AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.
True, but there's a lot of room for ulterior motives there too.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
We saw the same thing with crypto ads dominating the Super Bowl a couple of years ago and gambling apps during the NBA playoffs. TV advertising for major sporting events is a "flex" as so few companies can afford the cost of a national ad slot. The ones that do usually have money to burn from investors.
I just returned from vacation in Wisconsin, where the Olympics were on everywhere. Every single time an ad prompting AI came on, people loudly booed, and it was not uncommon to hear "don't be a sucker!" and "fuck that bullshit" yelled out. When I asked, people would say "I'm not stupid, I'm not touching AI anything."
I grew up and live in small town Wisconsin. Sounds very believable.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
I disagree. It's good that people scrutinize and resist corporate greed. Accepting that "AI" (whatever that means) should be in every single product I use is not adapting. It's bending over. People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
> It's good that people scrutinize and resist corporate greed.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
> People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
> Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
> Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
I agree with most of your points. However, I stand by my point that corporations looking to cut costs moved those production jobs abroad. This will happen time and again under capitalism. I think blaming the working poor is not the right conclusion to draw.
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
> Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
> You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
Frankly the fact that you expect everyone who lived around you to just up and reskill shows that even if you lived there, you did not understand the people you lived with. People are limited, flawed, and 50% of them are below average in most any stat you could come up with. Does that mean it's their fault when the legislators in Washington decide it's time for their industry to go bye-bye? To put it concretely, is the fair punishment for "being too slow to adapt to industry trends" the total destruction of their family and the communities which once supported it? You seem to think that if people just swallowed their fear and dove in head-first, things would be OK. But in reality, the people who can, generally -do-: it is the people who don't think they have a chance at reskilling who are the most afraid, and are the most likely to lash out against the possibility of it happening. Because if it does, what are they going to do? Not every press operator can turn into a CAM engineer, there just aren't enough roles. Destitution was prearranged for the large majority of them.
This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c
I live in the Midwest. I don’t know what all your other reply’s to other people say.
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
> Or they have developed a good filter for BS marketing.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
> The markets can adapt also.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
It is still not marketed to you the same way the millions of ads you see of prescription drugs that can only be prescribed by doctors are marketed on tv.
Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
Does everybody really have ChatGPT installed? I, and most of my colleagues at work in the development department, don't use ChatGPT for anything. A couple of us use Copilot-esque tools, but even then, the suggestions are almost always useless.
I have used ChatGPT a few times instead of looking up documentation. It can give you a better start point for common stuff, like draw a scatter plot with upper and lower limits with matplotlib.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
I don't use any form of "AI", and I'm a software engineer. At least two of my friends, who don't work in software, have somehow learned about ChatGPT and routinely use it for whatever.
"Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor."
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
After spending time abroad you begin to realize just how insane these commercials are. Only the US and like Australia allow these weird doctor-bypass medical advice/brainwashing sessions.
It's literally true that it is being marketed to consumers. GP was being somewhat poetic. Marketing to consumers is an instrumental goal in service of marketing to investors. The aim is to sell more stock to investors rather than more product to consumers.
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
Well at least you can switch your crypto mining toothbrush with AI infused one that will analyze movements of your hands and once sold to insurance brokers conclude you have an old injury and are a risky driver raising your insurance premiums.
Current model massage chairs are marketed as having AI (which I think actually just means they have pressure sensors which they use to detect your height/weight... but who knows these days?)
You missed metaverses. Also there was another AI one; there was a smallish computer vision oriented bubble early last decade. Main product was a lot of money wasted on putative self-driving cars, but there was other stuff.
Also wearables, VR/AR (possibly included in your computer-vision category), 3DTV, nanotech, tablet computers (possibly breaking out), brain-computer interfaces, IoT (AI is the new IoT, IMO), 3D printing, Big Data, Theranos (and other highly-customised healthcare, think 23andMe).
Oh, huh. Totally forgot about IoT, yeah. I think tablet computers are a _bit_ different; they were never really sold as changing the world, and have carved out a definite niche (certainly more so than any of that other stuff).
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
Exactly. Marketing dollars come from investors. A big part of modern marketing for startups is spending tons of investor money to "grow" quickly. How long the fire burns doesn't matter, it's all about throwing dried out February Christmas trees onto the flames for quick bursts of flame.
Exactly, I had an interview at some company last year that had AI in their name and got a million invested in them. I read their website and saw nothing that really showcased AI it seemed like just something you could code with basic filtering. The interview felt like I was consulting them on what to do next and I probably should of been paid.
Arent the Investors the main consumers for software goods by now? The customer consumer (cc) is just a stage to mass adoption on the way towards en-shitification, basically some late stage fracking process chemical, needed yes, but not a decisionmaker when it comes to drilling.
I've seen this and it's very silly. Every step where the machine makes an automated decision, it displays a message like, "using AI to xyz." I have to imagine the "AI" to determine how long the cycle should be is a linear function of some metric like weight.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
"AI Bubble which mixes water, air and detergent..."
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
It's still very much a product that you can buy. One of the "features" was being able to look into the fridge with an inward facing camera from your phone while you're away from home. Potentially useful if you really can't remember what you have while at the grocery store.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
I can imagine a fridge with an (outside) camera that can take a picture of your groceries (make the user hold it for a fraction of a second in front of the camera) and categorize it as well as see its expiration date (or estimate, e.g. for fruits and vegetables) would actually be useful, considering we throw away so much food.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
But this is a great example of something no one has ever asked for. Even the suckers buying it never wanted it, they would just buy “top of the line” no matter what useless “features” that means.
For corporations I’m sure they like whatever cash they squeeze out of whatever percent of people have this “get the most expensive offering” strategy but it seems likely the end goal is more about gradually normalizing more expensive offerings at all levels. After you get there, you can start removing useful things that justified cost originally (like headphone jacks) to push whatever else people now need (ear buds). Smart phones are the obvious example of this sort of thing, where major carriers will basically force customers to get use either the latest iPhone or android, and then act like your existing phone is a potato and you must be crazy to think that they could make it ring.
Not just a push to require smart phones but the latest ridiculously large one with features no one cares about, at a price point that it becomes a major investment for many households, and now needs a payment plan. whereas logic,progress and naive expectations of capitalism would suggest that such things would be getting cheaper, and represent a *smaller* chunk of your monthly wages.
See also the similar situation with everything from smart tvs to toasters. I try to enjoy experiences with flashlights and paper maps while these things are still available. If toothpaste were invented today it would be engineered with a short shelf life and require a subscription
Can't wait for my washing machine to be able to make an API call to OpenAI so it can worked out how best to tackle the stain on my undies. We really are living in the future.
No internet / dns fail / openai failed patching and bam! Whole world wears dirty clothes.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
You’d be shocked at how brain dead the csuite who influence buying decisions can be.
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.
