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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project. (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 23 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

He's sadly right.. My wife is Chinese, she watches AI Chinese dramas and she has told me that most of China watch AI dramas. And Gen Z watch AI, Everyone younger than 30 relies on AI.

Now before you downvote me, I'm 37 and I've worked in IT since I was 19.. AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself. The only time I've used AI was when chat GPT was fresh and new and I told it to be more sarcastic and snarky in it's answers and I argued with it for 2-3 mins before I got bored.

Humans are much better at arguing with me and being sarcastic to me.

I don't care for AI, Turn off all the air conditioners and AI burns out.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    What are AI Chinese dramas? How much is AI? Just the script, or is the entire thing AI animated? Where do you see these programs?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    There’s an entire genre of these weird “fruit Love Island” AI dramas that pop up on my TikTok. It’s terribly animated anthropomorphic fruit, and the plot is usually that the wife is cheating on the husband with the boss and gets pregnant.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    I have a family member addicted to these (well, not Chinese...). It's pretty much all 100% slop, the voices, the animation, the script. My head hurts just seeing how it cuts every 5 seconds when I casually see it. The voices are so horribly soulless. The writing is inane and tortuously paced.

    But people eat it up. Similar to (and large audience overlap) with people who toss massive money at shitty mobile games.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Okay update, It's 100% AI scripted, voice acted and animated.

    I have no idea what AI China has but apparently most of the videos are 2 mins, but there's entire series.

    Seems like most of it is just about marital problems between a husband and wife in different times and settings.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    My wife is Chinese, she watches AI Chinese dramas and she has told me that most of China watch AI dramas. And Gen Z watch AI, Everyone younger than 30 relies on AI.

    If it's not that, I'm seeing people almost everywhere hunched on their phones, watching AI-generated summaries of... what? soap opera episodes and whole movies. And those people complaining about the low quality of education when they're so fucking focused much on getting a piece of paper just to be hired even for a department store attendant.

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  • [+] -24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

    "AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself." True, but that's the point.

    From a worker standpoint, while you're researching that thing you can find for yourself, someone of equal skill to you that is leveraging AI has solved 3 of those issues. And someone with more skill has solved 10. And someone with lesser has either crashed the network, or solved that same 1.

    From a personal use standpoint: is the value of creation in the journey and the learning? For some it is. For others it being able to remove barriers and obstacles to create a new website you've been wanting to, or planning out a garden, or brainstorming an idea.

    You've used it once 2+ years ago and wrote it off completely. Do you also still do your laundry with a wasboard and clothesline? Is the Internet just a fad also?

    It's has value. It also has large risk. But pandoras box is open. Those that refuse to leverage and learn it will be at a disadvantage.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    From a worker standpoint, while you’re researching that thing you can find for yourself, someone of equal skill to you that is leveraging AI has solved 3 of those issues.

    And I've rejected their code for unnecessary complexity and issues they overlooked all three times so actually nothing was solved. AI does not increase productivity. At all. Study after study after study has confirmed this. AI can spew out what sounds reasonable to people of low skill. That's it.

    I don't use AI, but I've watched enough other people who's intelligence I used to respect devolve into token monkeys who understand nothing anymore.

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  • [+] -9 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    That's why was was careful to say engineers of equal skill with and without. I think you hate read and ignored that part. I did not say jreng+claude code is now a principal architect..

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I agree its pandoras box but I disagree about the quality of life it brings. What it is creating is larger electric bills that is strangling the lower class, killing consumer low end computers which also harms the lower class, creating a dependency which will likely increase in price, lowering childrens critical thinking (according to studies private schools are not being as affected), killing jobs, oh and the fuck ton of effect it has on climate change which also affects the lower class more.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    Yeah but you see, everyone who's gun-ho on AI doesn't seem to be bother to give two fucks. It's bat-shit people are chasing this like their lives depend on it. They don't give a fuck about the lower class, they never have, it's a new shiny toy, and until something catastrophic happens, nothing is going to change.

    Eat the rich.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    Yes. I agree those are all terrible. And I agree with your assessment of almost all of them. But I'm not naive enough to think that we can put the evils back in and switch back to a non-ai world. We live, we grow, we adapt. This is the future, no matter how bleak it is.

    I didn't say it improves quality of life. I said it can lower barriers of entry to some things, and it can improve a workers productivity when you compare two workers of equal skill.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    improve a workers productivity when you compare two workers of equal skill.

    It makes you seem more productive in most metrics that corporate america seems to measure, but that doesn't really mean anything. Even if most of what the current AIs produce would be good quality (and it's not, its mediocre at best), one hallucination costs you more time than everything it saved you.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 week ago

    Hard disagree. Random utility scripts, most, terraform, and ansible, brainstorming architecture decisions, throwing an error log at it and spitting back the plausible solution. All faster. But the engineer needs to be capable of knowing when it's plausible or not.

    I don't think replacing sr engs with interns+claude is the solution. But many sr+principal engineers can be accelerated on a majority of tasks. That's why was careful to say equally skilled engineer with/without.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    You've used it once 2+ years ago and wrote it off completely. Do you also still do your laundry with a wasboard and clothesline? Is the Internet just a fad also?

