I had a meeting recently where our new dipshit VP told everyone that we needed to use AI. He didn’t know how, or why, but really wanted to make sure everyone knew that we needed it. And then he went on a rant about how people give their electronics names or something.
Fucking moron.
Had a meeting 6 months ago with the CEO demanding why we haven’t incorporated AI into more of our company. We said we did. Our devs are using AI to speed up programming. And we were exploring customer service support with AI.
Then he demanded more. And we just stared at him wanting him to answer “in what usecase”.
Fortunately our CEO has a short attention span and hasn’t brought it up since. Also still haven’t implemented any of the AI stuff successfully.
I was recently working on a migration for a divestiture of a healthcare company, so mid-migration the stakeholders changed their tenant domain to a .ai domain, and they never purchased the previous domain, which at least had ‘health’ in the name, so it fucked up the email forwarding and parts of the mail migration.
This company has nothing to do with AI, they can barely keep their SharePoint site functional, and none of their developers has a clue about AI, so why did they choose a .ai domain? Because some asshole executives thought it made them sound cool.
Just another example of the enshittification of the Internet.
I was recently doing contract work for a .ai company. They were suspiciously wary of actually SHOWING ANYONE THE PRODUCT. They kept raving about this incredible AI platform, they’d promise demos and all of these impressive capabilities, then nothing. Rinse and repeat.
It ended with the CEO trying to avoid all communications and not pay everyone as the company floundered.
Every few years there’s a new shiny buzzword. Most of the time, people don’t even remember it a decade later. I think AI will find its place in a number of industries, but there will be a lot of growing pains as these companies try to shove it where it obviously doesn’t belong.
New! AI powered restaurant! Whatever the AI tells us to make, we’ll make it and you’ll eat it!
Let’s 3d print meals at an AI restaurant with a low carbon footprint with organic food delivered by renewable ride shares!
On the blockchain!
With VR!
I don’t think AI will dramatically change the experiences we have interacting with businesses or content creators - we’ll still evaluate their output with the same metrics we use now.
But as a tool it vastly accelerates a lot of old processes that were mundane or mentally exhausting. Previously we overcame these with an army of educated workers who - although skilled - were performing a function that turns out to be repeatable with enough silicon. Tasks like basic writing, basic research, basic programming, image/video/audio editing.
These are all tasks that never really required an incredible amount of experience if you had the right tools, and now one of those tools is “AI” as we are calling it, which does a halfway decent job with nearly zero effort. A whole lot less effort than before.
The highly skilled and educated will continue to be fine - they can work a lot faster now and instead of spending a lot of time on these mundane tasks, can spend more on the higher level stuff. The people who are still moving up the skill levels will have to go a lot further in their education before their value is as apparent.
Honestly, I would try that restaurant. If it somehow knew my preference in spice, rare/medium, my preferred drink to that specific meal.
I could see it work. I would at least try it.
I see AI sort of like 3D cinema, buzzing like crazy right now, people exploring all it can do, but in 5-10 years, while not dead, it will be mostly overblown.
It will be a niche tool, that improves certain tasks in many sectors, but we won’t hear much about it.
As someone with a huge intrest in machine learning, it kinda pains me to see all this empty hype. All the buzzword fetishists seem to have picked AI as their next big thing, without properly understanding what it does. Most businesses don’t need AI. For them it’d be a huge money and time sink. They could maybe benefit from existing tools like Copilot or ChatGPT, but they don’t need their own AI features in their apps. Once their post-nut clarity kicks in and they find out how much money they’ve wasted on something that was barely useful to their products, they’ll probably start hating AI for their own mistakes.
AI/ML is a very cool and useful tool. But most products don’t need AI currently. It’s not worth it in most cases, appart from maybe using off-the-shelf solutions that are easily Integrated.
