To be fair, yes, I’m just another person on the fediverse for all of you, but for me, this is the reality I live in.
I’ve always wondered about all the AI hate around here, and if this is just a fediverse thing, but realized recently that it’s not. In fact, people are generally getting tired of constant LLM and genAI use. I’ve already noticed people getting turned off by AI flyers more and more, sentences like “oh, they switched to an AI flyer”, in a voice of disappointment. And recently, I was at a trade show, talking to one of the reps at a booth, and it was really interesting to hear what he had to say on the topic. Apparently, two years ago, he constantly got questions about AI, wanting to hear that the products contain AI. This year, people also ask him fairly often if his products have AI, hoping to hear that they don’t have AI. And he was able to clearly say, there is no AI in his products (at least not the LLM kind, only the classic, non-neural network kind).
It’d be great if everyone would mention the little bit of AI that they noticed making something worse.
Me, it’s extremely petty and first world problemy. I am disabled in the brains, so until recently I was getting a lot of Ubereats delivery.
(Not so much any more, because I live with a kind and generous and extremely good cook now who likes doing culinary experiments on me. Because I’m expendable.)
The descriptions of the food are all the bloody same now. AI slop wall to wall. And when there’s pictures, it’s best to ignore them because they’re so often just slop which might or might not look like food.
It’s an incredibly minor issue, but it grinds my gears. Every little piece of everyday human creativity just mashed away into a mediocre paste. No more descriptions like “hottest goddamn curry, no bull, don’t complain about the burn you wimp” like my favourite Thai place had for a while.
Just bleh. “Fragrant spices and fresh ingredients combined into a green curry.” Thanks AI, real fucken descriptive.
They just seem to guess at the ingredients, too. Which is super helpful for those with dietary restrictions. Doubly so when they disable the “notes” section (where one might specify an allergen they need to avoid, for example.)
I don’t use Doordash or Ubereats or whatever myself, but my workplace does. When they want to “reward” us with free lunches, we have to choose something from Doordash. Trying to sift through the menus to find honest descriptions is stressful enough that the reward feels like a punishment. I’d much rather just get the money.
Unfortunately, when I asked them to just give me the money last time this happened, they gave me $5 Doordash credit. The fuck am I even supposed to do with that.
Wasn’t there a business article that was about how people are less willing to buy a product if it advertises its AI implementation?
I’m seeing widespread acceptance and adoption around me IRL. On Reddit it is more accepted than not, seems t be the same smaller bunch running around frantically downvoting. Can’t say I lose much sleep over it.
On Reddit it is more accepted than not
That makes sense. That site has been working towards becoming the embodiment of Dead Internet Theory for years now.
All the small restaurants are using it for menus and ads. So many posts and dlyers using AI. Teachers relying on it entirely in classrooms. Smart coworkers deep frying their brain by using it. It’s everywhere.
I’m seeing that, as well. The point is, though, that many of the reactions I’ve seen have moved from “wow, cool” to disappointment.
Not very smart if they’re cooking themselves by relying on it too heavily
I don’t know why people love making this comment on Lemmy.
If party A accuses Party B of doing something they should know better than doing, while describing Party B as smart, they’re expressing shock. Surprise. It’s uncharacteristic. It’s a bigger problem.
Something / an environment that makes experienced people with good judgment throw out their brains is categorically worse than “just” idiots using a tool they don’t understand.
You already know this
No, see, that’s exactly my point. Someone who’s smart in the well-rounded way you describe, who is experienced and has good judgement, is not someone who would cook themselves with AI. Doing that is a sign that they were likely not that good at judgement to begin with. I’m not saying that smart people can’t fall for AI-- they can, and that’s noteworthy-- but that it is worth at least reexamining their status as a smart coworker if they fall for it.
EVERY single leader and college is using it by choice at unprecedented scale.
I feel like I’m living in a twilight zone episode everyday.
There’s a could chunk of people with real money who buy this crap.
I have a friend who is a professor of linguistics. He only accepts handwritten assignments now. His students are probably copying off their screens by hand, but what can you do? I don’t understand spending all that $$$ on education then not bothering to learn.
I don’t understand spending all that $$$ on education then not bothering to learn.
Rote memorization, disillusioned educators, lack of role models and personal aspirations, and more distractions than ever - like we’re more awash in entertainment than at any point in history.
idk in my school they use it a lot for flyers and no one seems to notice
Monthly users sit at around 3.8 billion [3.8 is not true most likely, bogus source]. Chatgpt alone has a billion weekly users. US wise, about 50% of the population uses it.
Say what you want but adoption is already cemented.
We are maybe a month away from flyers being indistinguishable from the real thing and I think most people don’t really care already. The tech is simply getting better way faster than anyone expected.
We can talk about the very real downsides and all, especially when it comes to big AI, job loss, market capture and the absolute insanity that comes with building datacenters in Arizona, but public sentiment isn’t against it, just the media.
I’m a boxing fan and the smallest promotions are all using AI posters. No, they are not “1 month from being indistinguishable.” They are extremely easy to spot. Mistakes with flags, black backgrounds, constant font changes. It’s extremely easy to spot.
