nightsky
With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.
Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow “gain new abilites” and do “horrifying things”.
Not even buying things on blu-ray is safe anymore from being tainted with “AI” nightmare fuel.
The ongoing trend of “flat UI” is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don’t mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had “flat design” due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.
The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like “all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic” (luckily this one is on its way out) or “war on physical buttons” aka “touchscreens everywhere”… it’s simply a design trend.
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said… this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
Ugh, from me as well: sorry to hear that.
I can relate to how you feel about the AI stuff. I also work for GenAI-pilled upper management, and the forced introduction of github copilot is coming soon. It will make us all super extra productive! …they say. Dreading it already. I won’t use it at all, I’ve already made that clear to my superior. But my colleagues might use it, and then I will have to review the AI slop… uggghh…
Maybe a small silver lining to raise the mood here, recent article from Monday: Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges
If even freaking Gartner is now saying “well, maybe AI is too expensive and not actually so useful”… then maybe the world of management will wisen up as well, soon, hopefully, maybe?
FastCompany: “In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots”
It’s interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need “Apple Intelligence”[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous “Crush” AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday… I find it just alienating.
Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can’t find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don’t think anyone can.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
Ah, so apparently Google has found a new way to make Youtube comments worse.
Projects having a self-appointed “BDFL” has become kind of a red flag for me in general. I know the term is used somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still I find it really offputting. Ruins the vibes.
Has happened just recently that I found an interesting project, was excited about it and even thought about becoming a contributor eventually… until I saw that its founder calls themselves “BDFL”, and then I just noped out.