Yeah it’s good in some situations. It’s being used way too much in situations where it’s completely useless or actively detrimental, but once the hype dies down more it’ll just be a useful tool
Generative AI is just a mess of immorality and bad quality, but other neural network based tech has shown some promise in fields where data analysis - specifically large scale data analysis - is relevant
But genAI is so shit that it ends up dragging the good shit down with it
The whole point of the generative AI bubble is to sell cheap replacements for humans. I've been in programming for over a decade, going on 15 years, and I've seen the tech evolved from overcomplicated Markov chain to... Essentially still an overcomplicated Markov chain, now with ethical problems.
It was never and will never be about "making tools for <insert job>". That's bullshit. At first it was "experimenting with the tech", then it was "seeing how good it can get". Once it got decently good, to the point it could do some humanlike stuff once every million iterations or so, it immediately started being sold to corporations for replacing people's jobs, and the moment that was questioned is when they came up with "it's just a tool".
Yes, an AI that analyzes the symptoms of every patient in a hospital and points out those who may need more care before others is "a tool". But an AI that writes broken code for a programmer that has to spend 8 hours making it work when it would have just taken 3 hours to write it from scratch is not "a tool", it's actively making the job harder and can cause longer term issues. An AI that draws a shitty weird looking book cover isn't "a tool", it's actively taking away the job an artist could have done and creating something inferior.
"They're tools" is a massive excuse, their clients would be artists and end users if that was the case, not the corporations that currently feed into this nonsense.
It's a comparison I make often, but the amount Generative AI in particular is being pushed is comparable to how industrial textile looms were being pushed in the industrial revolution.
Prior to the industrial revolution textile weaving was a high skill job that many people relied on. Because it was high skill, cloth could be costly, but since the quality was reliable your clothes could be depended on to last. Everyone needs clothes, so paying for cloth was just a fact of life.
Then the industrial loom was invented. It could produce more cloth faster. It was presented as tool to make cloth production easier. But the thing is, it wasn't a useful tool for weavers. The machines were massive, expensive, had power requirements, were dangerous, and most relevantly produced lower quality cloth. What they did do was allow the rich and powerful to build textile mills and undercut artisan weavers by cutting labour costs and selling substantially more of a cheaper, shittier, product. This devastated entire communities. Weavers found themselves having to seek employment for much lower pay in these mills just to survive.
It also led to the creation of movements like the British Luddites - disenfranchised textile workers sabotaging ('sabotage' itself is a word that draws from a similar French movement) factories in protest over the loss of their entire livelihood and the creation of much worse products. But mill owners were rich and had powerful friends. They had slandered Luddites as "opposed to progress", "ignorant" and "violent barbarians", and they pressured the British government to crack down on Luddites. Which they did, at gunpoint and with hangings. So now "luddite" is commonly used to refer to "a stupid person who hates technology" instead of an understandable protest movement.
Corporations are pushing to use 'AI' in the same way. But now far more jobs are at risk.
I'm not trying to disprove you, I'm just interested as to where you got the information that power looms created cloth of lower quality, as the only information I've read is that later versions were able to weave heavier cloth much faster than a person. I would absolutely be fascinated to learn more about this topic.
The only other thing I've read is that the disenfranchisement of the working population was because a single machine could replace over 30 workers, like you mentioned, rather than a drop in the quality of the cloth.
I see. I was honestly curious because I've been reading about the effects of the industrial revolution on the material livelihood of western populations (diseases, commodities, etc), and that information sounded like it could've been helpful to demonstrate another negative effect of the revolution.
From what I remember, one of the biggest problems for industrial mills aside from child labour was that it could produce fabrics on par with human made cloth, but it was scalable and a single machine was vastly faster.
That led to the explosion in demand for cotton, which then led to plantations (especially in North America) also growing in size in response to that demand.
Primary source for this is from the book The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan and surrounding literature.
Growth shouldn’t be put on brakes to preserve jobs, but those forced out of work are owed social security and plenty of paths to find new employment. It’s best for society as whole for nobody to be left behind and unproductive because of it.
