Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries

Every time some product or service introduces AI (or more accurately shoves it down our throats) people start looking for a way to get rid of it.

It's so strange how much money and time companies are pouring into "features" that the public continues to reject at every opportunity.

At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. All the AI being shoehorned into products and services now are mostly to test, improve, and advertise for the AI being used, not to provide any value for users who'd rather have nothing to do with it.

Precisely. From day one this was about doing what industrialization did for manual labor for "white collar" work.

AI has value the way self-checkout has value: it's anti-consumer and widely hated, but it (can) save the companies money and will therefore be too widespread for anyone to opt out.

> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work

It's this part.

Salaries and benefits are expensive. A computer program doesn't need a salary, retirement benefits, insurance, retirement, doesn't call in sick, doesn't take vacations, works 24/7, etc.

"How do I tell Copilot to go fuck itself?" - My mother during a recent tech support call.

The end goal is a global panopticon followed by a culling of the herd. Read the inscriptions: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeo...

Self-checkout has come a long way IMO. I love not having to queue as long or speak to staff. The occasional "unknown item" still happens, but it's worth it. Even better are the ones in smaller shops that don't have a weighing sensor.

Somewhere there’s a graph that went boop just enough to get someone a promotion, a raise, or a bonus.

Self-checkout has its uses and supporters. Introverts, the socially anxious, people in a hurry, people who'd much prefer to bag (or double/triple bag) their own items in ways that work best for them, people who want to get the organic tomato at the price of the non-organic one.

It's absolutely still a scheme by companies to get rid of employees and get customers to do work for them for free, and there are still issues with the systems not working very well, but we at least have the option (in almost all cases) to queue up at the one or two registers with an employee doing the work. When it comes to AI, we're often not being given any choice at all. Even if we can avoid using it, or somehow avoid seeing it, we will still be training it.

Siri will shut up if you yell,

“Nobody asked you, Siri!” at it.

And that, kids, is how I met your mother.

Sometimes I worry that the internet has enabled ordinary but gullible people to find exactly the supporting evidence they need to be considered insane by society.

With the amounts being invested into AI and even just in recognition of running an AI service (@see how openAI loses money on their $200 subscriber accounts). The "for funsies" services like switching an HTML form over to a chatbot are clearly not going to be a realistic resolution for this technology. I'd argue that even when it comes to code generation the tools can be useful for green-field prototyping but the idea that a developer will need to verify the output of a model will never cause more than marginal economy of tools in that sector.

The outcome that the large companies are banking on is replacing workers, even employees with rather modest compensation end up costing a significant amount if you consider overhead and training. There is (mostly) no AI feature that wall street or investors care about except replacing labor - everything else just seems to exist as a form of marketing.

> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work

That's certainly part of it.

However, at this point I think a lot of it is a kind of emotional sunk-cost. To stop now would require a lot of very wealthy and powerful people to admit they had personally made a very serious mistake.

The Freemasons which rule over you in the form of police and courts and the legislative branch built the Georgia Guidestones

No it's not. It's because management is tone deaf and out of touch. They'll latch onto literally anything put in front of them as a way out of their inability to iterate and innovate on their products.

Throwing "ai" into it is a simple addition, if it works, great, if it doesn't well the market just wasn't ready.

But if they have to actually talk to their users and solve their real problems that's a really hard pill to swallow, extremely hard to solve correctly, and basically impossible to sell to shareholders because you likely have to explain that your last 50 ideas and the tech debt they created are the problem that needs to be excised.

I like self checkout for medium to small shops (which is pretty much all I do since my local small supermarket is 100 metres down the road). Before they put in the self checkouts there was always a huge queue for the registers and I avoided shopping there; now I almost never have to queue and it's much faster to get in, pick up a dozen items and get out.

It is also possible that we're just in the realm of pure speculation now - if you look at Tesla and NVidia both their valuations are completely imaginary and with the latter standing to benefit a lot by being shovel sellers (but not that much) and the former seeing an active decline in profitability while still watching the numbers go up.

It may be less that people are unaware of the speculative bubble but are just hoping to get in and out before it pops.

I donno I like AI, I don't use it often but when I do I've found it useful and impressive. It's really improved quality of life when it comes to having something to read over my work or help with finding small bits of info. I also like self checkout because this it reduced wait times at the store.

I think people are always resistant to change. People didn't like ATMs when they first came out either. I think it's improved things.

There will be a crash as with any hype cycle

But this is normal. A new thing is discovered, the market runs lots of tests to discover where it works / doesn’t, there’s a crash, valid use cases are found / scaled and the market matures.

Y’all surely lived thru the mobile app hype cycle, where every startup was “uber for x”.

The amount of money being spent today pales in comparison to the long term money on even one use case that scales. It’s a good bet if you are a VC.

I genuinely cannot tell if this is a joke, or a serious hypothesis :-/

The faint ray of hope that someone will engage has been the essence of advertising since time immoral.

It's similar to the question of why flies lay millions of eggs.

It's a weird cycle though where the order of everything is messed up.

The normal tech innovation model is: 1. User problem identified, 2. Technology advancement achieved, 3. Application built to solve problem

With AI, it's turned into: 1. Technology advancement achieved, 2. Applications haphazardly being built to do anything with Technology, 3. Frantic search for users who might want to use applications.

I don't know how the industry thinks they're going to make any money out of the new model.

It's not strange. It's about power and control. Google and the other big names could care less about user satisfaction: their customers are the ad buyers.

It's too bad because even 10 years ago Google and the internet in general were magical. You could find information on any topic, make connections and change your life. Now it is mostly santized dumbed down crap and the discovery of anything special is hidden under mountains of SEO spam, now even AI generated SEO spam that is transparently crap for any moderately intelligent user.

For a specific example I like to watch wildlife videos and specifically ones that give insight to how animal think and process the world. This comparative psychology can help us better understand ourselves.

