The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success' with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc.

Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.

A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped me.

You: No one knows anything AI helps with.

Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.

How much astroturfing is happening online? These companies certainly have the funds to do so on a wide scale

The only thing I trust about these right now is my own experience

This is how it is done openly with clearly Grok-edited or written comments:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m

One can only imagine the amount of covert promotion.

Are these "million people" in the room with you now? Or are they just the bot and shill accounts you're reading on "X"?

From another industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_...

I don't have much proof, but given the incentives and the possibility of doing it I'd be surprised if it wasn't happening everywhere. How much would be enough to pay the top 50 influencers in a market to push something? To hire 100 people to be active full time on all social media sites? To a company with billions they wouldn't even notice the expense

Default to skepticism and double down on your critical thinking skills. More important than ever today

They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people. ChatGPT and the other big LLMs has hundreds of millions of users.

You might not like using LLMs. You might not find them useful. You might think they're bad and harmful (I do). But to claim that no one finds them useful is a completely different position, and one that's about as disconnected as it's possible to be.

> They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people.

I have all of those. Most don't use AI at all. Some use it on a limited basis but it is unclear if there is any worthwhile gain in productivity. Remaining are two who use it with regularity, including one who's all in. I personally use it for 2 limited use cases. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I'd be done sooner without it.

Conversely, I need to mediate an epidemic of AI foistware and AI UX pollution. 100% of my userbase is subject to overpushy AI offerings and an endless minefield of shifty, unwanted AI elements. These users are clearly more productive when I keep AI out of their way.

On balance, AI is presently a net negative for my clients.

I’m sure it is. Though I can never tell if it is astroturfing or extremely weird AI maximalists just reminding us that they’re in a cult.