I don’t work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn’t already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist
The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks.
I don’t really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don’t use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?
There are loads of reasons normal people aren’t using AI Agents. This article doesn’t give any of the ones I’d think of, and they flat out ignore all of the real reasons behind it.
The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don’t understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.
It’s not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they’re not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. “Normal people” accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little “normal people” jobs and “normal people” lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It’s signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.
Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It’s not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it’s still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.
The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don’t like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn’t charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over… well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it’s no secret there’s also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.
Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It’s been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They’re not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with… the charity of the ultra wealthy? That’s nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we’re redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).
I’m not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn’t see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.
And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that “using” something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren’t asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it’s simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they’re not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.
None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren’t reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it’s not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.
What an addoly written article. It reads like satire. I don’t think it is. But it reads like it.
I feel like I got so little substantive information from reading that.
Normal people couldn’t figure out the “mail merge” function of their 1980-era word processor, and haven’t figured it out since.
Normal people don’t use VS Code either… what’s a silly article
I don’t use a scalpel… so I guess scalpels are stupid and Surgeons are idiots?
You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.
“You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!”
- guy who vibe codes by talking into a mask.
“You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!”
We are totally past that. Where is my hover car?
I know you think you’re being witty, but autonomous robotic surgery is a hot tech that is starting to push into active use.
My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
The pasta manufacturer and the tomato farmer would like to have a word with your metaphor.
Also, the chef stole the recipe and ingredients from somebody else.
He only stole the recipe, he took out a trillion dollars in debt to buy the ingredients
I don’t use tech I can’t trust, and AI did lie to me before.
I’ve lied to you too, but you still use me, Steven!
well if i could use ai the same way, maybe i would like it more
I’ve started to call people AI-assisted
“Powered by Claude”.
I do everything I possibly can to avoid that shit. Any app or service i use that trys to force it gets canceled and deleted.
Even before computers I didn’t need, nor want, anyone’s help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human’s independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly “AI” subscription.
I’ve seldom been described as a normal person, but in my job, I have to get things right or there are problems for real people. So whatever tools I use have to be reproducible in their results, transparent in how they give their answers, and verifiable. So that precludes LLMs, which are automated bullshit firehoses with opaque, constantly mutable workings.
Those are exactly the properties that should never apply to a system whose output actually matters.
I just had a thought. The people pushing for AI use get fined when the make huge mistakes, basically a speeding ticket. But they’re pushing AI on people that get fired or go to jail if they make a huge mistake, more like A DUI. So they’re saying “use this thing that makes the kind of mistakes that I’d fire you over, and take responsibility of it”.
More or less what happened to my former project manager.
No reason you can’t use LLMs to write deterministic scripts. Handing off every task to an agent is a crapshoot, but they do help with some tasks. At the minimum - writing regression tests.
I use the AI agents to write software which is reproducible in its results, transparent in how it operates and verifiable…
Trust an LLM to switch on a light? No. Trust an LLM to write a diagnostic script and tell me what problems it notices in 3MB of log files, then write another script to patch the problem? Only if I actually understand the problem it finds and how the solution it creates is going to work.
They reduce some tasks that used to take weeks to a single day activity, they are NOT universally applicable.
I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it
It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.
Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.
May I ask what the use case was?
What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”
For fuck’s sake.
It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.
Aka reliable technology
I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as “AI”. I think it’s fairly useful now, and suspect we’re at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.
What I don’t like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo’s front end, which anonymizes prompts.
As for agents, it’s pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I’m confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.
Yeah “AI” stuff gets a lot of hate around here but I think it works pretty well as a tool for things like information gathering and analysis. Wouldn’t trust it to go off taking actions by itself either though.
To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
In as far as the Google Home speakers are “Agents” we’ve had one for several years now. It’s good for a laugh once every so often when it gives a wildly random response to something we ask it for. Would we trust it to do anything like lock or unlock the house door? I don’t think so, probably not ever, definitely not today.
Doesn’t help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.
Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of “don’t be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them” that customization isn’t making a damn agent, it’s adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!
I’ve been “adjusting the prompt and saving changes” with Claude code for the past 9 months (it’s not ready to have a baby yet), it has been steadily improving over those months, a lot of that seems to be in the models and harnesses provided by Anthropic, but not a small part of it is the customization of the prompt to do what I want the first time instead of making me redirect it constantly.
They are not using agents. Most people use LLMs as Google on steroids.
Google on LSD (the hallucinate results)
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
99% nudify apps
lol it’s true. My mom sends me screenshots of AI chats every fucking day.