If you want to watch Macaque monkeys for example google/youtube feeds you almost exclusively SEO videos from a handful of locations in Cambodia. There are plenty of other videos out there but they are hidden by the mass produced videos out of Cambodia.

If I find an interesting video and my view history is off the same video is often undiscoverable again even with the exact same search terms.

Search terms are disregarded or substituted willy nilly by Google AI who thinks it knows better what I want than myself.

But the most egregious thing for me as a viewer of nature videos is the AI generated content. It is obviously CGI and often ridiculous or physically impossible. For example let's say I want to see how a monkey interacts with a predatory python, I am allowed to watch that right??? Or are all the Serengeti lion hunting gazel videos to be banned in 2025? Lol. So I search "python attacks monkey" hoping to see a video in the natural setting. Instead I am greeted with maybe a handful of badly shot videos probably staged by humans and hundreds of CGI cartoons that are obviously not real. In one the monkey had a snake mouth! Lol. Who goes searching for real nature videos to see badly faked stuff?

Because of how I can not find anything on google or Youtube anymore without picking through a mountain of crap I use them less now. This is for almost any kind of topic not just nature videos.

Is that a win for advertisers? Less use? I don't think so.

In about 20 years of using the product the number of times a google or Youtube search has led to me actually purchasing a product or service DUE to an ad I saw, is I believe precisely zero.

Recently I have been seeing Temu (zero interest), disability fraud (how is this allowed), senior, and facebook ads. I am a non disabled, 30 something man. I saw an ad for burial insurance today.

Why is facebook paying to advertise "facebook" on youtube in 2025? Is this some ritual sacrifice to the god Mammon or something? Surely in 2025 everyone who would be interested in Facebook has heard of it. I have the Facebook app installed. Why the hell do facebook investors stand facebook paying google to advertise facebook non-selectively on youtube. It's the stupidest thing I ever saw.

I have not watched any political content in years. And yet when I search for a wild life video I get mountains of videos about Trump and a handful of mass produced low quality wildlife content interspersed.

Today I was treated to an irrelevant ad about "jowl reduction."

I know many of you use ad blockers but this is how horrendous it is without them. You can't find what you want, even what you just saw, and you are treated to a deluge of irrelevant, obnoxious content and ads.

Clearly it is about social control, turning our minds to mush to better serve us even more terrible ad content.

> people in a hurry

Huh, I always thought it was the opposite: If you're in a hurry, you go through traditional check-out. Nothing really matches the speed of an experienced and trained grocery store checkout clerk whizzing boxes past the scanner faster than you can load them into your cart. I think traditional checkout can blaze through 30 grocery items before I can even get three or four out of my cart, fumble around with them in front of the scanners, and then get chastised and stopped by the computer because I didn't place the item properly on the shelf next to the checkout machine.

Billions of dollars are being spent on very useful AI.

You just notice the shitty ones, but people on HN thinks that's the norm for some reason.

I mean the obvious solution is to just manufacture more problems.

I wish I could be certain that we're not doing that already.

It's certainly a way to cut costs. It's also, for a few conveniently handled bar-coded items, generally faster and more convenient than waiting in line behind a person with a shopping cart full of items. (Yes, there are express lanes but they're often not that express.)

I am totally in the same boat but also I do suspect it is a minority. It’s the same way that some people really want open source bootloaders, but 99.99% of people do not care at all. Maybe AI assistants in random places just aren’t that compatible with people on HN but are possibly useful for a lot of people not on HN?

> With AI, it's turned into: 1. Technology advancement achieved, 2. Applications haphazardly being built to do anything with Technology, 3. Frantic search for users who might want to use applications.

No, it’s always been 1) Utter the current password in your pitch deck to unlock investor dollars. Recently it’s “AI” and “LLM,” but previously it was “Blockchain,” “Big Data,” etc.

If I’m buying one thing then it’s much faster to self checkout than have to wait in line.

I agree with you for large purchases.

It's interesting how we can frame "potentially automating tasks" in the most sinister conceivable way. The same argument applies to essentially all technology, like a computer.

at work i’ve been tasked with “developing AI use cases” to add on to our product.

we still don’t know what problems to solve, but we’re gonna use AI to help us figure that out.

once we do, it’s gonna be huge. this AI stuff is going to change everything!!!

Reminds me of 3d tv and AR glasses

> the internet has enabled ordinary but gullible people to find exactly the supporting evidence they need to be considered insane by society

If by "be considered insane by society", you mean "find each other, attract new members, mobilize, and vote", I'd say you're spot on.

This was all a big mistake. To future generations, all I can say is that we meant well.

Today it is AI. Yesterday it was Blockchain.

Tomorrow it will be Agentic AI Blockchains.

I know what you are thinking: robots are coming for our jobs after that. Don't worry! Those AI robots will run on the Cloud.

I agree with this. I'm very surprised when I see someone blindly trust whatever the AI summary says in a google query, because I myself have internalized a long time ago to strongly distrust it.

There are 4-12 self-checkout kiosks and the loads there tend to be smaller. So the line moves. Speed of checkout once you reach the clerk in a traditional lane, hands-down faster than self.

Plus traditional is where you buy alcohol.

To me it looks like for most things I search it just verbatim is the top answer from Stack Overflow.

Is the "useful AI" technology any different from this slop? If not then I fear that's wasted money as well. Which I think is the reason this stuff keeps getting shoehorned in. They invested money in training and equipment all of which is depreciating far faster than it has returned value.

I strongly doubt this "dichotomy AI" theory.

Do you remember "10 items or fewer" lines in grocery stores? I suspect self checkout is the reason they no longer exist. It was a fair trade.

The best conspiracy theories dance along this line

Moved from android to iOS to get rid of the ceaseless ‘please use our assistant’ nagging.

