AI Is a Total Grift
AI Is a Total Grift
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40 comments
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"Use our AI!"
"Hmm... I don't know."
"If you use AI you can fire all your employees 🤞 ."
"GIMMEE! GIMMEE! I'LL PAY ANY PRICE! I HATE EMPLOYEES SOO MUCH!"
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two months later
"Why is everything broken?"
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well duh, much like CRYPTO was a grift/ponzi scheme, after it crashed people started looking for th next big thing, it was AI.
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No fucking shit.
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Every tech buzzword is a grift to try to rationalize endless exponential growth in a world where that’s just impossible
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Duh
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I've met the author IRL. He's quite famous in his niche
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Unrelated, but what’s the difference between grift vs. scam? Internet search seems to give me the same definitions.
Is it just that grifts are personal, while scams are impersonal (like phone/internet scams)?
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Not sure of an official difference, but my take is a grift is something that everyone's kind of doing on the DL, but nobody is admitting that it's a scam.
Think like a cult. Everyone's a part of the cult, but nobody actually wants to believe they're getting scammed or scamming others, so it's more of a grift. People assume what they're doing can't last/sustain, but they do it anyway because the benefits are good.
A scam is straight up the party knowing it's illegitimate and going out of their way to execute the scam so they can benefit at the expense of others.
Basically, I've always taken it as one is self aware (scam) and one is only self-aware at the top levels (grift).
But this is all just in my head.
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That's a good question actually. Could it be it's a "lie vs. untruth" situation where grift is just a nicer word for what's obviously a huge scam? In that case we should probably use "scammer" a lot more than "grifter".
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When I think of a scam, I think a one-off, obviously amateur attempt. An email with awful grammar saying the government will fine me a bajillion dollars if I don’t download a file is a scam. A scam will also leave you alone.
A grift is done by career slimeballs. Used car salesmen, big C-suites and corrupt politicians are grifters. It’s more offensive and more aggressive. You can’t escape a grift.
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Hmm, yeah that’s helpful! So maybe if I think of grifting as more of a lifestyle, as in done by con artists.
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I read this as "gift" the first time haha
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Same 😅
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chatbots like gpt and gemini learn from conversations with veiwers, so what we need is a virus that will pretend to be a user and flood its chats with pro racism arguments and sexist remarks, which will rub off on the chatbots making them unacceptable for public use
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Nope, they mostly learn during training
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hmmmm damn alright
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Been there. Done that
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what did you do?
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Yeah. GROK and Twitter have entered the chat. Seriously though, we've regressed pretty far in what the general public deems acceptable.
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How do models learn from conversations with users?
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40 comments
AI has some legit uses but the hype around it is mostly VC's throwing money at buzzwords while the actual tech is nowhere near the "AGI revolution" they keep promising us lol.
But can we at least be thankful that it shifted focus from augmented reality? Prior to AI, the buzz was around things like the metaverse and digital avatars in your teams meetings.
Even crap AI is more useful than avatars in teams.
Digital Avatars in teams arent actively destructive to the internet, the environment, and people's grasp on reality.
I think you're universalising a personal grievance, without fully accounting for the impacts of Metaverse bullshit, which was never practical or feasible to begin with, and the AI Apocalypse sweeping the internet
IDK, at least that was useful for gaming etc. AI is mostly about eliminating jobs
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it's what's selling for some reason?
The latter isn't even selling, just used because it is free to use or they jammed it into an existing ecosystem like Copilot.
The former isn't "kind of interesting" and there are lots and lots of daily use cases solved by AI that are much much more than "kind of interesting".
What a simple way to try to downplay it by calling it only kind of interesting.
The crap they're promoting it for also showcases the direction they're developing it for which is an utterly depressing, unsustainable and impractical one. It's frustrating to see how much money is invested (and ultimately burned) to actively destroy the economy and create problems rather than fixing some.
How does this differ from most other things VCs throw money at?
cough cough crypto cough
This. Everybody wanted it to be AGI right out of the gate. It's just a tool, like Photoshop. It will get better over time but it's not the end all be all.