    I just don't get why people like you exist. You guys have the stupidest fucking arguments for why not wanting to use the regurgitation machine that murders the environment and causes people to kill themselves is bad.

    But, like, do you still use NFTs? That was the future. It was so the future. Same fucking arguments from the same fucking mouth-breathing dipshits.

    And using AI does not even make you faster or better at what you do. It can increase output, and it can cause you to do a shit job, and it can falate your ego so you think you are soooo much better and bigger than everyone else, you big strong muscly man, you. You're basically just saying that workers can never and should never have any fucking downtime, ever. They cannot stop. They must always, always produce, more and more. And, like, fuck all the way off. You don't need to output more. You do not need to be faster. You don't need AI, even if it was as good as people pretend it is, which it is not!

    Because AI sucks. It isn't good at anything other than replicating an amalgamation of the data that is fed into it. Anyone that says it is good at any other thing is just shit at that specific thing and doesn't know any better. LLMs are just huge giant matrices full of coefficients matching language segments. They don't know jackshit. They have relatively small context windows compared to even the dumbest motherfucker on this planet and people working on making LLMs better are running out of shortcuts to make them better. The money they have been lent needs to start making it back. And they can't make money because they are subsidizing everyone using AI with that venture capital because it still hasn't made a fucking dime yet.

    Don't worry, guys. We just need to keep feeding more data into it! It's so much better, guys, I swear! This one won't hallucinate all the time, bro, I swear! Just one more model, it's so close!

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  • [–] -5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I feel like your projecting. My comment didn't approach anything close to the unmedicated fantasy in which you seemed to have made up and responded to.

    Nfts, no downtime, and anti-worker? Really? Not even gemini would hallucinate that out of my comment.

    The world is accelerating faster than most of us are comfortable with. The future is bleak and we absorb utter chaos daily in the 24hr news cycle. It's exhausting

    I'm sorry that pandoras box is open. But it's not going away.

    I'm not naive enough to think we're going back to a world without a machine that statically produces regurgitated characters that happen to match an exceedingly large class of common problems that people are looking for help with, whether it's an over burdened worker at soulless corporation, an 18yo with an idea but not the background, a 21year assessing if the lease for their first apartment has red flags, or a mom making a video game based on her son's stuffed animal named slappy.

    Unfortunately, even with their small context windows, useless matrices, and lowly statistical representions of language segments, they are better at debugging, brainstorming, "coding", and answering questions than a lot of people, let alone "the dumbest mother fucker on the planet".

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately, even with their small context windows, useless matrices, and lowly statistical representions of language segments, they are better at debugging, brainstorming, "coding", and answering questions than a lot of people, let alone "the dumbest mother fucker on the planet".

    That's why those people do not code or do those other things, and, surprisingly, most of those people don't suddenly think they are now better than a person who has done... Just... The smallest amount of actual training to become good at that thing.

    You got that AI psychosis in you, buddy. Ask your AI friend for the nearest person to get you the hell away from it.

    If only telling you how brainwashed you are would actually fox things. Let me know when you have enough tokens to reply to me.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    There you go projecting again. Pushing a narrative about how I must feel about people that you push as being dumb.

    It is hilarious how a comment where I say AI is pandoras box, aka the mechanism that spawned all of the world's evil, and conceeding it has risks and flaws, all of a sudden makes me the world's biggest AI sycophant because I say it has value.

    As you grow older, or if you watch the movie Inside Out to completion, you will learn people can have multiple complex feelings about things. Only on reddit, and this place it seems, must someone have the most extreme all good or all bad else they're the worst thing that ever existed. I truely hope you find the help you most surely need.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago*

    From a worker standpoint, while you’re researching that thing you can find for yourself, someone of equal skill to you that is leveraging AI has solved 3 of those issues. And someone with more skill has solved 10. And someone with lesser has either crashed the network, or solved that same 1.

    This is complete fantasy. I've personally watched like 10 SEs decide LLMs are the best things since sliced bread and talk up how much more productive they are and without exception they're all to varying degrees just worse at their job. Same for every other role I've observed as well, though I have fewer data points.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    For some it is. For others it being able to remove barriers and obstacles to create a new website you've been wanting to.

    You've used it once 2+ years ago and wrote it off completely. Do you also still do your laundry with a wasboard and clothesline?

    Okay but one of those is an artform and the other is physical labor.

    Programming doesn't really equate to physical labor like that.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 week ago

    No, but it helps design. How big of a box. What vegetables thrive together. What ones should be kept apart. What spacing. How much root depth. Can ground hogs get at it. Here look at this picture. Looks like a tomator disease, what do you think?

    Programming equates to architecture. It equates to system design. You can have good (non-sycophantic) conversations about what, why, push back when it's wrong, agree when it's right.

    And if it's for a personal project, then for some people the labor and the learning is the value. For others maybe it's showing the end product to their 6year old that dreamt of a game where a dolphin was flying in space with ninjas trying to attack it.

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