I'll repeat my favorite quote about it (paraphrased and read it here first but don't recall the attribution): AI can copy a song, tell me a joke, predict what I buy, but I still have to do my own dishes.

If AI (or any tech) could clean, do dishes, or cook (which is not a chore for many, I acknowledge that) it could potentially bring families together and improve the quality of peoples lives.

Instead they are introducing it as a tool to replace jobs, think for us, and mistrust each other ("you sound like an AI bot!/you just copied that from chatgpt! You didn't draw that! How do I know you're real?"

I don't know if they really thought through to an endgame, honestly. How much decimation can you inflict on the economy before the snake eats its own tail?

> It’s the same way that some people really want open source bootloaders, but 99.99% of people do not care at all.

In fairness to the 99.99% they don't even know what a bootloader is and if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.

I don't think the rejection of AI is primarily a HN thing though. It's my non-tech friends and family who have been most vocal in complaining about it. The folks here are more likely to have browser extensions and other workarounds or know about alternative services that don't force AI on you in the first place.

At my company we have a live service chat feature. Recently some of our customers have been requesting an AI chatbot support (we've got fairly technical product offerings). I'm guessing they want to ask a bunch of stupid questions.

I'm surprised as well. Some people want it

Billionaires destroy the working class: "progress".

Working class organizes a defense: "insanity".

Any useful AI I've seen isn't branded as "AI", it's just a product that doesn't mention how it works.

the only reasons i can imagine that a customer would want to use an AI chatbot for support instead of chatting with a person is either because they don't currently have the option to chat with a person 24/7 at all (AI is better than no chat support), or their experience with human chat support has been terrible (long wait times, slow responses, unhelpful agents, annoying language barriers, responses so unnatural and overly scripted that they might as well be bots, etc).

There's nothing AI brings to the table that a competent human wouldn't, with the added benefit that you don't have to worry about AI making things up or not understanding you.

Or maybe they just want to try and convince the AI to give them things you wouldn't (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...)

This lines up with my experience loitering in the soup aisle and stopwatching the grocery checkouts: https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2022/2/17/let-them-check-you-out

I was going to buy a pixel 9 fold, but I literally have no idea why I should.

All the ad talked about was AI, nothing about specs, and barely a whisper of how it works, or even good demos of apps switching between open and closed.

Every phone has AI now, big deal. How about you tell me, Google, what is cool about the fold, instead of talking for 4 minutes about AI?!

It's not really interesting, it's exactly what should be expected. We've seen how corporations act, and their history and our prior experiences go on to shape our perceptions and expectations accordingly.

2030 at the latest. LLM androids(robots).

Almost makes me think curated TV will come back, even if all streamed. Real humans with reputations, and ensuring no fakery.

And a vast decline in youtube.

I would be fine with cheating and embedding magnets in the plates or having a special track that fits the plate to the sink. But I find it pathetic that this problem hasn't been solved yet. No one likes doing dishes.

Well, dishwashers are enough to remove lots of the work. And they can dry the dishes too.

So it's a lower bar, there's a partial solution.

I've seen liquor stores that handle alcohol sales through self-checkout without friction. They don't check IDs 99% of the time, which I suspect could get them in some trouble, but instead the monitoring employee basically looks at you and makes a judgement call on your age and if you're clearly not a child they approve it before you're even done scanning.

> In fairness to the 99.99% they don't even know what a bootloader is

True. And awareness and education is very important for useful discourse.

> if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.

Raising my hand as one of those people who knows what a bootloader is and also doesn't currently care about an open option. Maybe at some time in the future I will again, but for now it is very far down on my list of concerns.

I suspect whether or not AI is useful/high-quality/"good"/etc is just not important to most poeple at the moment. If they are laid off from their jobs in the future and replaced with an AI, I suspect they'll start caring more.

But in the general case, I've found "caring ahead-of-time" (for want of a better phrase) is a very hard thing to encourage, despite the fact that it's one of the most effective things you can do if you direct it at the "right" avenues (i.e. those that will affect you directly in the future).

Adding unwanted features, bolting on an AI assistant, changing to a subscription model, and even automating away employees can all be explained by the following iron rule: C-level leadership lives in abject terror of the numbers not going up anymore. Even if a product is perfect, and everyone who needs it owns it, and it needs no improvement, they must still find a way make the numbers go up. Always. So, they'll grab hold of any trend which, in their panic, seems like it might be a possible life preserver.

> LLM androids

They'll make you the perfect pizza with cheese that doesn't slide off because of the glue.

But seriously, I predict inadvisably-applied LLMs are going to eventually end up somewhere between the mistakes of Juicero and the mistakes of leaded gasoline.

I think this is the case. Most of my family and friends use and like the various AI features that are popping up but aren't interested thinking about how to coax what they want out of ChatGPT or Claude.

When it's integrated into a product people are more likely to use it. Lowering the barrier to entry so to speak.

I’ve seen quite a few posts on Reddit with people asking questions like “Is a Mazda 2 really faster than a Civic Type R?!? ChatGPT told me it is” and it’s some complete nonsense numbers that could’ve been fact checked in about 5 seconds.

I don’t think the little “ChatGPT might be wrong, you should check” disclaimer is doing very much.

One of the fun things about surveillance capitalism is that you can't correct errors in any of the millions of assumptions being made about you based on any number of tiny details collected about your life.

Sounds like somebody somewhere thinks that you're old, or that you know an old person. Maybe you live in an area with lots of old people. Maybe you've got aging parents. Maybe an old person had your IP before you did. Maybe just the fact that you're still using facebook is good enough to identify someone as being old the majority of the time.

I dunno. Sarah Connor explained it pretty nicely in the 90s

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E

Kinda on the nose

I don't think so. I have many nontechnical friends who are furious at having to deal with bad AI, whether it's a stupid chatbot that they have to talk to instead of a real person or Google "AI overviews" that often get things completely wrong.

