TechTakes

youtube comment:

Zeppelins are here to stay! After all, we still have the technology for rigid airship full of hydrogen cells, you can't unring this bell!

(I have pretty good YT commenters actually. Because I moderate all comments, because this is fuckin AI.)

I'm old enough to remember the dotcom bubble. Even at my young age back then, I found it easy to spot many of the "bubbly" aspects of it. Yet, as a nerd, I was very impressed by the internet itself and was showing a little bit of youthful obsession about it (while many of my same-aged peers were still hesitant to embrace it, to be honest).

Now with LLMs/generative AI, I simply find myself unable to identify any potential that is even remotely similar to the internet. Of course, it is easy to argue that today, I am simply too old to embrace new tech or whatever. What strikes me, however, is that some of the worst LLM hypemongers I know are people my age (or older) who missed out on the early internet boom and somehow never seemed to be able to get over that fact.

I mean, if a lawyer uses LLMs as counsel, that might cause a judge to stay the proceedings to tell that lawyer to get their shit together and be professional. Or if a company slaps AI into their mission statement, that could stay their stock price for a while until investors lose faith or they pivot to the next bubble. In that sense, "AI is here to stay."

Especially galling when the sentence starts with "like it or not". Wrong. AI is not like a disease or a natural law that stays with us whether we want it or not. If humanity decides we don't like AI, we could just stop doing it. "Like it or not, hitting yourself is here to stay" is only true if someone is actively forcing me to hit myself, and whoever is forcing me probably doesn't honestly think they're doing me a favor.

Homeopathy is here to stay and (a) that's a bad thing, (b) it could be more popular, but thankfully is not, (c) we don't need to believe fraudulent claims about its benefits, (d) we could and maybe should try and make it even less popular, and (e) the continued practice of homeopathy in parts of human society should have little to no impact on the daily lives of most people and the vast majority should be given the opportunity to ignore it instead of integrating it into every possible facet of their lives. Same goes for AI slop.

Sure, like NFTs were here to stay, and the gazillion different shitcoins that were popping up everywhere some years ago.

To me it seems more like the bubble is finally beginning to burst. People are fed up by the hype and by having AI shoved down their throats literally everywhere. Companies start realizing that they cannot outsource everything to the shitrobot without having to pay people to fix the garbage produced by the shitrobot - so they are going back to paying people for the original task. I start to see it happening in my industry. All I read theses days are major fuckups by something AI everywhere I look. Hopefully the creators who invented this fuckery end up being forced to shove it up their arse, considering the environmental and societal destruction they caused.

It might be here to stay for at least a while in the same way that asbestos is.

I've not yet encountered someone saying "it's here to stay" to me IRL but if it happens, I think I'd just ask them "and you think that is good?"

Glad I could help with writing this.

I've already predicted that AI will completely and permanently disappear once the bubble bursts, and between AI's utterly radioactive public image and businesses' increasing realisation that AI is a useless money pit, its a prediction I've only grown more confident in over time.