posted in Technology
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-business-incentive-to-lie-useless-chatbots-report-nikhil-suresh
The NerveCory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingIt has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnistReplying to @floofloof@lemmy.ca
This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the “I wish I could do ____. but _____” ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer “a thing”. This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We’re at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.
Replying to @FerrisEuler@programming.dev
A more recent (and maybe closer) analogy is the advent of ebook readers and the heralding of the Death Of The Book. I suspect we’ll be in a similar place in a few years - books stores are doing just fine, perhaps even better than pre-ebook.