That's every streaming service right now. Netflix hides all kinds of things they have on offer from you because they've already decided what they want you to watch and they'll push it at you over and over again while keeping other content hidden unless you explicitly search for it.

We have curated TV now, but just like before the people doing the curation aren't doing it based on what's good for you, the viewer. It's based on what will benefit their bottom line.

The things we try to resort to in order to figure out what to spend our time watching like review sites and social media are already gamed and astroturfed to death. Each new one that comes out gets less useful as time goes on because of it.

Good luck finding the real humans online among the countless AI generated curators PR firms churn out.

> The same argument applies to essentially all technology, like a computer.

Why yes, it does.

Even setting aside that most AI hype: Yes, automation is in fact quite sinister if you do not go out of your way to deal with the downsides. Putting people out of a job is bad, actually.

Yes. The industrial revolution was a great boon to humanity that drastically improved quality of living and wealth. It also created horrific torment nexuses like mechanical looms into which we sent small children to get maimed.

And we absolutely could've had the former without the latter; Child labour laws handily proved it was possible, and should have been implemented far sooner.

It's a good sign that people are even going to reddit and asking for confirmation of something that seemed suspicious to them. Sure, many of them could have googled for those answers themselves, but part of the problem is how unreliable and dishonest Google has become.

Reddit sure isn't an ideal place for fact checks. It's full of PR bots and shills, but at least there are still humans commenting and I can't fault people for doing what they can in the best way they know how.

What choice does Google have? Google search is such a shit show now that I use ChatGPT to do any complicated web search. The paid version has had web search for over two years now.

Google couldn’t just keep ignoring it. I do wish it were an option instead of on by default - except for searches they can monetize

Marc Andreessen stated on twitter that was a core reason for why he likes AI, to drive down wages (which in his words "must crash").

So you are not far off from that concept of putting vast numbers of employees out of work, when influential figures like Andressen are openly stating that is their ambitions.

I agree, although "competent human" is not really the bar when we're talking about actually existing phone support. A while back I was trying to solve an issue with Verizon and calling three separate times I got three completely different approaches to solving my problem, all three of which were totally incorrect. (And the correct solution was literally just "go to this URL and fill out a form".) At least one of those people gave me advice that would have put me in legal hot water. It was rough.

Could they... improve their search results?

Or they could have just use ChstGPT and typed “provide citations…

https://chatgpt.com/share/679d7f5f-d508-8010-94fa-df9d554b62...

(and then I just remembered that the free version doesn’t have web search)

how does chatgpt paid compare to perplexity.ai ?

Who do they think will buy their products if there are no employees anywhere? Businesses, even business facing ones, eventually rely on consumers at some point to buy things. What can be gained by putting everyone out of work?

And Larry Ellison wants us all under the eye of AI cameras so that "citizens will be on their best behavior". I almost used the word "panopticon" there, but Ellison is proposing something strictly worse, in that there's no hope of the cameras not being watched.

In this case, I wouldn't attribute malice to incompetence.

For every person that asks I imagine there are a bunch that just assume it must be true because the computer told them

Similar result, maybe not quite so illustrative, perhaps more colorful, just involving images not videos. Ended up at a similar conclusion.

Tried to search user interface design for an ongoing project, and found that Google now simply ignores filtering attempts... Try to find ideas about multi-color designs, and all there is are endless image spam sites and Letterman style Top 10 lists. Try to filter those out, and Google just ignores many attempts.

There's so many, that even those that actually do get successfully filtered out, only reveal the next layer of slime to dig through. Maybe the people that didn't pay enough for placement?

Huge majority, far and away, where the "Alamy", "Shutterstock", "_____Stock", ect... photos websites. There's so many it's not really practical to notch filter. Anything involving images. Spend all day just trying to notch filter through "_____Stock" results to get to something real.

The worst though, was that even among sites that wrote something, there was almost nothing that was actually "user interfaces" or anything related to design, other than simplistic sites like "top 10 colors for your next design" that are easy to churn out.

Try to search on a different subject and filter for only recent results from 2024, get results from 2015, 2016. Difficult to tell if the subject had simply collapsed in the intervening 10 years (seemed unlikely) or if Google was completely ignoring the filters applied. The results did not substantially change. It's like existing in an echo chamber where you're shown what you're supposed to view. It all feels very 1984 lately.

Basically ended up at the same conclusion: their customers are the ad buyers. They don't get enough money from "normal" people to care.

I just used perplexity.ai. The interface is janky and it looks like it just does search.

ChatGPT has image generation, you can upload word docs, images and PDFs and it has a built in Python runtime that it uses to offload math problems to.

In addition, the Industrial Revolution led to societal upheaval which took more than a century to sort out, if you agree its ever been sorted out at all.

So, if it is true we’re on the cusp of an AI Revolution, AGI, the Singularity, or anything like that, then there’s precedent to worry. It could destroy our lives and livelihoods on a timescale of decades, even if the whole world really would be over all improved in a century or two.

> people start looking for a way to get rid of it

I would bet money that the majority of users do not actually feel this way.

It's not totally true: computer programs have downtime (even major cloud platforms), and need maintenance to keep being useful and operational.

AI confidence has been dwindling[0][1] so I don't think that's the biggest contributor.

I do think it's as simple as appealing to stakeholders in whatever way they can, regardless of customer satisfaction. As we've seen as of late, the stock markets are completely antithetical to the improvement of people's lives.

The first point does indeed come into play because oftentimes most people don't throw enough of a fuss against it. But everything has some breaking point; Microsoft's horribly launched Copilot for Office 365 showed one of them

[0]: https://www.warc.com/content/feed/ai-is-a-turn-off-for-consu...

[1]: https://hbr.org/2025/01/research-consumers-dont-want-ai-to-s...

