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 not there for everyone yet. Apparently a rolling update
I spent longer searching how to make it go away than the quick document I was writing took

I think Google AI summarises are great and so helpful. I regularly use Chatgpt as well, hugely helpful.

Well I’m not sure how that’s going to work as…
A: ai uses a huge amount of energy to process (as many pp have rightly noted)
and
B: The climate crises has basically been caused by humans are using too much energy (carbon) to do the things they want to do.

I'm not a good person to ask because I'm a bit of a hard-ass when it comes to gratuitous energy use. There are lots of things I won't do or use on account of excessive carbon emissions or resource intensiveness. I'm obviously not perfect (using MN for fun!) but I do think we should hold ourselves accountable for our resource and energy consumption and question whether it is strictly necessary. Maybe creating an avatar or a milieu as a one-off to enhance a gaming experience isn't so bad, but aren't you already gaming online with all that entails? A school mum acquaintance churns out endless AI generated 'selfies' of herself as a viking, a red panda (the irony...) a leprechaun, a Native American (!), a sexy nurse etc in multiple iterations; another uses ChatGPT to generate a personalised daily 'poem for the day' for her socials ‐really?! I'm not saying AI is inherently bad or that it doesn't have important applications, but that we shouldn't use it frivolously.

My daughter gets it to do all the coding on excel, it's really helped her.

The problem is humans have evolved to be frivolous.

From the bmw m5 that’s sat on some people’s drives

To the holiday in Thailand

To the meat on the dinner table 7 nights a week

To the brand new phone every 18 months

To the failed space rocket that crashes down to earth burning 7 gazillion tons of fuel

etc etc

I just can’t personally see a drive towards “AI is bad because it takes too many resources” taking hold.

Because it’s against basic human nature. I’m not excusing that, just observing.

I had the puppy option, soon got bored with it.

Agreed. I hate it.

My boss uses it to write promotional campaigns and then sends the script out to our client base on a regular basis. Its terrible, obviously AI, and does not read well. I've tried to tell her and been shot down. It makes me cringe. Intelligent? Ha!

I'm very much hoping it's a bubble that bursts soon. I don't really see how most of the frivolous uses of AI are going to be monetised.

It's less the technology itself I object to than its forcible insertion into everyday life without the option to turn it off.

AI narration drives me mad. I watch a lot of Youtube videos and it is everywhere. Some of it is very obvious but some you won’t realise until they mispronounce a simple word or don’t understand the context (eg a band are playing liv instead of live). I switch it off in annoyance.

It’s very hard to turn off things that are embedded into all of our lives though, as AI is increasingly, often without us knowing.

No. I saw Envision glasses that help blind/visually impaired people. It’s life changing for them. I can live with annoying AI that is just an irritant in my life.

Obviously it will eventually get taken too far though.

This is an example of how it can be monetised. We can't recruit humans for the roles so this is inevitable

Oh God YES that is what it's like!

I'm another one who had the joy of this on my work Google today and couldn't make it stop 😭

Oh, so that’s why every description sounds the same….. enhance your wardrobe, etc.

I loved Clippit - especially his expressive eyebrows 📎

See as an analogue dinosaur that all sounds very complicated to me. Why not just tap in your rental income, business income and and other facts you have to look up elsewhere anyway!!!

I had the little robot that exploded every so often, I was fond of him.

It is everywhere we don't need it, being useless (bad summaries on Google searches, terrible eBay descriptions, absolutely shit customer service chat bots), and not yet doing anything that useful (intelligent toilet brush that lives under the rim would be great, maybe a wheelie bin that knows when it needs to go out with which type of rubbish)

I’d go for either of those

I like AI generated religious "art", which is usually hilarious. If we feed it's brain nonsense, surely AI will remain dumb?

(JC has five fingers and one thumb on his left hand)

I once spent a couple of hours on a quiet Friday afternoon (those were the days) searching "How do I kill Mr. Clipit"). A surprising number of pages appeared....

It would be interesting to know what the energy consumption used to generate a throwaway image, like Jesus and his 6 fingers above vs an actual difficult question for AI is.

I can’t imagine 6 finger Jesus actually takes that much processing power.

How? I have not started mine 🙈

The Google ai summaries are wrong a lot of the time. They have no way of knowing if a source is reliable. And they can easily get confused. For example I asked how to remove dried pritt stick. The reply came back "to remove dried pritt stick (glue) use a solvent such as nail varnish remover. " It had obviously not realised there are different types of glue. Pritt stick is water soluble so you can just rinse it in water.

Another example today was of when a particular class of drug became available. It came back "1960s". I knew that was wrong as it was much earlier. Google had used an academic paper from a dubious journal to come up with 1960 but the right answer is the 1940s or maybe even earlier.

I use chat gpt for coding at work and it's good for the common stuff where there's loads of stuff online. It's less good for obscure things.