this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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For the most part, I am an AI sceptic. My firm has had access to and beta tested every Google AI model since before the AI had a name (yes, well before Bard). We also have access to ChatGPT, Claude and locally run models on dedicated hardware. I'll save you the suspense, at the moment it's all mostly trash. Barely a proof of concept. Definitely not production ready, but there are a few exceptions I, personally, have found.
Gemini Pro is excellent at identifying and diagnosing sick garden plants if you take and upload a photos of the plants. Unfortunately, it still cannot do simple arithmetic. A simple SUM that any spreadsheet does automatically by just highlighting the cells, and somehow it was still off by one.
For software dev, the only one product we have found to be useful is Claude, BUT it really depends on the model. Haiku is a joke. Sonnet is not bad, if not bad is ~50% accuracy. Opus is fairly descent at building scaffolding that you can then correct and complete, but don't expect efficient code.
The only model we have ever tested that can deliver ALMOST fully functional code, reliably diagnose errors, and review code is Mythos/Fable. Genuinely not absolute shite, BUT that shit is extremely slow and outrageously expensive. I seriously doubt that your company is forking out the money for Claude Fable as their default model, and if they are, they must not care about ever making a profit.
For the plant identification, I would say that these detection methods are heavily biased towards the data in the training sets. Sure, it’s probably good at commonly occurring plant symptoms, but would be unable to assess rare symptoms with any real accuracy. Same goes for diseases with similar symptoms.
I think it if fine for entertainment or research purposes, but should not be used for real world issues. AI should not be used to accuse people of crime they didn’t commit and have that be taken as evidence. Like how Google scans all personal photos and has falsely reported people of heinous crimes. Sure they catch some bad actors, but I doubt they are doing better than if they were to randomly report people’s accounts. And there is never a human in the loop to correct for false positives.
For sure. I have no doubt that it was trained primarily using Reddit (the gardening subs were actually pretty good). My intent with the comment was to imply casual home gardening use (entertainment). I apologize if that wasn't clear.
Your comment was clear, I just wanted to add on some other supporting information and also add on other scenarios for additional context. The main point of all of this being the use cases for AI are currently very slim, but it is being pushed to an unreasonable extent on people. Maybe some like it and are happy to give up their data and privacy, but I think there needed to have been regulations and protections set in place before it was rolled out.
i visit the whatisthisplant sub quite often, and some pretty unusual rare plants(like wild orchids, mycoheterotrophs), i thinks harder to identify tropical wild plants though.
might not work with plants that look like another plant too, and give you misleading info. some people couldnt identify rare plants, because rarely are encountered by people.
likely common house plants have so many pictures online already it would be easy to identify with a AI, especially people also post disease plants to idenfy it too. they dont do that well with animals/pests though, since theres alot of look alike species and very similar patterns.
Lets assume you have to cross a desert by foot. You can have either a human guide or a map, which is cheaper. The guide can reliably tell you points where you will find water that you need in order to survive. The map has much more information but it will be bullshit half of the time.
Which would you chose?
What would a company chose?
Why?