I just wish the workers didn't have to suffer everytime some CEOs decide to experiment with humanity and stakeholders overhype things.

we most certainly are with this subscription era of software. No one had an issue with buying Office or Photoshop or any other product that has no business needing to do monthly update cycles being a "buy once, own until you wanna upgrade". Except executives who wanted to siphon more money out of their products.

Ok but how are the companies supposed to replace workers when the tech isn't having real use cases, and is far from accurate?

I agree, but doesn't that basically mean there are two camps: people who dislike it, and people who don't care? I also agree with GP in that there isn't any visible 3rd camp: people who want it. If google themselves thought people wanted this, they wouldn't need to make an un-dismissable popup in all of their products with one button, "yes please enable gemini for me", in order for people to use it.

I'm sure google thinks that people have some sort of bias, and that if they force people to use it they'll come to like it (just like google plus), but this also shows how much google looks down on the free will of its users.

That's demonstrably false unless you believe millions of people are spending their own money every month for useless tech.

I don't know how a thinking person can use this technology and not see the possibilities it opens up.

I work on a project where customers need to fill out a form to receive help. We introduced an AI chat bot to help them do the form by just talking through the problem and answering questions. Then the form is filled out for the customer for them to review before submitting.

Personally I find it slower than just doing it manually but it has resulted in the form being correct more often now and has a lot of usage. There is also a big button when the chat opens that you can click to just fill it out manually.

It has its place, that place just isn't everywhere and the only option.

> one of the most effective things you can do if you direct it in the “right” avenues

The people I know who “worry” are terrible about predicting negative events that impact them. I think that’s why it’s uncommon, lots of negative health outcomes and almost zero actual benefits.

Instead simply aiming for reasonable levels of resiliency in health, finances, etc tends to cover a huge range of issues. In that context having a preference for open systems makes a lot of sense, but focusing a lot of effort on it doesn’t.

Yet, some analysts claim the fact that people nevertheless use these awful choices means they like them despite their frequent complaints.

They cite "Revealed Choice", which may apply when there is an actual choice.

But in the nearly winner-take-all dynamic of digital services, when the few oligopolistic market leaders present nearly identical choices, the actual usage pattern reveals only that a few bad choices are just barely worse than chucking the whole thing.

Correction: That some subset of the people you mostly meet online tries to get rid off.

You'd be surprised how many don't even realize it's artificial, and/or welcome it. The average Google user is most certainly not similar to the average Hacker News commenter.

<Maybe AI assistants in random places just aren’t that compatible with people on HN but are possibly useful for a lot of people not on HN?>

Coincidentally today, I received an automated text from my heath care entity along the lines of, "Please recognize this number as from us. Our AI will be calling you to discuss your heath."

No. I'm not going to have a personal discussion with an AI.

I remain skeptical of the prediction that AI will simply “take over jobs”. If AI becomes advanced enough to perform tasks traditionally done by skilled professionals, it would instead democratize access to capabilities that are currently gatekept by wealth and resources (since right now you can’t have human employees, but you’d be able to have AI workers for cheap).

In this scenario, individuals without substantial capital could leverage AI to achieve outcomes that today require the resources and influence of wealthy founders. It might do the opposite of what CEOs seem to think: challenge existing power structures and create a more level playing field.

It's not even remotely a minority. It was widely mocked everywhere when they first debuted it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1czcjze/how_is_ai_o...

Mainstream press have been covering how much people hate it - people's grandparents are getting annoyed by it. Worse, it comes on the heels of four years of Prabhakar Raghavan ruining Google Search for the sake of trying to pump ad revenue.

It's a steaming pile of dogshit that either provides useless information unrelated to what you searched for and is just another thing to scroll past, and even worse, provides completely wrong information half the time, which means even if the response seems to be what you asked, it's still useless because you can't trust it.

There’s been several products where I want to pay to disable certain features—especially AI features.

What state or territory does that? Not a challenge, just curious, there are over 50 to track.

I did a project a while back that created a wizard to fill in a form - I also found it much easier to simply complete the form, but when we demonstrated it to target users they nearly cried with relief. It was a good reminder of the importance of knowing what users actually want.

I should go back to look at that and see if we could incorporate an easy ChatBot as an improvement.

> unless you believe millions of people are spending their own money every month for useless tech.

Your premise is wrong. You assume these people are spending money creating useful output or would otherwise understand and be able to implement a more efficient means on their own. In the words of David Graeber a lot of people have bullshit jobs, are you sure the "AI" isn't alleviating some other problem for them?

> and not see the possibilities it opens up.

The current technology has no natural exponential growth curve. Which means for a linear increase in spending you get a linear increase in accuracy. Any thinking person should see where this is going. Which is why you should call these LLMs so you don't accidentally fool yourself.

I mean, of course, when AGI does arrive and has a reasonable power budget, then we're talking. The current technology will never become this or anything like this. This will almost certainly lead to a new "AI winter" before AGI happens and will likewise almost certainly not occur during yours or my lifetime.

If you do believe that then I have a self driving battery powered semi to sell you that's fully autonomous and will run road cargo trains for you all day and night for huge profits.

> hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively.

They already fired so many developers and this feels more like a Hail Mary before maintenance costs and tech debt start catching up to you.

No, I like the AI summaries and I had assumed I was in the silent majority. People like convenience and it usually answers correctly.

I'm sure there's a time and place for these things, but this sounds very much like the echo chamber I hear at work all the time.

Someone has a 'friend' who has a totally-not-publically-visible form where a chat bot interacts with the form and helps the user fill the form in.

...and users love it.

However, when really pressed, I've yet to encounter someone who can actually tell me specifically

1) What form it is (i.e. can I see it?)

2) How much effort it was to build that feature.

...because, the problem with this story is that what you're describing is a pretty hard problem to solve:

- An agent interacts with a user.

