THE AI Thread

Hi Erik,

Sorry for that. What did you mean by this comment?

Addy & Arianna transferred to WVU according to AI. :rolleyes:

I assumed you were suggesting that AI's "answer" was incorrect, proving some point you were making.

You are correct about my response, I will give you that. Every time I see someone make a point about AI when they are misusing it and then making a statement about its actual usefulness or capabilities, it does cause an adverse reaction deep in my soul. Becuase, it is very important that people know how powerful and consequential it is to their future.

I apologize for the overreaction, but the question still remains. What was the point you were trying to make that I so poorly understood?
My point is that you are saying AI should not be used for a search engine.

I'm not pointing out a bad answer it gave on a search engine just to say that AI is stupid/doesn't work or whatever... but how stupid humans can be for putting blind faith in it.

Google disagrees with us that it is a search engine, because well, Google built AI into its search engine...some human at that company made that decision to use it as one. And I think that move was a bad one (just like you probably do). Seeing AI being used by companies like Google to be a search engine is just eyeroll inducing, hence my previous post showing an example of that.
 
My point is that you are saying AI should not be used for a search engine.

I'm not pointing out a bad answer it gave on a search engine just to say that AI is stupid/doesn't work or whatever... but how stupid humans can be for putting blind faith in it.

Google disagrees with us that it is a search engine, because well, Google built AI into its search engine...some human at that company made that decision to use it as one. And I think that move was a bad one (just like you probably do). Seeing AI being used by companies like Google to be a search engine is just eyeroll inducing, hence my previous post showing an example of that.
GOTCHA. My bad. I see where you are coming from now. I was only looking at it from an independent, stand alone, disconnected LLM perspective. If it was a Google search and you got this. It should do much better.
 
What, you don't run all of your responses through some AI chat prompt first? lol
Nope. Only when I'm trying to show how useful it can be.

Do my responses sound like they have any intelligence attached? ;)
 
Ive been doing my own automation forever though - even Excel can "automate" some pretty sophisticated processes. Data cleaning, analysis, monte carlo, forecasting... all kinds of stuff was already possible for angone willing to learn a little bit. And once its built, it seems like more work for me to convert it to an agentic AI.

The fear I have is when a layman tries to do something that needs domain expertise, the AI agent hallucinates something wrong, nobody catches it (because verification and validation is always one of the first things to go) and it causes lots if damage. In the best case, its only financial damage.
 
I share many of the same concerns already addressed. I try to focus on the things I can control so I don't go to that dark place.

I'm a managing software developer and have been using AI for coding since it's been available. It's gone from fancy auto-competitions -> to writing a function that I'd need to do corrections on -> to now writing complete modules that I only review. Most of the difference is not the models getting "smarter" but the tooling getting better. The newest agents are at their core a loop to keep the model iterating on the problem spec. They will try everything under the sun to get success. My job now is writing (AI assisted) specifications with (AI assisted) success criteria and then reviewing the code. Comparing this to my reports it takes 2x the time to write exactly what I want without ambiguity and I get results 2-100 times quicker. It's rout stuff, no creativity, but that's 90% of coding. I still hand code that last 10% or when I don't have an exact spec.

It's an enabling factor now, but upper management is looking at AI adoption use for everyone. I've ran several lunch and learns to try and boost numbers. My strategy now is make sure I'm still a value add, but I do worry...
 
Ive been doing my own automation forever though - even Excel can "automate" some pretty sophisticated processes. Data cleaning, analysis, monte carlo, forecasting... all kinds of stuff was already possible for angone willing to learn a little bit. And once its built, it seems like more work for me to convert it to an agentic AI.

The fear I have is when a layman tries to do something that needs domain expertise, the AI agent hallucinates something wrong, nobody catches it (because verification and validation is always one of the first things to go) and it causes lots if damage. In the best case, its only financial damage.
Agentic AI will most certainly be deployed by humans in stupid and irresponsible fashions.

Others will get it right with oversight and human in the loop where needed.

