This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Don't these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?
It's difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.
To me, it's not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.
I'm the other fence. My daily reporting has 12-15 documents output, that I then previously had to spend 3-5 hours moving this item over to this form, and that item over to that form, and management wants everything to be kept locked PDF so no excel macros can be used.... upload everything to claude, let it run. Sure... sure, itll make errors here and there... but no one actually checks what these documents pop out.. only that they're there. And that alone, has cut my workload by half. So, thanks AI for giving me my time back, and thanks boomer bosses, for not knowing how to do basic computer tasks badly enough they will never figure it out!
Using AI to complete bullshit work tasks that shouldn't exist in the first place. Yep, I know that feeling very well.
Had loads in my last job. I could spend a few hours and struggle to fill in a few sentences for this bullshit form HR keep sending us, or I could ask ChatGPT to write the most obviously generic corpospeak crap that for some reason people like and are even impressed when I say that I used AI for it.
Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. "All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait..." While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.
When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. "Don't say anything, and eventually you'll be put through."
Yes, I'm a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank's human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.
(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn't a complete bust...)
I've never wanted to punch a word in the face until the word "agentic" started popping up everywhere.
I refuse to even pronounce it correctly.
"ajanteek" is probably what I'd say if I was forced to utter such unspeakable trash
When someone proudly express their enthusiasm for AI, I immediately think less of that person.
Or defer to AI, when you ask them a quesiton that can be simply answered or even googled, that doesnt have a AI results. and ends up with a overcomplicated summary that leads to more questions.
The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks.
I don't really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don't use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?
There are loads of reasons normal people aren't using AI Agents. This article doesn't give any of the ones I'd think of.
The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don't understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.
It's not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they're not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. "Normal people" accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little "normal people" jobs and "normal people" lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It's signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.
Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It's not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it's still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.
The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don't like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn't charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over... well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it's no secret there's also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.
Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It's been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They're not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with... the charity of the ultra wealthy? That's nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we're redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).
I'm not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn't see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.
And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that "using" something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren't asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it's simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they're not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.
None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren't reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it's not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.
The bit that drives me insane is ..the fuck are you capturing / storing all this data for. It's sure as hell not sales or advertising , i can literaly google something i wish to and am ready to buy right now, cash in hand and not have it findable, so it's clearly not fucking that.
Part of me wonders if the instrumentality shitheads are trying to mimic humanity. And if you base that core on the corporate internet that's how you get AM
At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.
Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.
All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.
Fundamentally, they cost way, way too much to run. LLMs are useful tools (I use them a bit for data analysis and coding help) and the people who use them for that kind of thing might pay the full cost in some form (not as individuals but their companies might). But they're trying to push them into everything and people who can't think for themselves and want them to help them write emails and such are not going to foot the bill. Not even close.
I think they've realised that forcing universal adoption is the only way that this could work, to get everyone hooked on it then jack up the prices. But regular consumers will never, ever be the ones paying the enormous costs of LLMs. Even companies will start to realise that there is no point paying huge amounts just for everyone to be able to outsource writing emails and basic tasks to LLMs. And short of any huge breakthrough, they are incapable of doing most jobs.
I hold the opinion that if people talk about LLM's instead of AI they are inherently more understanding of the tool and therefore more qualified to use it.
It's not difficult to understand. This whole AI bubble is just a push to get enough people, a critical mass, over a threshold that they start paying for the usage. The Bubble was waiting for the money to run out which is what built the bubble. The money is running out and the subscriptions are ready for purchase.
The software development industry is ready to purchase subscriptions, but no other sectors it seems.
Naive question here. If I use ChatGPT or whatever to enhance my resume, do these programs data collect my resume/personal info ?
just assume yes
google has been found keeping information on you that they explicitly said they wouldn't. I can't recall the specifics. but apply that to any megacorp like this
If you're concerned about data retention, you'd want to select an inference provider that is listing 'ZDR' (zero data retention) as a feature.
For example, a lot of the Chinese open weight models have become quite capable and because their weights are available end up like generic vs brand name medicine where there's multiple providers serving them with different production conditions.
Because enterprise use will often be worried about data retention or sending data to China, the alternative providers usually offer things like US-only inference or zero data retention.
If you're not going to use it all that often, a la carte API use is going to be way cheaper than a subscription, probably better results than a free plan with a closed model provider, and give you more control over the process.
Almost certainly.
They don't have to, since it's not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.
They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that's not their business model at the moment, but it's probably finding it's way into the next version in some capacity.
yes. if you still feel the need to do this, sanitize your inputs. strip it of all personal data. don't upload the whole file with metadata, paste the scrubbed text that you want rewritten in with the prompt.
I don't work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn't already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist
But surely you need a program to direct your attention to those programs, otherwise how would you know what you're supposed to be doing? You need to have another power hungry program running that uses a full center worth of processing power to... *checks notes* ...do what your google now homepage used to do.
Normal people couldn't figure out the "mail merge" function of their 1980-era word processor, and haven't figured it out since.
I know quite a few people who have bought into agents 100%. Its wild to hear them talk about letting an agent run for days on their personal computer, grinding away on some task. The way they talk about it, you would think they were babysitting a child or something.
What do they use them for? I have played with it a little out of curiosity, even got an LLM running on my phone until it got stuck in an endless loop spewing nonsense. Not touched agents yet.
I haven't really found much use for LLMs yet beyond rewording or summarising text and even that is rarely worth the effort of loading it up.
I want AI agents to just go the fuck away!
Just curious, do any of you think AI would be more popular if someone was offering as a physical product? As in instead of data center and paying a company to use their model, you pay for an in home server with some sort of base agentic LLM preinstslled that you could then train to your specific needs.
This article's title is ridiculous. What do you mean 'why don't normal people use agentic AI?' Were they supposed to?
We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren't paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics... They're practically engaging in a boycott.