- The agent has free reign to fill out the form fields.

- Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is both faster and more accurate than users typing into the field themselves.

- At any time the user can opt to stop interacting with the the agent and fill in the fields and the agent must understand what's happened independently of the chat context. i.e. The form state has to be part of the chat bot's context.

- At the end, the details filled in by the agent are distinguished from user inputs for user review.

It's not a trivial problem. It sounds like a trivial problem; the agent asks 'what sort of user are you?' and parses the answer into one of three enum values; Client, Foo, Bar -> and sets the field 'user type' to the value via a custom hook.

However, when you try to actually build such a system (as I have), then there are a lot of complicated edge cases, and users HATE it when the bot does the wrong thing, especially when they're primed to click 'that looks good to me' without actually reading what the agent did.

So.

Can you share an example?

What does 'and has a lot of usage' mean in this context? Has it increased the number of people filling in the form, or completing it correctly (or both?) ?

I'd love to see one that users like, because, oh boy, did they HATE the one we built.

At the end of the day, smart validation hints on form input fields are a lot of easier to implement, and are well understood by users of all types in my experience; it's just generally a better, normal way of improving form conversion rates which is well documented, understood and measurable using analytics.

...unless you specifically need to add "uses AI" to your slide deck for your next round of funding.

It's "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Which is a stupid argument, since there is "any tech" that can do your laundry and dishes, and it's been around for decades! Is it too hard for you to put your dishes in the dishwasher, or your clothes in the washing machine?

And I say this as someone bearish on AI.

One prescient comment was made by Eric Yuan (Zoom CEO), who made the claim that the reliability and general efficacy issues from AI products would be solved "down the stack", and I think this is more or less the attitude right now. Firms believe if they can build their LLM/AI products, the underlying LLMs/AI will catch up over time to meet their requirements.

I've also talked to a number of CTOs and CEOs who tell me that they're building their own AI products nominally to replace human workers, but they're not necessarily confident it will be successful in the foreseeable future. However, they want to be in a good place to capitalize on the success of AI if it does happen.

> Is it too hard for you to put your dishes in the dishwasher, or your clothes in the washing machine?

Is it "too hard"? No. Is it a substantial time sink, and one that (in the case of laundry, particularly) breaks up flow, so that it is inconvenient for someone who has to deal with $DAYJOB and those chores and wants to do art and writing (or other personal projects that take focus)? Yes.

It also looks really appealing to do tasks you have a very shallow and dismissive opinion of. For example, a lot of managers and c-level sorts seem to think it will replace developers. I think it would be great at summarizing and passing up reports and generating plausible looking meaningless text—so, it looks like it could do most management type jobs, to me.

But, I must try to have a little bit of self awareness here: if we all think it can do the jobs we don’t understand and don’t think it can do the job we’ve got experience in, then maybe that just indicates that it isn’t really very good at anything yet.

You might've been… slightly… more convincing if you had any sources to back that absolutely wild claim up.

>unless you believe millions of people are spending their own money every month for useless tech

that's a hot take! A classic "Eat shit! A million flies can't be wrong.". really made me smile :)

BILLIONS of people are spending their own money for useless tech, simply because they fear of missing out.

Thinking person can see it is generating text from the input query – which is useful of course – but not dramatically useful

> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work

no. On the contrary. We will need people to clean the mess left by AI

> and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively.

yes.

But that's where my job is!

Hmmm. Is there a word I can use to stop seeing the word 'Subscribe' on every site?

Human beings still need all those things whether they are employed or not though...

Polish Lidl works like that. You self-checkout alcohol and some store employee gets notified. They look at you and approve remotely. If you scan alcohol first, they will likely do that before you finish checkout and there is no waiting involved.

Another view is that the Internet exactly matched this model, and that it's much closer to the norm than not: the Internet became available to normal people in the mid-to-late 90s, depending on where you were, but all that was on the web was dumb personal websites (1). In the late 90s bubble, startups seemed pretty crazy, slapping "...but on the Internet" onto basically any idea and raising money off of it (2), basically what's happening with "...but with AI" today. Most failed to find a market because too few people were using the Internet for everything and the frantic search for users failed (3).

But just as the conservative old-school business people were laughing and patting themselves on the back post-bubble over how stupid all the dotcoms were for thinking they could monetize eyeballs, Google emerges, and 20 years later tech companies drive the stock market rather than following it. Don't dismiss a technology just because the birthing spasms look ugly, it takes some time for markets to develop and for products to settle into niches. At the start a lot of that is due to people not being comfortable, tech sucking, and the market shifting too quickly to precisely target, but that can all change pretty fast.

Maybe at some point giant companies like google realize that the only logical solution to the expansion problem is that they have to help space research to actually be able to expand more.

Jokes aside, investors behind google seem to not realize that google at this point is infrastructure and not an expandable product market anymore. What's left to expand to since the Google India Ad 2013? What? North Korea, China, Russia, maybe? And then everyone gets their payout?

Financial ecosystems and their bets rely on infinite expansion capabilities, which is not possible without space travel.

Isn’t this position predicated on the assumption that individuals without substantial capital “own” an AI?

When someone uses an AI they do not own, they are (maybe) receiving a benefit in exchange for improving that AI and associated intellectual property / competitive advantage of the person or entity that owns the AI—-and subsequently improving the final position of the AI’s owner.

The better an AI becomes, the more valuable it becomes, and the more likely that the owner of the AI would want to either restrict access to the AI and extract additional value from users (e.g. via paid subscription model) or leverage the AI to develop new or improve existing revenue streams—-even if doing so is to the detriment of AI users. After all… a sufficiently-trained “AGI” AI could (in theory) be capable of outsmarting anyone that uses it, know more about its users than its users consciously know about themselves, and could act faster than any human.