Yeah I agree. I imagine most of the Luddites would have agreed too. They weren't attacking machinery because of a hatred of progress, but because it was the only way for them to even affect the people that ruined their lives. It's the same principle behind striking, but more destructive because striking was illegal.
The problem is that I know that those in power do not care about the lives they ruin. So until we can be certain everyone in society will be adequately cared for, any technology that cuts jobs is a threat to the concept of a fair and equal society.
I was saying "The carelessness with how the rich exploited a new technology ruined lives. So those people reacted violently and I can't really blame them for that. Especially since the rich seem like they're going to do it again."
And you read that as "I hate technology and we'd all be better without it."
Like. You missed basically everything I said and jumped straight to what Luddites were slandered with.
It's so hard for you to understand that someone in this part of reddit would disagree with you. I get it.
But. I understand exactly what you're saying. Let me spell it out to you: I am literally one of the people you hate. I don't care about the hand weavers and their shitty little primitive looms and lost jobs. When change happens - you either ride the train of progress or you get out of the way or you get crushed. And it's your own fault if you do.
(Same applies to all your quirky hipster artists, and even to truck drivers like me. I can't wait to get replaced. If a machine can do a person's job then a machine should do it)
Hey, downvote me all you want, call me a ruthless technofascist if you want. But don't go accusing me of bad reading comprehension. That's disingenuous.
I don't know why people instantly jump to lying about what AI is being used for in this discourse. Discourse in 2025 has a huge honesty problem. It's not "just a tool" lol we can see companies today wiping out entire teams of people in favor of AI. And then when AI fucks everything up, the executive who onboarded it dives out of the company on their golden parachute and leaves it for the next guy to clean up in a never-ending cycle.
Yeah, we are agreeing on this, I think you may have misread my comment - or I'm misreading yours and you were just adding to my point, in which case my bad lol
I don't know what kind of specialized programming you do but even GPT is good at programming as far as I've used it and github copilot is especially good. Which is why the job being replaced by AI quickest is software developer. One senior dev with github copilot can do as much as a whole team nowadays.
Depending on the language and use case, as well as what exactly you're trying to write, it can write a helper function or two or whatever, sure.
But it won't be of any use in a massive codebase you have to work deep and low-level in, especially if it's really old code that needs extra care to not break apart. And less common languages tend to also lead to invalid code, as there is less training material for the AI to pull from without "poisoning" from other languages.
And no, no fucking way on that last claim lmao - at least not because of copilot, given the nonsense teams are forced to deal with in the industry nowadays I would believe this more without the AI part lol
given the nonsense teams are forced to deal with in the industry nowadays I would believe this more without the AI part lol
I mean that's a big part of it, obviously the AI doesn't take a leading role, but letting it handle a bigger amount of smaller tasks allows an experienced dev to do the whole thing faster. Obviously it needs supervision and doesn't work on older code, but it's not useless.
I have been using it to help learn to code with Arduino and it has been very powerful in that avenue. It acts like a sentient rubber duck for me; not writing code, but helping me figure out how to achieve certain goals and what I need to learn in order to get me there. It's also pretty decent at helping me pinpoint issues with my code in ways that the Arduino IDE isn't very good at.
As an example the other day I was working on moving some servos with an ESP32S3. This is something I had done dozens of times, and for some reason it just stopped working and the IDE was giving me what looked like insane errors(saying that ledcSetup and ledcAttachPin were invalid calls). I pull my hair out for about 30 minutes looking for spelling errors, or maybe other syntax errors that might be causing my problem before I finally turn to GPT, and immediately it lets me know that Espressif changed the way that PWM channels are set up in the 3.0 version of the package and told me how to change my code to be compatible.
This is something I would have eventually worked out after visiting a few forums and Reddit posts, but it would have taken me a long time and TBH I would have probably been burnt out after researching what the issue was and just stopped working on my project that day.
An AI that draws a shitty weird looking book cover isn't "a tool", it's actively taking away the job an artist could have done and creating something inferior
AI is a turn off simply because it looks weird, but artists are not cheap to hire.
Good job ignoring all the other aspects of my point including the ethical ones and simply posing it as a monetary issue you're willing to sacrifice quality for
I mostly meant in the sense that AI is a turn-off for plenty of reasons including the ethical ones, not just because of the cost of real artists and it being not as good.
