Money quote:
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
Money quote:
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
Yea like what? It’s been a big increase in workflow for me.
Increase in workflow? Like there are more steps to perform the same task? Because workflow isn’t work volume or units if output. It’s the process that gets the work done.
Did the increase in “workflow” get you more money or more work for the same money?
Like I spend less time trying to build formulas and I can create formulas and tools I normally wouldn’t with it because I can have a conversations about what I want to do and it provides suggestions.
I mean… they responded in agreement to a comment that said it’s not an improvement. So it seems to me that it also would not increase the money they get out of it.
How did it improve your workflow?
I have a conversation about what I want to do and it provides suggestions and formulas or tools I wasn’t even aware of that stopped up productivity.
The manual exists though.
You know it’s easier, efficient and better to have a conversation with an AI rather than read an entire manual that won’t contain the thing you need right?
You know, all the things it’s advertised to do.
Only to find the “AI” hallucinating functions that won’t work. Or won’t do the thing you were told they do.
Most times it works. When it doesn’t, it’ll still get me 90% of a solution and I can use the manual or other means to finish it. Again a much faster and better approach. I don’t need to spend hours of my time reading manuals that barely touch on the knowledge I need just to bash keys and hope for the best. Plus it’s conversational so it engages other parts of the brain as a learning tool.
These fucking people use a rubber duck for the same thing
So you prefer a “90% solution and then read the manual” to “read the manual anyway”?
Yes. Why would I need to read something that is 99% information that is not important to me or my problem.
Lol you shared your personal experience and got downvoted… lmao even
Lemmy is propaganda against AI at this point. Not sure what paid for it but it has all the markers. Feels like being in the comment section of ny post articles.
Same energy as talking online about immigrants, nuclear energy or marvel
It’s using a community to post toxic and dystopian articles over and over again. Lemmy technology communitys are extremely vile. Not sure why it happened but it’s turned toxic
There isn’t propaganda against AI, it’s totally grassroots because companies are overselling it.
No it isn’t. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.
The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed to be toxic towards it. People who are influenced cannot see it, outsiders can though. It’s like seeing right wingers talk about immigrants. They’ll never be able to see how their news and media influence them. That is their truth and it’s as true to them as hate towards AI is towards lemmings in places like c/technology
Look at the articles posted, the headlines, the appeals used, the comments. It has all the markers of an Astro turf campaign.
By who? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense. Why would anyone want to do that.
You really can’t imagine why corporations and political groups who spend billions paying people to manufacture narratives and flood feeds might hate the idea of ordinary people suddenly having their own free, on-demand content factory, fact-checker, and megaphone?
That’s on both sides of the political spectrum. These AI tools are not just Google chat. You can build with them rapidly. Is it some revolutionary thing? No
But can it be a game changer in some areas? Absolutely.
They moved rapidly with the media on this. Compare headlines for AI to any other yellow journalistic topic. They’re identical
In favour of AI absolutely, against it, no I can’t. What group would want to disvalue AI, after all most of the big tech companies are developing their own. They would want people to use AI, that’s the only way they make a profit.
You keep providing these vague justifications for your belief but you never actually provide a concrete answer.
Which groups in particular do you think are paying people to astroturf with negative AI comments? Which actual organisations, which companys? Do you have evidence for this beyond “lots of people on a technically inclined forum don’t like it” because that seems to be a fairly self-selecting set. You are seeing patterns in the clouds and are insisting that they are meaningful.
You call it “patterns in the clouds,” but that’s how coordinated media campaigns are meant to look organic, coincidental, invisible unless you recognize the fingerprints. Spotting those fingerprints isn’t tinfoil-hat stuff, it’s basic media literacy.
And let’s be real: plenty of groups have motives to discourage everyday people from embracing AI.
Political think tanks and content farms (Heritage Foundation, Koch networks…) already pay for astroturfing campaigns and troll farms. They do it on issues like immigration, climate, and COVID. Why would AI magically be exempt?
Reputation management/PR firms (Bent Pixels, marketing shops, crisis comms firms) literally get paid to scrub and reshape narratives online. Their business model depends on you not having the same tools for cheap or free.
Established media and gatekeepers survive on controlling distribution pipelines. The more people use AI to generate, remix, and distribute their own content, the less leverage those outlets have.
Now why does this matter with AI in particular? Because AI isn’t just another app it’s a force multiplier for individuals.
A single parent can spin up an online store, write copy, generate images, and market it without hiring an agency.
A student can build an interactive study tool in a weekend that used to take a funded research lab.
An activist group can draft policy briefs, make explainer videos, and coordinate messaging with almost no budget.
These kinds of tools only get created if ordinary people are experimenting, collaborating, and embracing AI. That’s what the “don’t trust AI” narrative is designed to discourage. If you keep people from touching it, you keep them dependent on the existing gatekeepers.
So flip your own question: who pays for these narratives? The same people who already fund copy-paste headline campaigns like “illegals are taking our jobs and assaulting Americans.” It’s the same yellow-journalism playbook, just aimed at a new target.
Dismissing this as “cloud patterns” is the exact mindset they hope you have. Because if you actually acknowledge how coordinated media framing works, you start to see why of course there are groups with the motive and budget to poison the well on AI.
Lemmy is pretty consistent with the people I know IRL in terms of opinions on AI.
Not where I am. I haven’t met anyone irl that has any spite with AI. They think it’s interesting. Have tried it a few times. But nobody is out there saying fuck AI.
No, I’d definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don’t see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.
IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype. “We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything”. It’s wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.
People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.
Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren’t yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They’re a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating “therapy”. They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.
All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.
You’re probably debating a tool.
That was the initial impression of it. Now that we’ve had more experience with it and learned that it can’t be relied on, perception has changed. It is oversold and the costs are not worth what we are getting out of it.
I fed AI all my Lemmy posts and asked it for a portrait of the artist. Not bad, down to my 6 fingers.