While I share in your hope, I think it is unfortunately far more likely that AIs will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots and will evolve into some of the most financially and intellectually oppressive technology ever used by humans (willingly or not).

It just takes a generation of people growing up with it until it really takes hold. People didn't use to ask Google questions, either, but now you're the outlier if you try using search terms instead.

I feel like a lot of devs and artists are dreading the idea of their entire job becoming nothing more than "debug/fix the mess an AI made". Going from designer/architect to QA/editor would kill a lot of the fun and satisfaction people get from their work.

so far I've only seen it in the midwest - WI and IL

You are in the silent majority. It's a costly feature for Google and they aren't the type to take a large risk of pushing out something unpopular to their most profitable product.

> If AI (or any tech) could clean, do dishes, or cook (which is not a chore for many, I acknowledge that) it could potentially bring families together and improve the quality of peoples lives.

One day they'll put those kinds of robots in people's homes, but I'll keep them out of mine because they'll be full of sensors, cameras, and microphones connected to the cloud and endlessly streaming everything about your family and your home to multiple third parties. It's hard enough dealing with cell phones and keeping "smart"/IoT crap from spying on us 24/7 and they don't walk around on their own to go snooping.

The sad thing about every technology now is that whatever benefits it might bring to our lives, it will also be working for someone else who wants to use it against us. Your new smart TV is gorgeous but it watches everything you see and inserts ads while your watching a bluray. Your shiny car is self-driving, but you're tracked everywhere you go, there are cameras pointed at you recording and microphones listening the entire time sending real-time data to police and your insurance company. Your fancy AR implant means you'll never forget someone's name since it automatically shows up next to their face when you see them, but now someone else gets to decide what you'll see and what you aren't allowed to see. I think I'll just keep washing my own dishes.

It's great when it works. Yesterday I needed to contact support for a company but all they had was a chatbot. I explained what information I was looking for and it linked me something completely irrelevant and asked if this solved my problem - with big buttons to reply yes/no. I pressed "no" which simply caused a message with "no" to be sent from me in the chat. The bot replied with "You're welcome!". I wrote a manual clarification that this did not solve my issue. The bot answered "You're welcome". Luckily, I found that ignoring this and asking the question again did work.

This can often be done without any AI (I suppose you mean LLMs here but I'm not sure since the term has been diluted so much).

My partner has dyslexia and finds forms overwhelming. Chatbots break this down and (I suspect) give the same feeling of guidance. As for specific examples NHS has some terribly overwhelming forms and processes - image search IAPTUS.

Another example; I was part of a team that created a chatbot which helped navigate internal systems for call centre operators. If a customer called in, we would pick up on keywords and that provided quick links for the operator and pre-fill details like accounts etc. The operator could type questions too which would bring up the relevant docs or links. I did think looking into the UX would’ve been a better time spend and solved more problems as the system was chaos but “client wants”. What we built in the end did work well and reduced onboarding and training by 2 weeks.

Some variant of express lanes (may be >10 or <10 items) still exist in most of the grocery stores I frequent.

Getting cash used to be a royal PITA. Not that I need much cash these days but it used to mean going out at lunch during bank hours and waiting in line.

Stores seem to have dialed down some of the sensitivity. I don't know the last time I've run into a complaint because I used my own bag or something else that affects weight. One of my regular grocery stores doesn't have self-checkout. The other one has both and I'll wait for a cashier if I have a lot of items, especially produce. But if I have a handful of barcoded items I'll use self-checkout unless there is a cashier's lane with literally no wait.

Dishwashers and washing machines don't eliminate cleaning all dishes/kitchen stuff and clothes but, realistically, they cut down on them a lot.

That billions of dollars is being spent on AI? That's a wild claim?

It's dramatically useful for millions of people who are now much more productive than they were 3 years ago, including the programmers who have 10x'd their output.

Your superiority complex is nothing new... anytime new technology emerges, there's an old crochety class that thinks it's a fad. It's always people arrogant enough to believe they know the world better than everybody else.

And no, billions of people aren't spending money on tech purely because of FOMO. That's just nonsense.

I don't know what the point of your rant was. Nobody is talking about AGI. Even if the technology never evolves again, it's still dramatically useful to the tune of billions and billions of dollars being spent on it.

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Midjourney are all branded as "AI".

> Coincidentally today, I received an automated text from my heath care entity along the lines of, "Please recognize this number as from us. Our AI will be calling you to discuss your heath."

That sets off super strong scam vibes to me... Our banking industry here and medical industry pushes phishing information down your throat so much people even worry about legitimate communication that couldn't possibly be a scam being a scam.

I find that to be better for society but definitely clouds my judgement on those kinds of text. Also I have absolutely dropped my previous bank because it became impossible to speak to an actual human and willingly pay more for a bank where my phonecall goes directly to a human.

Do what one of the other commenters mentioned, make the AI an assistant for the human beings that help your customers, let the humans communicate with humans.

you get the employees rebate at selfcheckout

Thanks for correcting the quote, it's been a while since I read it. Yes I struggle with doing chores, mainly because there is no reward and they are tedious and boring and I'd rather spend my time doing interesting things. But AI can't do that for me because it's more profitable for them to use the technology to steal.

I didn't think about the privacy aspect, my concern is mostly with the subscription model. You won't be able to just buy an automatic dishwasher, oh no. You can start out at the basic plan for $x a month and bundle it with countertop plan for $y/month.

Oh good lord, I asked it two fairly technical questions, and it contradicted both the top answers... is there a way to get rid of it?

You used to be able to put 'Eliza' to sleep by using the word 'Dreamt'

For some people, its actually therapeutic, but for most, its like talking to a plant, except AI does not benefit from the exhaled carbon dioxide.

