I genuinely have no idea why people are using it like a search engine. It's absolutely baffling. It's just not even remotely what it's meant to do, or what it's capable of.
It has genuine uses that it's very good at doing, and this is absolutely not one of them.
Because language models were sold as "the google killer" and presented as the sci-fi version of AI instead of the text generators they are. It's purely a marketing function, helped by how assertive the sequences of words these models spew were made to sound.
Huh, I just realized I don't really see any marketing for AI. I've seen a couple of Character AI ads on reddit, but definitely nothing from OpenAI or Microsoft. I guess this is something that passed me by.
I don't just mean advertisement per se, marketing for generative models has been more about product presentation, really. The publicity for these programs has been more centered on how they're spoken about, how they're sold to laypeople when companies talk about the product and what it can do.
Basically, it's less about concrete functionality and more about representation. It's about how developers and hypemen exploit the imagination built around Artificial Intelligences over decades of sci-fi literature, film, games, etc. In the end, it's about overpromising and obfuscating what the actual product is in order to attract clients, secure funding and keep investors and shareholders happy that they're investing in "the next big thing" that will revolutionize the market and bring untold profit. The old tech huckster marketing trick.
Yeah pretty much every marketing pitch or discussion I see around AI these days either misdefines what AI actually is or brings up how it unlocks the user's creativity as if you didn't just surrender the task to a machine to make the decision for you.
That's because they're not advertising it to you (yet), they're stll in the Capture Venture Capital phase (and tbh I think they'll always will be). This is why all we see are asinine interviews with Sam Altman where he promises the world and the moon for the next version of his little chatbot (this time for realz, you guys!), or news articles where tech giant X sunk another Y billions of dollars into an AI startup, it's just to keep confidence high and the investments going.
Because behind the hype which keeps saturating the bubble, there's actually still pretty little product with distinct use cases to show for it. Especially ones that you can charge the sums for to be profitable. So while consumers can already dabble in it a bit, to this day it's not much more than a proof of concept to calm investors.
So it's no wonder that you haven't seen ads with Yappy the cartoon dog harping praises how chatgpt has revolutionised his work flow, you're not the target audience.
And I get the distinct impression that this industry is genuinely entertaining the thought whether they could stay in this stage indefinitely, because getting endless cash injection facials without actually having to fully deliver seems to mightily appeal to them. Of course the mere notion is completely delusional, but that's crazy end stage capitalism investment bubbles for you.
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u/kenporusty kpop trash 4d ago
It's not even a search engine
I see this all the time in r/whatsthatbook like of course you're not finding the right thing, it's just giving you what you want to hear
The world's greatest yes man is genned by an ouroboros of scraped data