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ike2792 | 2 months ago

I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up.

In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.

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nunez|2 months ago

Case in point: subscription costs for everything going up to justify the "additional value" that AI is bringing _whether you use it or not_.

This would have been an additional, more expensive, subscription tier in the past.

Anecdote: Literally this morning, krisp.ai (noise cancellation software that succumbed to slop-itis two years ago and added AI notetaker and meeting summarization stuff to their product that's really difficult to turn off, which is insulting seeing how most people purchased this tool JUST FOR NOISE CANCELLING, but I digress) sent an email to their customers (me) announcing that they would no longer offer a free tier and will, instead, offer 14-day trials with all features enabled.

Why?

"As AI has become central to everyday work, we’ve seen that most people preferred the unlimited workflow once they tried it."

This bait-and-switch era is tiring.