Just the other day I was pissed off. My dad missed some deadline to request money from the government. I told him to call them, they might be able to do something anyways. He was like “nah, they’ll never do that, why would they have a deadline if they do it after the deadline yadayada”
Then a few days later he told me “oh that gpt thing told me to just try, I might be lucky and they pay out even after the deadline, he was very reassuring, so I’ll try calling them!”Man chatgpt would fucking tell you to try your luck if you’re 12 years over the deadline, but god forbid your son tells you the exact same thing and you even consider calling them lol
There was some research recently that showed the same thing. People who are “dug in” on a topic, usually a political topic, will shut down when a person tries to persuade them of an alternative, but are much more open to hear the same arguments from AI and actually reconsider their position.
I believe this is a big reason why X-Ai was so important for conservatives to get off of the ground, they were afraid all the crazy would start wearing off if people asked the “woke” models for the truth.
i know some tech people that uses it.
So you’re decided not to use a useful tool, because you don’t like it. Gotcha.
I once thought the fediverse was full of cool, techsavy people. Turned out it’s full of old people yelling at clouds.
I’ve had Gemini downright lie or completely fuck up before and it’s not a rare occurrence. That means you have to verify everything anyway and hell at that point maybe you should have just looked it up yourself.
First of: When? Few months make a huge difference. Development happens fast.
Second: Gemini is not the top of the line. You could do worse - if you use the fucking LLMs from meta.
My issue is that people have been saying “yeah, it’s a bit iffy, but it’ll get better” since 2022. It’s been four years. When is it actually gonna get better… enough?
Based on my understanding of the underlying tech, it will always have some level of making shit up. That, combined with the fact that all of these companies are spending more money running data centers than they have coming in, implies to me that this tech (at least in the current form of cloud-based chatbots) isn’t staying around long-term. No one is actually making money off of it except the hardware vendors. None of these AI companies are what my grandpa would’ve called a “going concern.” So I haven’t felt much desire to get into it.
I typically like new technology as it comes out, but I haven’t found LLM’s to be very impressive or inspiring.
Use it two years ago. It is wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Use it a month later. It is still wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Repeat for months on end. It is always wrong in different ways. It even finds new and unique ways to be wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Every time.
Personally, I just think the dipshits who use LLMs are just fucking morons that don’t realize it’s wrong, or they wouldn’t use it because it is still shit. But, fuck me for not wanting to use the planet-destroying technology that lies for pennies.
At first I was bit mad to be called a dipshit, but hey, what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed. Lol, you’re right of course. It’s just ChatGPT 3.5 that finds all those bugs in the Linux kernel.
You just don’t know, don’t you. You probably even don’t know the difference between a chatbot and an Agent. All you know is empty phrases and hyperbolic statements. You know, it’s fine. Get your upvotes from your ignorant, uninformed circlejerk and yell at the clouds. Good luck.
…what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed.
In that case, maybe they should take down what they’ve released to production until they finish the development. It isn’t finished yet.
Those bugs that generative AI found in Linux were some old bugs that, and I cannot stress this enough, required elevated access to your system and only crashed the machine. Basically, it wasn’t found because it never actually affected anybody, but sure, take your win. You were lacking them.
And hey man, if you caught some strays on that comment, maybe consider going outside. There are people out there that could enjoy being around you if you stopped talking about AI! They are rather nice because they typically like other people and don’t call them Luddites for not wanting to kill the planet tp avoid writing an email.
But, sure, let’s play the dumbfuck game where AI proponents use their definitions to pretend that a chatbot (a thing that doesn’t really matter to LLMs in general since they’ve existed for fucking decades) and an agent (basically the same shit as an LLM but directed) are things that truly matter in the discourse. They don’t. People that don’t want their brain rotted from the inside out just hate AI. Not wanting to turn your brain off seems pretty fucking normal to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you because the thoughts in your head are a nightmare to experience.
You have your definition of useful, I have mine. Maybe predictability is important to many others, but not to you.
Besides, “not liking it” sounds like a pretty legit reason for not using something, lol. Would you listen to music if you didn’t like it?
Music is NOT a tool.
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
And this argument about different definitions is fundamentally dishonest under a comment that say broadly we don’t like AI. I have my definitions of interesting, useful and fun. But if I would make a post about, I would be torn apart here, lol.
Music is NOT a tool.
I use music as a tool to relax. If the music isn’t relaxing, I don’t like it, and I won’t listen to it. See how that works?
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
No, it’s like using a jackhammer when you need a chisel. You have to repair most of the shit instead of doing it right the first time.
And you get progressively worse at using the chisel when you only use a jackhammer for everything.
I think music is so much more than a tool. But I‘m not here to argue over music. I get your point.
So you don’t see any merit in current AI at all? Do you thin it will vanish like the blockchain fad?
