All things AI

[Recusant]

Many tech companies are shoving AI slop down their customers' throats. There are ways to avoid a lot of it:

"How to avoid AI in as many places as possible" | Fast Company

"How to be an AI minimalist" | Vox

Call me a Luddite but I think most AI stuff that the average person encounters is crap.

[Dark Lightning]

I attempted to make an appointment for some work on my car, and it became immediately obvious that "Ashley" was an ai dunce.

[Recusant]

Yes, people can minimalize how much they surrender to AI in their own devices but it's not so simple when dealing with corporations that have adopted AI for interactions with the public.

[billy rubin]

i had chatgpt loaded into my phone and laptop    for a while, as it was convenient to use it as a search engine.  it made a lot of mistakes, but was still useful.

but in light of my disinterest in supporting the new paradigm, ive deleted both.

still, it is true that i cannot escape other peoples use that i am requird to cooperate with.  some thingts i can, such as ignoring fast food AI order-takers until a human being comes on the speaker.

others, such as online customer service, not so much.

[Dark Lightning]

Went to visit my son in Nevada last year. On the way there, the wife wanted to get lunch at a McDonalds. Now, I personally wouldn't ever eat there, but the wife insisted. It would have been easier for the kid behind the counter to take our order there, instead of coming over and touching screens at the kiosk. The more that happens, the less likely I am to eat out, which I almost never do at fast food places, anyway. It takes me less time to make lunch at home. I don't eat dinner out, ever, if I can help it. My reflux kicks in almost every time.

[billy rubin]

the kiosk is a management technique to reduce wages to human beings. i buy food at mcdonalds because its the only way i can eat breakfast at four-thirty in the morning unless i get up at three. but i never use the kiosk. it helps that i have multiple fmaily members that work at the local store, so the entire grille area recognizes me and knows that i will stand there and stare at them until somebody walks up front.

at mcdonalds , the IT programmers are incompetent and lazy. if you want to rattle the cage, tell the store manager you want to order two plain sausage patties, a la carte, off the kiosk.

it cannot be done, because the algorithm  doesnt have that functionality. there is no way to order that menu item from the kiosk.  im sure there are others.

[Recusant]

The past few days there have been attempts to register accounts using "ChatGPT..." usernames. Russian IP addresses. I'm not keen on letting Russian bots register, let alone something using ChatGPT as part of its username.

[billy rubin]

 its bemusing to me that the techno-serfs are so clueless about  AI that they are enabling the technology that will replace them.

AI is a very useful tool for the tech oligarchs, because it cements their position as our dystopian overlords by rendering all of us superfluous. but the low-level managers are only now discovering that AI is eliminating them from the workplace, starting at entry-level positions and moving up.

unemploym,ent in america among new computer-programmer university graduates is now higher than for art history majors.