One of the interesting questions raised in the course I took was about accountability in this new technology landscape. You can’t hold an AI Agent accountable the way businesses are accustomed to doing so with humans. But someone has to be accountable at the end of the day
 
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This is where I think the “AI is just another tool we’ll adapt to” framing becomes incomplete. Historically, adaptation worked because humans retained comprehension, control, and the ability to govern the tool. AI is the first widely deployed system that scales globally, operates opaquely even to its creators, and concentrates power extremely quickly—largely outside democratic or public oversight. That’s not fear-mongering; it’s a structural difference.

Disclaimer: This isn’t intended to be combative in tone. If it comes off that way, I’m sorry.

Weirdly I think we probably agree on the potential scale of impact but disagree on much of the rest of it.

I’ll start with most trivial, pedantic disagreement. I think the notion that AI is incomprehensible and opaque is greatly overblown.

Not to be overly facile, but virtually everything in existence is incomprehensible to humans at some level of abstraction.

With AI I think this belief stems from our inability to describe the behavior of the system as we would using a transfer function in a linear system.

Sure, the output is both emergent and non-deterministic, but the process of how it’s created and a conceptual description of what it is doing are embarrassingly simple at the fundamental level (ANNs). It is also basically unchanged over the last 40 years (and the most basic element was invented ~70 years ago!).

While I agree governance and control are the foremost concerns, I don’t think this has anything to do with AI itself

The structural problem is with how we’ve organized our civilization. The concentration of power that already exists is what is causing the abdication by governments of their duty to provide oversight. AI didn’t create that, we all allowed that to happen.

My hunch is that access to data centers needed to keep up in the arms race to build the biggest models will continue to be monetized, not restricted. Those massive models will either become economically viable or they’ll shrink to fit the power budgets to make them profitable enough. I’d bet on a hybrid model of training in the cloud and running inference at the edge becoming the most popular paradigm.

The damage I’m most worried about is due less to control, but to widespread access.

From what I gather the “agentic” AI you’re all talking about currently is integration of LLMs with business tooling wrapped in somewhat bespoke programmatic “agents” to provide domain-specific executive function. Does that sound right?

Putting that firepower in the hands of roving gangs of CFO warlords may well cause economic genocide on a massive scale at precisely a time when social safety nets and cohesion are weakened.

Or maybe it’ll trigger a social remodeling that rebalances power in a more equitable manner?
 
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Agentic AI will most certainly be deployed by humans in stupid and irresponsible fashions.

Others will get it right with oversight and human in the loop where needed.

One of the interesting questions raised in the course I took was about accountability in this new technology landscape. You can’t hold an AI Agent accountable the way businesses are accustomed to doing so with humans. But someone has to be accountable at the end of the day
"Human in the loop" is one place I see benefit. Like some mentioned a few posts earlier, using AI to review human-authored (for now) requirements is really valuable when you get engineers get turned loose on projects. There needs to be recognition that AI can turn a bad requirement into a good requirement, but it can't turn the wrong requirement into the right requirement. And good/bad vs wrong/right requirements is a subtle distinction that even many engineers don't get, let alone business/marketing/product planning people.
 
Pourcyne, I want to push back a bit—not to dismiss what you’re saying, but to add perspective from direct experience that I think matters here.



Postlogue

For transparency: I used AI here the same way I’d use a good editor—to summarize positions in this thread, check tone, and remove unnecessary friction. The ideas, arguments, and conclusions are mine.
Gonna be honest, this was obvious in the first paragraph
 
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I share many of the same concerns already addressed. I try to focus on the things I can control so I don't go to that dark place.

I'm a managing software developer and have been using AI for coding since it's been available. It's gone from fancy auto-competitions -> to writing a function that I'd need to do corrections on -> to now writing complete modules that I only review. Most of the difference is not the models getting "smarter" but the tooling getting better. The newest agents are at their core a loop to keep the model iterating on the problem spec. They will try everything under the sun to get success. My job now is writing (AI assisted) specifications with (AI assisted) success criteria and then reviewing the code. Comparing this to my reports it takes 2x the time to write exactly what I want without ambiguity and I get results 2-100 times quicker. It's rout stuff, no creativity, but that's 90% of coding. I still hand code that last 10% or when I don't have an exact spec.

