I’ve tried several types of artificial intelligence including Gemini, Microsoft co-pilot, chat GPT. A lot of the times I ask them questions and they get everything wrong. If artificial intelligence doesn’t work why are they trying to make us all use it?
Look at all the comments on this post. We’re not quite there but imagine half of the comments written by Chat GPT and it’s only going to get better.
Does it matter than 50% of them get it wrong?
To advertisers? No.
To the platform designers? Also no.
To idiot users? Still no.
To non-idiot users? Surprisingly no (bc we already left and are here now:-).
To people wanting Reddit to go the distance and boost their stock values, yes. But only in the long-term, which never exists, and in the short-term, no.
Hence, enshittification, delivered in a confident tone.
Investors are dumb. It’s a hot new tech that looks convincing (since LLMs are designed specifically to appear correct, not be correct), so anything with that buzzword gets a ton of money thrown at it. The same phenomenon has occurred with blockchain, big data, even the World Wide Web. After each bubble bursts, some residue remains that actually might have some value.
And LLM is mostly for investors, not for users. Investors see you “do AI” even if you just repackage GPT or llama, and your Series A is 20% bigger.
I can see that. That guy over there has the new shiny toy. I want a new shiny toy. Give me a new shiny toy.
Money. If you paid to use those services, they got what they wanted.
Money.
That’s the entirety of the reason.
“Line must go up.”
Summed up an MBA in four words.
“Be greedy” => there, did it in two:-P
It is so sad that it works too - no room for nuance, responsibility, even long-term stability (even for the entire human species, + all other mammals on Earth & many others too that we seem ready to take down with us on our way to extinction).
Generative AI has allowed us to do some things that we could not do before. A lot of people very foolishly took that to mean it would let us do everything we couldn’t do before.
That’s because the PR department keeps telling us that it’s the best things since sliced bread.
I second this, very consice and accurate
The last big fall in the price of bitcoin, in December '22 was caused by a shift in the dynamics of mining where it became more expensive to mine new btc than what the coin was actually worth. Not only did this plunge the price of crypto it also demolished demand for expensive graphics chips which are repurposed to run the process-heavy complex math used in mining. Cheaper chips, cascading demand and server space that was dedicated to mining related activities threatened to wipe out profit margins in multiple tech sectors.
6 months later, Chat GPT is tolled out by Open AI. The previous limitations on processing capabilities were gone, server space was cheap and the tech was abundant. So all these tech sectors at risk of losing their ass in an overproduction driven recession, now had a way to pump the price of their services and this was to pump AI.
Additionally around this time the world was recovering from covid lockdowns. Increased demand for online services was dwindling (exacerbating the other crisis outlined above) as people were returning to work and spending more time being social IRL rather than using services. Companies had hired lots of new workers: programmers, tech infrastructure workers, etc., yo meet the exploding demand during covid. Now they had too many workers and their profits were being threatened.
The Federal reserve had raised interest rates to stifle continued hiring of new employees. The solution that the fed had come up with in order to stifle inflation was to encourage laying off workers end masse – what Marxists might call restoring the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population – which was substantially depleted during the pandemic. But business owners were reluctant to do this, the tight labor market of the last few years had made business owners and managers skittish about letting people go.
A basic principle at play here, is that new technology is introduced for two reasons only: to sell as a new commodity and (what we are principally concerned with) replacing workers with machines. Another basic principle is that the capitalist system has to have a certain percentage of its population unemployed and hyper exploited in order to keep wages low.
So there was a confluence of incentives here. 1. Inexpensive server space and chips which producers were eager to restore to profitability (or else face drastic consequences) 2. A need to lay off workers in order to stop inflation 3. Incentives for businesses to do so.
Laying off relatively highly paid technical/intellectual labor is a low hanging fruit in this whole equation, and the roll out of AI did just that. Hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers were laid off across a variety of sectors, assured that AI would create so much more efficiency and cut out the need for so many of these workers. So they rolled out this garbage tech that doesn’t work, but everyone in the industry, the media, the government needs it to work, or else they face a massive economic crisis, which had already started with inflation.
At the end of the day its just a massive grift, pushed out to compensate for excessive overproduction driven by another massive grift (cryptocurrency) combined with economic troubles that arose from an insufficient government response to a pandemic that killed millions of people; and rather than take other measures to stifle inflation our leaders in global finance decided to shunt the consequences onto workers, as always. The excuse given was AI, which is nothing more than a predictive text algorithm attached to a massive database created by exploited workers overseas and stolen IPs, and a fuck load of processing power.
I hope someday we can come up with an economic system that is not based purely on profit and the exploitation of human beings. But I don’t know that I’ll live long enough to see it.
Well remember that the shifts that can happen in material conditions and consciousness can happen very quickly. We can’t decide when that is, but we can prepare and build trust until it does occur. Hard to imagine what it would take in the west to see an overthrow of capitalism, all we can do is throw our weight behind where it will have the most effect, hopefully where our talents reside also! Stay optimistic, despite even evidence to the contrary. For the capitalists, its better to believe that the end of the world is coming than to believe a new world is possible. So if nothing else lets give em hell
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this exact thought. 😕
Are you an economist or business professor IRL? Because that was an amazing answer!
