being built next to?
If you want to get mad about possible plans that have not yet been made, you need the increasingly rare gift of foresight
I have at least one head, so I’m normal. You?
This post has 255 upvotes. That’s basically nobody when you’re talking about what is normal.
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
The point is to replace you not help you
I think their point is that they just go into tangentially different workflows and do work you didn’t ask them to or need them to do.
Yeah. My point though is that’s on purpose. The tools being built are not meant to help workers. It’s meant to replace them. Which it can’t really do. Which is why none of this makes sense and everyone is flailing.
Uh, because its the future and if you don’t you’re not cool?
Good job putting to words one of the core issues I’ve had with using LLM chat for work. Stop trying to design an entire fucking system or solution and just answer the damn question I actually asked, by using natural language to search documentation and existing implementations.
I would tell it to only answer exactly what I asked, but sometimes I do get value from it “exploring” on occasion. It’s just so much damn worse with it than my newest junior co-worker who is known on our team for getting hours deep into tangential rabbit holes before coming up for air and asking seemingly nonsequiteur questions.
[removed]
I read somewhere that teaching people about how LLMs work is way better at protecting them from the harms of LLMs than trying to convince them not to use them.
This would include prompt engineering i guess! Which to be fair i do not know about.
The video makes fun of it by having the vibe coder put “… or you go to jail " at the end of every prompt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNS1ZNHQs8
The advantage I perceive with the AI agent vs junior co-workers both going down their respective rabbit holes, the AI agent costs less time and money to get their “in depth report” and you don’t have to kindly explain why it’s off track when it gets horribly distracted by something irrelevant, you can just flush the context and start over.
I do find myself a bit upset when I’m in the middle of a long context development with an LLM agent and that context gets lost for some reason - re-explaining everything from scratch can be exhausting, to avoid having to do that you can actually instruct the agent to create a file explaining to future agents what it “knows” about the discussion at the moment. Some agents are starting to do this automatically like Claude’s MEMORY.md file and similar. Another semi-cool thing is: you can read these files yourself (if you have the patience) and if you see anything in there that the agent “got wrong” you have the opportunity to fix it. Asking a junior colleague to thoroughly explain everything they think they know about a project gets to be a very wearisome endeavor both for the junior and whoever is reviewing their “understanding” of the project.
I’ve seldom been described as a normal person, but in my job, I have to get things right or there are problems for real people. So whatever tools I use have to be reproducible in their results, transparent in how they give their answers, and verifiable. So that precludes LLMs, which are automated bullshit firehoses with opaque, constantly mutable workings.
Those are exactly the properties that should never apply to a system whose output actually matters.
I just had a thought. The people pushing for AI use get fined when the make huge mistakes, basically a speeding ticket. But they’re pushing AI on people that get fired or go to jail if they make a huge mistake, more like A DUI. So they’re saying “use this thing that makes the kind of mistakes that I’d fire you over, and take responsibility of it”.
More or less what happened to my former project manager.
Well, Microslop did state that copilot should be used for entertainment purposes only, and is not to be relied on for real work.
I use the AI agents to write software which is reproducible in its results, transparent in how it operates and verifiable…
Trust an LLM to switch on a light? No. Trust an LLM to write a diagnostic script and tell me what problems it notices in 3MB of log files, then write another script to patch the problem? Only if I actually understand the problem it finds and how the solution it creates is going to work.
They reduce some tasks that used to take weeks to a single day activity, they are NOT universally applicable.
No reason you can’t use LLMs to write deterministic scripts. Handing off every task to an agent is a crapshoot, but they do help with some tasks. At the minimum - writing regression tests.
Don’t these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?
It’s difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.
To me, it’s not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.
[deleted]
[deleted]
“locked PDF”… " upload to Claude"… 🙈🙉🙊
Other employees are so incompetent (you know how incompetent your co workers are) that agents are producing better work and making fewer mistakes than they would on their own. The fact is, for most people, the mistakes it makes are no different than people mistakes.
Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. “All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait…” While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.
When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. “Don’t say anything, and eventually you’ll be put through.”
Yes, I’m a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank’s human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.
(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn’t a complete bust…)
My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
Also, the chef stole the recipe and ingredients from somebody else.
He only stole the recipe, he took out a trillion dollars in debt to buy the ingredients
The pasta manufacturer and the tomato farmer would like to have a word with your metaphor.
Yes this is like 99% of restaurants menu lol. Stolen and tweaked.
I don’t really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don’t use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?
I’ve never wanted to punch a word in the face until the word “agentic” started popping up everywhere.
I refuse to even pronounce it correctly.
“ajanteek” is probably what I’d say if I was forced to utter such unspeakable trash
There are loads of reasons normal people aren’t using AI Agents. This article doesn’t give any of the ones I’d think of.
The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don’t understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.
It’s not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they’re not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. “Normal people” accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little “normal people” jobs and “normal people” lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It’s signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.
Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It’s not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it’s still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.
The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don’t like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn’t charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over… well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it’s no secret there’s also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.
Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It’s been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They’re not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with… the charity of the ultra wealthy? That’s nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we’re redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).
I’m not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn’t see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.
And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that “using” something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren’t asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it’s simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they’re not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.
None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren’t reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it’s not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.
I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it
It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.
Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.
May I ask what the use case was?
Normal people don’t use VS Code either… what’s a silly article
I don’t use a scalpel… so I guess scalpels are stupid and Surgeons are idiots?
If a scalpel manufacture became 10% (currently AI is at this level) of our total economy but only .006% (percentage of surgeons to population) of people needed them it would be a major problem.
Because everyone is using this ai. They just don’t realize it yet.
If you’re buying from me you’re paying for generative ai and that’s going to be the case for most businesses. I hate yet to meet a business owner not using it. Our small business centers have classes on how to use it.
The majority of people are not using AI as in AI models like Claude or Chatgpt. This could change in the future.
The majority of people are being USED by AI though. This is not a positive thing.
"You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!"
We are totally past that. Where is my hover car?
I know you think you’re being witty, but autonomous robotic surgery is a hot tech that is starting to push into active use.
You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.
When someone proudly express their enthusiasm for AI, I immediately think less of that person.
Or defer to AI, when you ask them a quesiton that can be simply answered or even googled, that doesnt have a AI results. and ends up with a overcomplicated summary that leads to more questions.
I do everything I possibly can to avoid that shit. Any app or service i use that trys to force it gets canceled and deleted.
Even before computers I didn’t need, nor want, anyone’s help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human’s independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly “AI” subscription.
At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.
Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.
All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.
Fundamentally, they cost way, way too much to run. LLMs are useful tools (I use them a bit for data analysis and coding help) and the people who use them for that kind of thing might pay the full cost in some form (not as individuals but their companies might). But they’re trying to push them into everything and people who can’t think for themselves and want them to help them write emails and such are not going to foot the bill. Not even close.
I think they’ve realised that forcing universal adoption is the only way that this could work, to get everyone hooked on it then jack up the prices. But regular consumers will never, ever be the ones paying the enormous costs of LLMs. Even companies will start to realise that there is no point paying huge amounts just for everyone to be able to outsource writing emails and basic tasks to LLMs. And short of any huge breakthrough, they are incapable of doing most jobs.
It’s not difficult to understand. This whole AI bubble is just a push to get enough people, a critical mass, over a threshold that they start paying for the usage. The Bubble was waiting for the money to run out which is what built the bubble. The money is running out and the subscriptions are ready for purchase.
The software development industry is ready to purchase subscriptions, but no other sectors it seems.
Maybe but even there there are limits on how much they will be willing to spend for junior level programming no matter how much of a ship fast fix broken methodology they adopt.
What junior programmers?