It's an enabling factor now, but upper management is looking at AI adoption use for everyone. I've ran several lunch and learns to try and boost numbers. My strategy now is make sure I'm still a value add, but I do worry...
Just curious, how are you determining “quicker”? There is an open source study that showed developers thought they were saving time and really weren’t.
 
Nope. Only when I'm trying to show how useful it can be.

Do my responses sound like they have any intelligence attached? ;)
They absolutely sound like AI slop to me, lol

Noticed how I knew immediately? :cool:

AI could have some purposes to help daily daily life.... but taking writing, thought, drawing, and general creativity away from humans ain't it for me.
 
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I'm finding out that the free options seem more limited now, or I just don't know where to look.
I'm trying a new project, and wondering if people were spending money for this to do their writing, or if I just don't know the sites well at all.
 
I share many of the same concerns already addressed. I try to focus on the things I can control so I don't go to that dark place.

I'm a managing software developer and have been using AI for coding since it's been available. It's gone from fancy auto-competitions -> to writing a function that I'd need to do corrections on -> to now writing complete modules that I only review. Most of the difference is not the models getting "smarter" but the tooling getting better. The newest agents are at their core a loop to keep the model iterating on the problem spec. They will try everything under the sun to get success. My job now is writing (AI assisted) specifications with (AI assisted) success criteria and then reviewing the code. Comparing this to my reports it takes 2x the time to write exactly what I want without ambiguity and I get results 2-100 times quicker. It's rout stuff, no creativity, but that's 90% of coding. I still hand code that last 10% or when I don't have an exact spec.

It's an enabling factor now, but upper management is looking at AI adoption use for everyone. I've ran several lunch and learns to try and boost numbers. My strategy now is make sure I'm still a value add, but I do worry...
Out of curiosity, which tools have you used?
 
Haven't followed this thread at ALL.
Owner of a Samsung S25 Ultra.

Incoming emails are responded to minus my intended thoughts....and AI responses are near 100% accurate.
In some instances, more "accurate," and certainly not alcohol infused.
 
They absolutely sound like AI slop to me, lol

Noticed how I knew immediately? :cool:

AI could have some purposes to help daily daily life.... but taking writing, thought, drawing, and general creativity away from humans ain't it for me.
I appreciate your opinion.

However, I will assure you that what I write is not the thought of AI, it does not take my genral creativity away and the writing is crafted and shaped far before the AI is consulted. I would suppose you would dislike any articles or transcripts that have professional editing?

AI does has many purposes in daily life, it can make those that have talent, more productive, and will eventually take on a lot of the things that humans do and can't do now. What we have to decide is if we are going to master it rather than allowing it (or more precisely, those that control it) to master us.

I don't think we are necessarily on opposing sides here. But, simply discounting it will not keep it from becoming an even more powerful force in our collective existence.
 
Gonna be honest, this was obvious in the first paragraph
So, what was obvious. That I created it? That is was my thoughts. That I used an assistant to help edit it.

Did I make my points? Did you decide that the concepts had no merit because it sounded like something?

Please elaborate. I could be misreading your meaning.
 
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I appreciate your opinion.

However, I will assure you that what I write is not the thought of AI, it does not take my genral creativity away and the writing is crafted and shaped far before the AI is consulted. I would suppose you would dislike any articles or transcripts that have professional editing?

AI does has many purposes in daily life, it can make those that have talent, more productive, and will eventually take on a lot of the things that humans do and can't do now. What we have to decide is if we are going to master it rather than allowing it (or more precisely, those that control it) to master us.

I don't think we are necessarily on opposing sides here. But, simply discounting it will not keep it from becoming an even more powerful force in our collective existence.
You can stop now.

It's so bad at understanding what was said, even when clearly stated. lol
 
So, what was obvious. That I created it? That is was my thoughts. That I used an assistant to help edit it.

Did I make my points? Did you decide that the concepts had no merit because it sounded like something?

Please elaborate. I could be misreading your meaning.
Besides the em dashes? The tone and structure felt like something generic I’ve read 100 times via ai.
 
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