If I’m trying to fasten something, and the screwdriver fucks up half the time, then yeah I’m going to nail it together instead. Or use glue, or anything but an unreliable screwdriver.
Thats the thing. AI doesn’t fuck up all the time and has gotten genuinely useful for some things in the last months.
But a huge amount of you doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, generating an insufferable, ignorant circlejerk, drowning out every interesting discussion you can have about this topic.
If I had an employee that fucked up as often and confidently as LLMs do, I would terminate their employment. I don’t have the time or patience to redo all their work because I can’t trust them. If a brand had quality issues at as high a rate as LLM output, I would avoid buying anything related to that brand.
A human being or company can make some amount of mistakes and that’s completely understandable, and I think it’s perfectly fair to hold LLMs to that standard. That said, with a human being I can stress how important some task is and they don’t double or triple check their when it is that important, I can not and will not trust them. If I tell a company “hey this is important to me”, they will usually make extra effort to make sure it’s correct, and if they fail to do so, a decent company will make an extra effort to make things right. An LLM will offer an empty apology and spew more bullshit at me that I still have to verify.
The fact that AI gets things right often enough for you is great. Maybe I have higher standards, maybe I need higher quality output, or maybe I have trust issues. Everyone has a different threshold. Just because yours is much different than the people here doesn’t mean their opinions are invalid, and the way you dismiss everyone’s opinions and insist that it’s good enough makes you seem just as insufferable and ignorant as you accuse others of being.
The fact that LLM output has improved is great, but it is still so far from meeting much less exceeding my threshold that it’s beyond frustrating to keep being told over and over that “no bro, it’s good now”. I’ve been hearing that for over two years and it’s still not close to where I would trust it to answer questions, much less perform actions on my computer with access to my personal data.
You need to learn that some people are different than you and understand where they’re coming from if you want to have an “interesting discussion… about this topic”, rather than getting frustrated that people don’t agree with you and rage quitting.
half the time
Who said all the time? The problem is most people can’t tell which half it’s fucking up. An unreliable tool isn’t useful
Hmm. They fuck up 50 percent of the time? I not only doubt that, I know that this is wrong. No offense. Do you actively use LMMs?
That is what people have said, every day, on repeat, for the last three years. Explain why it is better now instead of three months ago, when it was definitely not fucking up all the time and then I will copypaste that back to you for what was said three months ago for the same question.
Which standards are you gonna hold it to? The benchmarking involves using standardized testing, but they typically just feed those questions into the testing data, so the tests have to be constantly updated, and when they are, you will not be surprised to learn that the machines goes back to fucking up the answers all the time.
Experts in their fields do not use this shit because it is wrong on the things they know, but, oh wow, it must be totally right about the things I don’t know anything about? Every time.
Removed by mod
Some tools are useless, period.
I think AI is like being given an automatic screwdriver with the speed maxed to shit. If you pay super close attention, you might be able to do things faster, with hypervigilance and expert knowledge. In most cases, though, you won’t. Congratulations, you have screwed in 100 screws, mostly incorrectly and stripped, when everyone else did 30, and you have fucked over the people who have to fix your shit.
I think AI agents are a lot like a chainsaw - they can save you a lot of time vs other tools for the same job, but… you can also screw up with them rather easily.
Fortunately, I just write software with LLM agents, if it comes out badly I can start over with nothing lost but time. My experience of the last few months has been: it actually writes some pretty good software, if you know anything about writing good software with teams of people and apply that knowledge to managing the LLM agents. If you’re just some guy who doesn’t really know how to write software, LLM agents aren’t always going to save you from yourself, just like a chainsaw won’t.
Good analogy! But I disagree.
Tech savvy groups have always included a significant amount of well established people unhappy with how technology is being implemented or used - who then, yes, yell at clouds. Hell, a lot of us still literally yell about the Cloud.
Paraphrasing a management quote I found a few decades ago - if the engineers aren’t complaining about something, it’s not because they’re happy. It means they’re complaining where you can’t hear them.
I‘m not fully in favour of LMMs by the way. They have their quirks, to put it mildly and are not suited for everything. I think they’re most effective with with someone who knows how to use them and when not to use them. I’m also highly suspicious against those AI companies and their CEOs.
Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.
Are we considered “normal people” though?
Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”
And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.
I often wonder as well because being a news reader makes me assume others are also following the news more closely than myself. When I test this theory by talking to people around me, I learn that maybe I’m more alone than I thought.
At least with social media I get to follow the news with all of you, my fellow nerds
One of us! One of us! One of us!
Gabba gabba hey!
Quite a few of the people I know and consider “normal” openly dislike AI.
I’m not sure it’s a majority opinion buts it’s not an obscure one.
I have at least one head, so I’m normal. You?