Humans have no intrinsic value except to convert food to carbon dioxide, most of which are completely useless to the Reich. AI is cheap to train ( only a few million dollars per model ), and cheap to run:

Data centers will soon outstrip all other uses of electrical power, as for an AI calling in sick, no it needs full power 24/7. AI has no creativity, no initiative, no conscious, and absolutely zero ethics.

"In a middle-ground scenario, by 2027 new AI servers sold that year alone could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually."

Can I control those robots using VR?

The joke used to be, "there's no girls on the internet."

Now its, "there's no humans on the internet."

I struggle to find a comparison that adequately describes the head snap at how fast some of these image / video generators were deployed.

The one that really got me was the immediate use of fake image gen by the British Royal Family. [1] (Check the kid's hand in the lower left they didn't even mark, broken fingers) Didn't even try to respond with anything real. Immediate response, photo image gen.

[1] BRF Doctored Family Photo (Sky News), https://news.sky.com/story/kates-doctored-photo-is-a-huge-ch...

People who knows better want to diable it 99% of others don't care or fins it more pratical to read the AI summary

I'm not suggesting child labor laws are bad, I'm saying automation is good and not sinister. Automation inherently reduces labor, which can inherently lead to someone not needing to work a job that is now automated. That we want to protect people from suffering doesn't mean we should be suspicious of all new technology because we can imagine a way someone might lose a job.

>1) What form it is (i.e. can I see it?)

You would need to spend thousands of dollars to become a customer, if you are not already one.

>An agent interacts with a user.

Correct, they are asked to describe their problem. There are some follow up questions, then some very specific questions if the form still isn't filled out.

>The agent has free reign to fill out the form fields.

Correct but there are actually very few free form fields and a lot of selections.

>Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is more accurate than users typing into the field themselves.

Correct, the form is filled out correctly more often now

>Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is faster than users typing into the field themselves.

No, I specifically said it is not. I can fill out a junk but valid form in about 10 seconds and valid with relevant data for testing in about 30 seconds. It is not a long form, but your selections will change the next selections. But I also helped build the form and have seen it go through every iteration.

>At any time the user can opt to stop interacting with the the agent and fill in the fields and the agent must understand what's happened independently of the chat context. i.e. The form state has to be part of the chat bot's context.

Would be a nice feature upgrade but if the user abandons the bot they just fill out the form as normal, same as if they decided to skip the bot at the beginning.

>At the end, the details filled in by the agent are distinguished from user inputs for user review.

Do you mean how do we know if the chat bot was used or whether it fills out the form. Both are trivial.

>Has it increased the number of people filling in the form, or completing it correctly (or both?) ?

The ideal case is that they never need to request help, but nearly all users will need help maybe once or twice a year unless something is really wrong. But yes, the number of users filling out the form incorrectly has decreased. Seems like the users don't mind spending 2-5 minutes per year chatting with the bot.

> You would need to spend thousands of dollars to become a customer, if you are not already one.

Can you be more specific?

Like, where specifically would I have to spend money to see this.

> Seems like the users don't mind spending 2-5 minutes per year chatting with the bot.

This seems like an enormous amount of effort to have gone to for a single form that people use once a year.

Did you roll out the chatbot assist to other forms? If not, why not? If so, are any of those forms easier to get access to that we can see either live or in a video?

Honestly, this is why I get frustrated with these conversations.

If it works so well, why isn't this sort of thing rolled out in many, visible, obvious places. Why is it hidden away behind paywalls and internal systems where no one can see it?

Why isn't everyone doing it? I've visited 4 websites today which had a chat bot on them, and none of them had a way for the bot to interact with anything on the page other than their own chat context.

Like I said, I'm sure it works to some degree, and varying degrees depending how much effort you put into it... but I'm frustrated I can never find someone who's so proud of it working they can go HERE, look at THIS example of it working.

Does anyone have an example we can actually look at?

> As for specific examples NHS has some terribly overwhelming forms and processes - image search IAPTUS.

Are those example where a chatbot helps fill out the form, or just examples of where forms are hard?

My image search did not find any results of AI chatbots that helped fill out the form for you. Do you have a direct link to a form by any chance?

You really like to shift things into personal attacks, huh?

"It's dramatically useful for millions of people who are now much more productive than they were 3 years ago, including the programmers who have 10x'd their output." - anecdotally

Your productivity cult is nothing new, anytime new quantity multiplier emerges, there's a freshman manager class like you who thinks quantity>quality. It is obvious from your comment since more productive and 10x output are the only things you praised there.

It's always people arrogant enough to believe they are riding the right hype-train, and everybody else is left behind.

No. The VR revolution will never come.

Lol okay buddy. That's why there are literally millions of people spending money every month and upgrading because of how useful this is. But there's always some big brained ape on hacker news who thinks they know better and everyone is just riding the hype train.

Nearly half of Google engineers' outputs are coming from AI generated code, but you obviously know better than all of them.

Millions of people spending money is not an indicator how useful something is.

"Nearly half of Google engineers' outputs are coming from AI generated code" – let's take a look at the results: 30 discontinued products for the past 3 years, and just 1 new product: Gemini, which got it's glorious 10% market share. Now that's a productivity monster.

Google is such a successful company now: they released 1 new product which didn't even surpass the microsoft chatbot in market share, and people are adding "fucking" to searches in order to get adequate search results. Great growth, was definitely not possible without AI!

Totally. And where do you work that's so much more succesful? lol

No, millions of people smarter and more succesful than you TELLING you it's useful is what makes it more useful. But when you're this arrogant it'll never register.

Like I said, this is nothing new. It's like the arrogant boobs who thought smartphones were just a fad. Or the famous HN commenter who said Dropbox was pointless.

Allrightie, at least I don't have millions of people telling me anything, that sounds really uncomfortable

Excessive smartphone use can lead to mental injury btw,

take care

That said "AI" is "very useful".

It was for examples of overwhelming forms to your #1.

Apologies for the confusion - that wasn’t clear at all.