AI is not popular, and AI users are unpleasant asshats

if you post a thread about intolerable dickheads, the most intolerable dickheads on Lemmy will post some shit like “intolerable dickhead checking in, how fucking dare you”

it’s like catnip for the Reddit-brained, and by catnip I mean meth

Interesting. Why would more manipulative people and ones with more focus on self-interest use AI more than other people? Because they're more likely to take shortcuts while doing stuff? Or is there any other direct benefit for them?

The only thing that drives me to AI is the extreme uselessness of modern search engines. This is not an endorsement of hallucination engines as much as it is a condemnation of late stage enshittification of search engines and the internet in general. I miss the days when I could google something and actually find what I was looking for.

Worse when your wife calls it her best friend.

science shows as true what you thought was only 99% true

Still a way higher accuracy than LLM output, so...

I love technology and seeing what I can and can’t get to work. I have a self hosted image generator and LLM (stable diffusion and ollama). It was fun for a little while, generating images of whatever popped in mind and using the llama for code completion, grammar checks, and rewording things. I even started working on something like that AI streamer, Neuro. It’s all garbage though. The whole stack has been relegated to sending welcome messages on a discord server. It’s a neat toy but anything past that is just adding a whole layer of inaccuracy to whatever you’re using it for and way too many people don’t realize that.

Until this article I wasn’t sure how big the AI bubble is…

But seeing that more than 99% of the public don’t really use AI and then comparing that to tech stocks makes me sure the bubble is just like in the 2000s

Of course some stuff will stick just like in the 2000s but with these high valuations and 99% of people not using it, it will take a long time till break-even

A colleague was leaving for good. Someone "made" them a song with Copilot by giving it their most common said phrase. They then made us all sit through it for two minutes.

It was the most insincere, minimal effort, maximum attention shit. Such an asshole.

It's almost like telling asshats that they're right all the time is, somehow, not good for their social-emotional development. Who would'a thunk it!

In other news water is wet.

So they looked at 1000 people, only 5 were using AI, and those 5 guys were dicks?

Wow. The anti-AI crowd says AI use decreases critical thinking, but this article provides strong evidence that we don't need any help in that arena.

For real, the study, the article, and every comment I have seen in this thread so far seem to have failed to apply even some basic critical thinking to this topic.

From the article:

The first thing the researchers did was not trust the users to self-report. They measured their web browsing by getting 90 days of browser history from Chrome on a desktop — so no mobile or app usage. They did collect the users’ self-reports, which were just incorrect:

we observed that self-reported AI use and actual AI use were only moderately correlated (ρ = 0.329).

If the users went to a chatbot site, that’s obviously AI. For other sites, the researchers picked the Interactive Advertising Bureau category by … running the addresses through a chatbot, GPT-4o. That’s not so great, though they tested GPT-4o against a random 200 of the addresses and it was correct on all but one. So they figured it’d do.

Yeah, the whole fucking study consisted of an online personality quiz, and then asking people to download and submit their desktop Chrome browsing history. The most glaring problem here is that MOST PEOPLE USE AI ON APPS ON THEIR PHONES. Seriously, this whole study is flawed to the bones because the researches chose expediency over actually gathering meaningful data.

And beyond that, Chrome doesnt cache browsing history in Incognito mode, which is likely where a lot of AI use is happening.

And a further huge methodological limitation: people tend not to self-report on things they are ashamed of. If someone really has Machiavellian traits, they will be wary of disclosing this on a survey where they don't know who will have access to that information. They will either hide their nature, or simply drop out of the study. Same goes for people with large amounts of AI use openly visible in their browsing history - they will likely either drop out of the study or delete shameful instances of AI use from their browsing history. So what they are really measuring on their long tale is likely confounded with a simple measure of how truthful/shameless people are. If someone reads a personality quiz and says "yeah, I do sometimes manipulate people - like a couple days ago I told Jerry I'd buy him a beer if he gave me a ride to the airport, but I still haven't done that..." then they are also likely the type of person who would say "well, I'm not a huge fan of these researchers knowing how much I use AI chatbots to jerk off, but I want to legitimately contribute to science."

And yet the researcher, this blogger, and everyone here simply ignore these gigantic problems with the study so they can toot their trumpets to the anti-AI tune. And for the record, I'm not some pro-AI evangelist. I think it's an interesting tool. I think it has future potential to improve/destroy the world. And I think that currently it has some pretty big limitations. However, I am pro-science, and this is straight up not science. It is pure, unfiltered dumbfuckery.