alt Hacker News> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.
You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.
You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.
You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.
You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.
Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.
You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.
You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.
You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.
On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.
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Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"
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This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
Replies
most of these complaints aren't because of AI though, managers have always looked to make staff redundant when there is a cheaper alternative regardless of quality, politicians giving tax breaks to giant corporations? was always happening before AI came along
as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.