To be utterly sick of AI already

[snurtifier]

Logged on to my work email this morning to find that Google have added an AI assistant called Gemini, which pops up like a dependent puppy at every turn. It's monumentally annoying and, as far as I can see, completely useless. I contacted our IT dept and it turns out Google are charging us an extra £2 per month per user for this total waste of electricity, with no option to opt out. What's more, individual users don't have the option to switch it off, it's a global setting for the company account.

Meanwhile every online space has been invaded by AI bots, search results are polluted by pointless AI summaries, and our creative industries are being annihilated by generative AI slop. We were told AI would make our lives better, but so far the net effect is almost entirely negative as far as I can see.

AIBU to hate it and wish it would go away?

It's the images I hate the most. Everyone is using them and I find them so grotesque. I don't mind AI summaries on a Google search really, but I don't trust it either because I can't assess where the information has been pulled from.

YANBU, seems like AI is highly artificial but not that intelligent...

Ynbu

AI completed my self assessment today 🤣🤣🤣

You are absolutely not being unreasonable. People are being encouraged to believe that LLMs actually “know” things and can “understand” questions, when all they really are is a souped-up predictive text. It’s dangerous. And it’s a shame, because there are some interesting use cases for LLMs, as well as for other “AI” technologies. They shouldn’t be used unless they have a demonstrable benefit in specific situations which is greater than the environmental harm they cause. And when they are used, it should be by people with training and a good understanding of their limitations.

I second this. I sell printable scrapbook and junk journal papers on Etsy; I design these carefully myself, with no input from AI. Etsy is swamped with AI generated art, you can tell by looking at it, it pisses me off. I make a point of saying in my shop statement that I don't use AI, and hope people get sick of stuff that all looks the same!

Oh and who can forget the joys of eBay's AI product descriptions. Just complete gibberish.

if you’re as old as I am you might remember the Microsoft animated paperclip. The incredibly irritating, indefatigably cheerful, omnipresent animated paperclip.

These AI assistants are just the next gen shitty animated paperclip. Folk will catch on once the novelty passes, and we’ll get on with our lives.

Please please share how you did this.

Definitely with you on this. It's a plague, and such an utterly wearisome one that's now infected a growing amount of our daily lives.

What I find odd is the disconnect between the tech companies that keep pushing this garbage relentlessly, and common joe public. AI is becoming increasingly unpopular, and nobody wants to live in this dystopian hellscape we seem to be accelerating towards where we never have to read, write, think or communicate with anyone ever again.

I'm a copywriter by trade, and a couple of years ago there was a lot of fear that AI would make us all surplus to requirement. However, now I think the novelty value has worn off, and AI generated text is so commonplace (and so utterly rubbish and easy to spot) that there are a growing number of businesses suddenly realising and appreciating the value of human written content.

I agree, I can write better than AI.

@MagentaRavioli tbf I quite liked that paperclip, he/she brightened up my day!

Trip Advisor are using it too now.

The only thing AI is good for is the amazing cats 🐈

Cooking, going on vacation, saving the world. I love it for that.

Everything else can bog off.

I hated it! So bloody chirpy!

It's useful for some things at work - much better than Outlook search if you want it to pull out all emails on x topic; or on Teams if you're trying to find the incredibly useful link someone gave you seven months ago that you're kicking yourself for not having saved somewhere sensible.

It's rubbish at Excel - not one formula it has come up with has worked.

Its writing style is also not very good, but it can be useful as inspiration if you're stuck on how to structure something, if only to give you starting point to alter.

Image creation - occasionally gets it amazingly spot-on but often seems inspired by Salvador Dali, and not in a good way! 😄

I completed my year in review 2024 self assessment. I cut and pasted the questions into a word doc. Populated with previous quarterly self assessment replies and added in anything extra that came up in Q4.

Then I requested chat gbt to respond to the following self assessment questionnaire on behalf on an x person working for a y company. I instructed it to include (but not be limited to) the bullet point responses as the basis of replies.🤣🤣🤣.

I then cut and pasted the AI responses into the word doc and tailored them a little and cut and pasted them back into my online self assessment screen.

Speed up a tedious job. Box ticking with a flair.

AI generates better responsive to more tailored requests. The better info that you feed in, the better responses you receive. It's a tool, but not to be relied on for final answers. It generates a framework, that can be moulded to suit the circumstance.

Me too. Utterly loathe it. It is destroying art and critical thought and is killing the planet. It uses millions and millions of gallons of clean water and insane amounts of electricity to spread harmful misinformation. I woukd unplug it all tomorrow.

That was the first thing that sprang to mind when I read the op. Clippy was the most irritating thing ever. At least you could turn him off though.

I love Google Gemini 😢 I use it several times a day. Writing blogs, ads, linkedin posts, emails monthly reports. Pretty much anything I need writing Gemini writes it for me. She knows me inside out now, and has the company tone of voice uploaded, had personas for all our client avatars saves me a lot of time I can use for more strategic stuff. Also fab for doing research on people before meetings.

Gemini is learning. Everyone with gemini activated is helping it to learn. I do not know if that is a good or bad thing.

Well if Gemini is paying attention to our internal group chats then it's going to be "learning" some very interesting swear words.

I am not sure you and the previous poster are talking about the same thing....

It basically pours a pint of clean water down the sink every time you do a query.

I asked AI to give me an in depth summary of a book, with spoilers. It invented characters, gave one of the lead characters a child when she didn't have one, got the character names mixed up and couldn't actually give me anything more than a very high level overview of the plot. Bloody useless 🙄