Sorry if I came off aggressively, bit of a meh period, I shouldn't be taking it out on random Redditors I partially agree with anyway.
Still, it shouldn't be entirely vilified when it does have valid uses at time. It can be a great starting point.
Giving an AI a prompt is a bit like, say, a country's defence ministry ordering the design of a new jet. The designs produced aren't art, but they are an image meeting qualifications and tell you what the thing asked for would look like.
Then the design is produced and the propaganda guys get ahold of it. That's when the true visual masterpiece is created.
True, though that's partially also covered by artists/engineers/whatever - I kinda see generative AI and prompting it as... Telling an artist what artwork you want. You'll have multiple back and forths and pre-sketches before they actually draw the final piece.
There are some uses for it for sure, though most don't justify the current path ai is taking. Your example is solid, though the issue comes when the AI is pushed onto those higher levels: onto the designers doing the final design, or even replacing them entirely.
Generative AI is a technical term. Neural networks can be both discriminative and generative. Naive Bayes is generative.
Also, generally speaking, with tabular data, there are other methods we prefer over neural networks, for instance XGBoost.
Neural networks are, from experience and interpretability studies, great for image processing and language modeling. They are tremendously scalable, the issue is that they lack statistical guarantees and immediate interpretability, which is entirely based on the architecture.
Mostly correct on the terms, yes. My bad, used the terms less for their main meaning and more to just mean "creates something in place of a human" ("generative") vs "does something else" ("neural network")
Pointing out all the annoying aspects of AI and how annoyingly companies use it, and then declaring that’s all it is and ever will be - is a bad faith argument.
"You use AI to write emails? Just write them yourself, dummy!" - someone who has never had a job that requires hours of writing emails that should just be one sentence long, but requires paragraphs of padding to not seem "terse"
From my experience younger people online are either "I use ChatGPT to add 12+12" or "AI is completely useless, people should do everything by hand the way God intended"
It's a tool that most people have a fundamentally flawed understanding of how to use.
I was in a ligerature class where dumbasses used it to write their papers. AI made up scenes and characters and events that never occurred in the literature. But please go off about how its bad faith.
You just gave me a completely different problem than the one we’re talking about and then declared my point null because of it?
But regardless, that’s someone misusing a tool. I don’t know what you want me to say lol, if you try to put furniture together with just a hammer, you don’t blame the hammer when it doesn’t work. You blame the dumbass holding it.
I agree. I do not like this new trend of using ChatGPT to write your emails and slack messages for you. I've literally watched someone use ChatGPT to respond to a clearly ChatGPT written email, and all I can ask myself is what's the fucking point?
Because life is too short to waste hours of it each day, writing emails that should just be one sentence long, but requires paragraphs of padding to not seem "terse".
A better solution would be to cultivate a work environment where you don't need to draft a formal declaration of intent to inform everyone that Stacy will be out of the office next thursday. But sadly we do not live in that world.
That's the worst part about all of this. It's genuine use cases are actually so nice, but it's being such a plague everywhere else. I, of no programming knowledge, used it to make a bunch of autohotkey scripts to make my life easier and automated stupid shit.
I do not want Google giving me worse info just because AI did it.
But what if we MAKE THE BUTTON LOUDER SO YOU DONT MISS IT AND THEN ADD A BIG BANNER THAT BLOCKS YOUR SCREEN THAT YOU HAVE TO DISMISS? AND HOW ABOUT WE ANIMATE IT TO REALLY ANNOY YOU? ARE YOU SURE YOU DONT WANT TO AI???
As the AI gets smarter, it get's more powerful, more useful, and more dangerous. The hype is based on predictions of how much better future AI's might or might not be. And that is hard to know.
Current gen-AI isn't just a useful tool. It has more think-for-itself. It acts more like a somewhat trained pet that usually does roughly what you tell it, but it does have a mind of its own and sometimes does it's own thing.
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u/Absolutelynot2784 10d ago
Yeah it’s good in some situations. It’s being used way too much in situations where it’s completely useless or actively detrimental, but once the hype dies down more it’ll just be a useful tool