Link tags: hype

Pop Culture

Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.

The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.

One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.

Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.

Beware the cloud of hype - The History of the Web

The rise of dot-com companies was pitched as a no consequences gold rush. We were on the precipice of a fictional future where everyone would be cashing in on the web. The reality was quite a bit more slow, and boring. Business on the web consolidated, as we now know, and left most people holding the bag. There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.

Deciphering Glyph :: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle

All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. It’s just that each follows the progress of a sigmoid curve that everyone mistakes for an exponential one. There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.

AI-free products

Develop a simple, focused app that does what it says on the tin — not one where the tin talks back at you.

What Are We Actually Doing With A.I. Today? – Pixel Envy

The marketing of A.I. reminds me less of the cryptocurrency and Web3 boom, and more of 5G. Carriers and phone makers promised world-changing capabilities thanks to wireless speeds faster than a lot of residential broadband connections. Nothing like that has yet materialized.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

A very even-handed take.

I’m glad that I took the time to experiment with AI tools, both because I understand them better and because I have found them to be useful in my day-to-day life. But even as someone who has used them and found them helpful, it’s remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.

The dancing bear, part 1

I don’t believe the greatest societal risk is that a sentient artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. I think our undoing is simpler than that. I think that most of our lives are going to be shorter and more miserable than they could have been, thanks to the unchecked greed that’s fed this rally. (Okay, this and crypto.)

I like this analogy:

AI is like a dancing bear. This was a profitable sideshow dating back to the middle ages: all it takes is a bear, some time, and a complete lack of ethics. Today, our carnival barkers are the AI startups and their CEOs. They’re trying to convince you that if they can show you a bear that can dance, then you’ll believe it can draw, write coherent sentences, and help you with your app’s marketing strategy.

Part of the curiosity of a dancing bear is the implicit risk that it’ll remember at some point that it’s a bear, and maul whoever is nearby. The fear is a selling point. Likewise, some AI vendors have even learned that the product is more compelling if it’s perceived as dangerous. It’s common for AI startup execs to say things like, “of course there’s a real risk that an army of dancing bears will eventually kill us all. Anyway, here’s what we’re working on…” How brave of them.

a view source web

As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.

This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.

The growing backlash against AI

You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.

In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.

And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Money Bubble

What we’re seeing is FOMO-driven dumb money thrown at technology by people who have no hope of understanding it. Just because everybody else is and because the GPTs and image generators have cool demos.

What’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure, is that AI/ML will, inevitably, disappoint; in the financial sense I mean, probably doing some useful things, maybe even a lot, but not generating the kind of profit explosions that you’d need to justify the bubble. So it’ll pop, and my bet it is takes a bunch of the finance world with it.

This is mostly about the intersection of finance, hype, and technology, but Tim mentions something that I’ve also been saying:

I’m super impressed by something nobody else seems to talk about: Prompt parsing.

Maybe it’s because I spent formative users playing text-only adventure games, but I am way more impressed by the way generative tools do natural language parsing than I am by their output.

The Subversive Hyperlink - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links.

I think about AI like I do Plastics. | Apple Annie’s Microblog

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.

— The Graduate

Beyond the Frame | Untangling Non-Linearity

A fascinating look at the connections between hypertext and film editing. I’m a sucker for any article that cites both Ted Nelson and Walter Murch.

unrot•link

Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.

No more 404

I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:

When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.

I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.

This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.

Just Another Music Monday - by Rusty Foster - Today in Tabs

I don’t read Today in Tabs with any expectation of insight (it’s more like a junk-food guilty pleasure), but these two remarks stand out for their clarity and correctness:

The more I hear people selling AI encouraging everyone to be scared of AI, the more certain I am that it’s nothing to worry about. A few months ago the same people were all shilling crypto.

And:

AI images were fascinating in the Deep Dream eyeballs everywhere era. The “better” AI gets, the blander its output becomes, and the more obvious and unacceptable its errors. We’ve already seen peak AI, and the only interesting use of it will continue to be in generating novel failure modes for human artists to explore.

The Illusion Of Developer “Productivity” Opens The Door To Snake Oil – Codemanship’s Blog

There are a lot of astute observations in here.

AI is not a paradigm shift. But it could be useful

What’s going to happen is this: in a few years, AI will come crashing down as everyone realizes it’s not going to be an evolution of human consciousness, and some other new technology will take its place. Valuations of AI companies will fall and some will go out of business. Then, some of the actual uses of the technology will become apparent and it’ll be a mainstream, but not dominant, part of the technology landscape.

The hype cycle is well-understood. What surprises me, again and again, is how thoroughly people follow it. Across industries, CEOs are right now thinking, “holy shit, if we don’t jump on AI, we’re going to be completely left behind. This is a paradigm shift.”

How to Identify “Truthy” Tech Trends

Amber points out the commonalities between self-driving cars, the metaverse, “AI”, and whatever tech trend is in the headlines next week:

• It was first depicted in TV & movies.
• Seemingly everyone is rushing into it for fear of missing out.
• It promises to do too many major things too soon.
• It inspires fear in the popular imagination.

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

• Be skeptical of PR hype
• Question the training data
• Evaluate the model
• Consider downstream harms