Fuck AI

They do, it's called margin trading, shorting, and options trading. Most private equity firms do it.

Because Claude told him to, my recently retired family member is trying to convince a nearby university to open an AI data centre/research centre/community hub in his town. It is proposing that the heat generated will be used to warm some buildings and a swimming pool, Claude likes the water and power availability from a nearby river with a hydroelectric plant. The man is calling city councillors and deans with Claude as his source.

For all I know, maybe it’s a good proposal. I am automatically skeptical when the entire proposal is a bunch of AI yes-man stuff. But really, I wish he had taken up painting or tennis in retirement instead.

For me, I've long had little patience for shoddy work from a lot of people. I am used to making sure I have a fundamental understanding of things before I make proclamations about why something is the way it is or how to improve it. To me, AI is largely horrible because it just spews out plausible sounding stuff without understanding, which turns out to be a strategy that works often enough, but creates huge headaches in obnoxious ways when it is wrong.

For a lot of others I work with, that has been their whole career strategy, when in doubt, just spew words that seem plausible and hope it works out. AI actually can compete with them in many ways because they have largely built their career of making plausible sounding guesses that get ignored when they are totally wrong and praised when they happen to be right. This crowd loves the AI, and they also get promoted because society rewards confidence more than competence.

Another facet is that so many folks reckon themselves to be creative geniuses with no time to realize their great ideas, and they see the slurry of hollow crap they can fling onto the internet as fantastic, while the rest of us are exhausted by a flood of soulless crap drowning out some of the content we used to enjoy discovering.

Keep in mind that clickbait has long worked and enough people want to engage with clickbait, while another contingent smells it a mile away and wants to avoid it at all costs as they know it's empty crap to bait us. I suspect there's a similar breakdown of AI fans and foes, excepting that AI is at least useful in certain contexts.

People also think praying is useful.

It makes more sense when you realize that you are not the target customer. C-suite people are the target customer. They have no idea what real work looks like, so whatever it barfs out looks perfect to them.

It's because AI is such a huge umbrella of things, some of it genuinely useful and others just a pure detriment to the world, and the discourse has become so vitriolic that there isn't room for nuance or discussion.

For example, I have a friend working in bioinformatics and a huge number of people in his field love AI. It's incredibly useful for their research. These aren't out of touch boomers, they're multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers with intimate knowledge of both neural nets and their field of expertise and they find AI (typically not the commercial-facing generative AI, but sometimes that, too) useful for what they're doing. It's anecdotal, but the actual experts I've talked to have said it sped up their work and opened new avenues of research.

That said, it's pretty obvious all of the absolute fuckery that is coming along with these companies; the slop, the job loss, the enshittification, the privacy nightmares, the theft of art and literature, the literal damage it's doing to people's ability to think–I could go on. It's easy to find reasons to be against AI in totality.

If you go into AI spaces, the vast majority of fans aren't fans of the slop or companies, either. They're mostly just optimistic that the improvements of AI will be so destabilizing that we all have to remake basically all of our systems and we'll only be left with the benefits. If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you'll still have every cure. If AI takes every job, you can't really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?

Again, it's anecdotal, and at this point I'm fully atop my soap box, but my experience has been that people who are AI "fans" actually hate the companies and the way that AI is being used. What they're hoping for is the world that comes after 'the big breakthrough' that breaks all the systems.

I think there's room for nuance. For the record, I'm a writer and game dev every time I see someone pop into my social media talking about using AI to write or make a game (or replace human creativity in any real way), I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.

A lot of people only say they are supporting AI because they feel they have to. If somebody would mention anything critical about the tech in my workplace or e.g. linkedin, they would definitely tank their career chances. Our managing director is a huge fan (or says he is, so the board likes him, who knows), so nobody would darw to go against the direction he sets.

They will... Very temporarily, and only if they don't have major competitors by the time they raise prices considerably.

It's pretty clear what all these fucks are doing. They're making it cheap now to get as many users as possible and make sure companies are completely dependent on their technology. And when they are, payday! Token prices go up, AI prices start looking crazy, separation of products into Claude, Claude Plus, Claude Plus Ad Free, Claude Enterprise, etc.

And the companies pay for it, very temporarily, until shit normalizes and enshittification ensues.

Came to say the exact same thing; to top it all off - as a (currently) private company - Anthropic doesn’t need to publish gross/net operating profits. However, they did for the most recent quarter - highlighting their first ever quarterly profit - so up until now, they’ve been burning investors’ money hand-over-fist.

Would you mind explaining how the rules have been loosened? First I'm hearing of this.