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You seem very eager to jump on any negative AI news out of some desire to prove the “AI bros” wrong. What’s your motivation? Annoyance at AI mandates from above? At insufferable people shoving AI slop in your face at every opportunity? Just disliking the concept in general?
I don’t know if I’m an “AI believer” (what do you mean exactly by that?), I dislike OpenAI and Anthropic for the shenanigans they keep pulling, and I’ll jump ship to whichever AI service provided the best value for money. The tech industry hype cycle goes on and on, at some point people went crazy over Java of all things, now it’s just a boring programming language and you don’t have to be a “Java believer” to use it.
All of the above, honestly? But the biggest would be annoyance at mandates from above, combined with a completely reversal in what people consider quality engineering in software that magically coincides with the rise in popularity of AI tools. See Lines of Code suddenly becoming a positive metric for a lot of people, versus the old Bill Gates quote "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
Sure, but despite Java's warts it's still used to this day to make a lot of the important software that keeps the modern world running. The AI hype bubble is much more reminiscent of the crypto bubble. No matter how many times you tried to make it clear that crypto is only useful where you need a distributed, immutable, trustless ledger (and even then it's questionable), crypto bros kept proposing uses in situations where trust was still required and other existing tools already did an infinitely better job for far less computing power. Similarly, I see retarded things like "I had AI generate a thing, and then I had another AI review it and tell me it looked great! What, review it myself? No, of course not, why would I do that?"
Except crypto was almost always purely in the realm of theory-applications.
With AI, right now, I can do things like generate custom flashcards for subjects I'm learning (job interview prep). I can get more in-detail answers about random questions without spending hours on Google piecing things together (just yesterday, asking for details about how stomachs process different macronutrient profiles). I can generate custom mini-apps for a wide variety of tasks (recently I made a custom task-selection spinner for my todo list that weights the important tasks more than smaller tasks, while occasionally mandating a break). It can make sure an email I send to a recruiter doesn't have obvious mistakes or commit a faux pas. I can get personal advice of at least middling quality without friction on a wide variety of topics. Obviously, it can code really well, and that touches my field very directly in a lot of ways. There are plenty of other use cases, too. These aren't "lines of code" type accomplishments, they are concrete deliverables of various scopes. Some of which were previously high-friction or even impossible.
Sure, some of these are gratuitous or busywork, but they are all real. Crypto stuff was like, "what if the government keeps track of property listings on the blockchain" which is a) something the government already does mostly just fine and b) obviously never happened and c) would have required very significant network effects. And currently, crypto is extremely useful for pretty much exactly two types of people: those who treat it like digital gold (it does OK at that) and criminals who can move money around that's difficult to track. Nothing else. So sure, in that sense it was real, but AI plainly can do more than two things and will continue to do more than two things even as hype dies out.
And sure, my IRL friend will give me better advice than Claude will, but there are some things that are so low-stakes that it would be disrespectful of their time to ask or discuss. Paradigms like that are all over, because of the speed and cost AI offers. In that sense, it's more like the Industrial Revolution, where speed and cost enable things to happen that previously were functionally impossible at scale. In fact most of the Industrial Revolution was about things that were already feasible to do, but were cost-prohibitive (or took too long). This in turn generated new industries that were previously only theory. Now, I don't think AI will have that level of impact on society, and I'm also not sold on it 'creating new industries' at all, but probably it's somewhere on the level of the impact similar to the invention of Google at least?
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