Same as the internet infrastructure bubble in the dot com boom. Thing is, we use the infrastructure now, just took a decade or so.
I hold the opinion that if people talk about LLM’s instead of AI they are inherently more understanding of the tool and therefore more qualified to use it.
The edge case is software development, for the bog standard stuff I write at work it probably helps me get work done about 15%-30% faster and with costs of $200-$400 USD a month the math actually works out. At current prices anyway. Also the electricity costs of running open weight models is even cheaper and if there is a pop HW prices may make that an obvious choice too. The worst case IMO would be a slow boil of prices to recoup the unsustainable growth then a slow decline to wherever normal ends up. In that case everyone is left indignant.
Deepseek V4 Flash only costs like $10-20/mo for a reasonable amount of usage and with their new update it has gotten crazy good
Stop normalizing LLMs as productivity machines.
They definitely can be useful as a part of a “productivity machine,” for some people. But yeah, they’re not the whole solution. An LLM alone is much less useful without harnesses and tools.
I suppose one of the difficulties in trying to build a one-size-fits-all thing is that everyone has a different set of use cases and workflows needed for productivity. Each person’s own “productivity machine” might be useless for other people.
Most people (maybe even most tech-oriented people) just aren’t AI-fluent enough to be able to build their own agentic workflows with enough fidelity to actually yield a net-positive effect in productivity. It’s not a user-friendly process for the masses (yet).
I don’t work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn’t already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist
But surely you need a program to direct your attention to those programs, otherwise how would you know what you’re supposed to be doing? You need to have another power hungry program running that uses a full center worth of processing power to… *checks notes* …do what your google now homepage used to do.
archive.is/Bj2wj
Because you don’t need AI when you’ve got NI.
I like Northern Ireland, despite its problems, but I’ve never considered it an alternative to AI. Interesting insight there.
Its pretty good at giving correct answers but god its slow and expensive. You gotta print and post like 2 million letters asking your question, wait for the concensus to be achived, wait for the comittee to conbein and compile the answer, then wait for the answer to come back.
They could at least streamline it a bit, maybe call instead of mailing the answer, and save a bit on the post by just having a dedicated radio signal that blasts the question to the entire population instead of having to send everyone a letter.
It’s only natural.
Naive question here. If I use ChatGPT or whatever to enhance my resume, do these programs data collect my resume/personal info ?
just assume yes
google has been found keeping information on you that they explicitly said they wouldn’t. I can’t recall the specifics. but apply that to any megacorp like this
Almost certainly.
They don’t have to, since it’s not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.
They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that’s not their business model at the moment, but it’s probably finding it’s way into the next version in some capacity.
If you’re concerned about data retention, you’d want to select an inference provider that is listing ‘ZDR’ (zero data retention) as a feature.
For example, a lot of the Chinese open weight models have become quite capable and because their weights are available end up like generic vs brand name medicine where there’s multiple providers serving them with different production conditions.
Because enterprise use will often be worried about data retention or sending data to China, the alternative providers usually offer things like US-only inference or zero data retention.
If you’re not going to use it all that often, a la carte API use is going to be way cheaper than a subscription, probably better results than a free plan with a closed model provider, and give you more control over the process.
yes. if you still feel the need to do this, sanitize your inputs. strip it of all personal data. don’t upload the whole file with metadata, paste the scrubbed text that you want rewritten in with the prompt.
I’ve started to call people AI-assisted
“Powered by Claude”.
There was an actual term I learned the other day, it was something along the lines of Thinking Dissonance but I can’t remember the exact term.
I’ve always argued that vertical integration is the only way you’ll make LLMs somewhat accepted and useful. The article is making the same point. Having a virtual girlfriend like in “Her” isn’t appealing to the average person, but certain results achieved by an agent without seeming like the BS output of an LLM may be seen as useful.
What an addoly written article. It reads like satire. I don’t think it is. But it reads like it.
I feel like I got so little substantive information from reading that.
