Read this: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.
I agree with almost everything the author is saying. This includes the part about physically beating douchebags who aren’t smart enough to run a database but who are getting hot and bothered over AI like it’s the next coming of Jesus. The author differentiates between people who do shit and the vast swarms of bullshit peddlers jumping on the AI bandwagon in hopes of harvesting more money to shove up their own ass:
We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’.
I’ll add that AI, as it exists now, is a shitty solution in search of a problem which it won’t address. I’ve seen this before. I’m old enough to remember when personal computers were just entering normal households. I remember idiots suggesting housewives might use dBASE to store their recipes. Yes, that was an actual thing spoken by an actual human. Every era has another herd of idiots trying to shoehorn fancy new technology into whatever orifice seems handy.
“Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits.”
It seems to me most of the AI hype is a work avoidance process. Doing a good job with tools that already exist takes effort… and competence. Telling your boss you’ll make straw into gold with the newest buzzword is so much easier.
“How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.”
And we all know management is mostly herd beasts with great hair; they’ll believe any dumb thing so long as it’s hip and new. Remember other buzzwords like “cyber”, NFT, and blockchain?
“…some of my friends feel that they have to be in leadership positions, and it is because someone needs to wrench the reins of power from your lizard-person-claws before you drive us all collectively off a cliff…”
The best solution probably is a brick to the face.
“With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don’t personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it, then just sit back and wait for you to load it into ChatGPT because you probably can’t read unassisted anymore.”
Hat tip to 357 Magnum.
Follow-up:
I wanted to add this myself. Watch and you’ll see there’s nothing new under the sun. Whenever you hear “AI” in its current context, just substitute “blockchain”, “NFT”, “cyber-space”, “e-commerce”, or fucking “tulip mania“.
Just one of the many cycles of stampeding midwits I’ve watched in my brief life was the dot com bubble. At it’s height, people would put the words “dot com” after anything, hurl money at it, and assume they’d strike it rich. “Rollerskate sandwich dot.com! It’ll make a ton of money!”
At its peak, someone thought it brilliant to sell dogfood over the internet. Between November 1998 and November 2000 this fucking thing was all over TV. The best minds of Wall Street thought riches would come from using “e-commerce” to “solve the problem of buying dog food”. What sane world would use Superbowl ad money to sell fucking kibbles for Fido?
Less than a year later, Pets.com crashed (everything else in the “dot.com bubble” crashed too). Pets.com never made a profit. It turned an IPO price of $11/share into $0.19/share and not a single business executive was thrown off a cliff! That’s part of the game, the dipshits that vaporizing huge piles of money chasing “the new thing” never seem to pay the price. It all burns down but they’re already chasing the next “magic noun”. Our current AI situation is what happens when business dweebs find a new word and pound it to death.