I want AI agents to just go the fuck away!
Replace politicans, CEOs and lawyers with AI first…
If all a President has to do is write stupid social media posts I think we found the best starting point
I’m still waiting to hear about the first board member LLM.
Are they not using AI because they are normal, or are they normal because they aren’t using AI?
I know quite a few people who have bought into agents 100%. Its wild to hear them talk about letting an agent run for days on their personal computer, grinding away on some task. The way they talk about it, you would think they were babysitting a child or something.
I wonder if it’s more like VR.
People don’t like losing control over their technology in reality.
People want to retain control over their technology, like it’s a tool.
Virtual reality removes awareness and agency in the real world.
Same as agents do.
What does this have to do with VR? VR doesn’t remove anything, it’s just a fancy monitor.
a fancy monitor that makes like 1/3 of the people who view it throw up.
Removes [your first step to be able to remedy a problem] your awareness of what’s going on around you in the real world. [Many people feel very unnerved by it because of this aspect.]
… I was going to share a link here to whatever first video I found of any of the many videos of thieves sneaking into people’s homes while they’re oblivious on VR, but someone has created a VR game called thief sneak, where the wearer of VR can play a thief sneaking into people’s homes, making it too hard to find the videos of that really happening. The potential for irony now, seems obvious…
Anyhoo, beyond that flooding-the-zone, plenty else goes wrong, born of that aspect, and more. www.youtube.com/results?search_query=VR+fails
AI is incredible for research and development. The power it gives you as a software developer is unreal. Outside of that, I really don’t like it.
Also good for plain old text manipulation. Bylaws for one of my orgs were like 15+ years out of date. Ask for a detailed read flagging any inconsistencies, check that all references point to real sections, and read the state code and related statutes on these 3 web pages, and provide a working draft and redline document with explanations for changes.
That was a 4 hour job that took about 15 minutes, and there is no risk because you have to read the output anyway at the end. It takes maybe three iterations on target sections once you do a full read-through, but as a human it was going to take two or three iterations no matter what.
Besides crafting homeassistant automations that was probably my best use so far.
Edit: But you’re right, if you’re using it to find out how many rocks to eat in a day or how many letters are in the items on your grocery list, or the best recipe for horse paste that’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Breaking news, people don’t worship other people’s idol statues.
This article’s title is ridiculous. What do you mean ‘why don’t normal people use agentic AI?’ Were they supposed to?
We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren’t paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics… They’re practically engaging in a boycott.
I mean this is quite biased article. My dad is the most basic user ever. Lately he’s thriving just using the simple google ai results and ai features in word. It’s fucking surreal to me a 76 year old man suggesting me to use ai and he says that it made his life way easier.
Ai is a tool. Hating or loving a tool is just fanboyism. Its no different than worshipping (or hating) photoshop.
I think there were already some research findings, how software developers tend to drastically overestimate how much AI helped them, while AI was actually hindering their productivity. It could be the same case here.
What AI is really good at is spitting out plausible sounding garbage, pretending it did some comprehensive research on the topic, and making people feel like it’s helpful without neccessarily being so.
Yeah its a great tool if your work is based on regressive data. What people think it can progressively develop new things and invent. Which I highly doubt it’ll be anything like that any time.
I see ai like Xbox Kinect. When it was first released it was like future of everything. Now we use it for Face ID. We just need the bubble to pop so companies can actually develop for the good of humanity
Except that the damage it’s causing, just so someone can avoid reading a little, goes waaaay beyond a matter of opinion.
I do genuinely think AI is soulless and that alone is enough, but entirely separate of that its implementation is nothing but environment destroying, health fucking, brain sucking, garbage being used to spy on people. It’s all the bad shit that ever Cyberpunk and adjacent media ever has been warning against with none of the cool stuff.
Also it is definitely different than hating photoshop but if that’s where you’re at I’m going to save myself the anyeurism trying to explain it.
[deleted]