3.8 billion would be about 50% of the entire world population. I don’t know where you’re getting that number, but that sounds highly unlikely
I imagine half of it is Deepseek bots distilling it for the next open weight model
They probably just asked an LLM and trusted the slop that came out.
Sadly, this is the source of a LOT of claims like this.
That would be my guess as well, especially considering that they did not cite any source for that number
That’s larger than any number I can find for the estimated total number of PCs in the world, lmao
You can access chatgpt for free with your phone. My source wasn’t academic and it’s probably much less though. It seems half of phones come with an AI these days tbh tho.
Yeah, because of the way they’ve rolled LLMs up into everything, a bunch of people likely use it regularly with meaning to (or wanting to).
Like, Googlemaps is now being “optimized” (ruined) with AI
Does that mean everyone who uses Google Maps to attempt navigation is now counted as an LLM user? Likely so, especially because the LLM companies want/need those numbers to appear large as possible to keep their insane and irrational valuations.
Were you counted as one of those users because you queried Google, and Google automatically fed your query into their LLM?
As another user mentioned, a lot of those “users” are also certainly agents delegating tasks to other LLMs, and the companies present each separate instance of that function as individual users
Agents using agents using agents using agents…
It’s agents all the way down.
Clicked the first thing I saw on Google but it’s one of those “statistics” website. Chatgpt does have a billion weekly users though, so the 3.8 monthly users across all LLMs didn’t seem far fetched at the time. I’m sometimes not as rigorous as I imagine myself to be. The 50% is from a study from Elon university.
I edited my comment.
.457 by today’s estimate, Lotta fuckin people, pun not intended but staying.
Lmao, it’s a good pun, intentional or otherwise
Those numbers would plummet if the users were actually paying the true cost to run these models. These companies can kick that can down the road, but not indefinitely.
I think that’s a false impression brought about by the endless articles using bad API math. They aren’t running the APi at cost, they are also rerouting easy task to smaller models and build fine tuned quants in the first week or two that they replace their models with. It’s very noticeable, the models are only at their best in the first few weeks than there is noticable degradation.
I don’t get how people can readily distrust OpenAI but drink the “there’s no profit in it” koolaid. Granted, they aren’t in the best of spots if businesses start running their own models but I think it’s overblown a bit personally.
I can run a small model that’s about as good as SOTA a year ago on my 8 GB card and run it for 15 people at a comfy rate, those giant GPUs they have in datacenters are each serving 100+ users, but their APIs are priced as if they needed one GPU per person.
But… Their own numbers say their revenues aren’t close to enough. Why do you not believe their own stats?
I don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty with this, but there’s a lot more going on behind-the-scenes than just running simple queries. I could see a future in which individuals and businesses are running open LLMs on their own hardware at cost for very specific purposes, with the understanding that relying on LLMs for everything will knee-cap them in the long-term. I’m not entirely against the technology itself, as long as people use it responsibly. However, that’s not what’s happening.
What is happening is a handful of AI companies, backed by tech giants and VC funding, are committing gross amounts of copyright infringement and intellectual property theft in an effort to monopolize all human knowledge and sell it back to us at a subscription. In order to do this, they are spending billions of dollars on influence and marketing to the public, government, and businesses. On the public side, they are trying to get everyone addicted to using their LLM chatbots and replace everything from search engines to genuine human interaction with LLMs. On the government side, they are trying to get the military to use LLMs in their war machine and domestic surveillance to identify and target anyone against the regime, while simultaneously cozying up to political leaders to convince them not to regulate them for fear of losing some kind of imaginary AI race with China. On the business side, they are trying to convince every executive and manager that AI is the future and can replace most if not all of their workers, even if it requires the current workers to train their model-powered replacements prior to being laid-off.
As a side note, the inability for regular users to purchase computing hardware at reasonable prices (RAM, GPUs, etc), thus being unable to run open models on their own hardware, is considered a benefit by these AI companies. Similarly, it benefits the AI companies for users to switch from simple queries to agents for basic tasks, because agents consume far more tokens.
The monopolization of this technology by a handful of tech companies, along with the build-out of data centers, hoarding compute hardware, and marketing of it to the public, government, and businesses, is unprofitable at the current prices. The market projections to achieve profitability are somewhere between laughable and insane. Almost all users of the technology, including individuals, government agencies, and businesses, are being heavily subsidized by a combination of dwindling VC funding and increasingly convoluted financing deals. Eventually, the free money is going to run out for the AI companies and their companions (data center builders, AI startups, etc), and they will be forced to raise prices, assuming they don’t immediately go under when the bubble bursts, which is looking increasingly likely. Businesses will be forced to have a serious discussion on ROI for LLM subscriptions, as well as the long-term effects of over-dependency on LLMs for core tasks, such as unmaintainable infrastructure, knowledge loss due to layoffs, and cult-like mindsets driving poor business decisions.
I really hope I’m not right about this, because when the bubble pops, it’s going to be bad, and the repercussions are going to be felt everywhere. I’m reminded of the scene from the Big Short:
You just bet against the American economy. If we’re right it means people lose homes, jobs, retirement savings, pensions. These aren’t just numbers. For every point unemployment goes up, 40 thousand people die. Did you know that?
From the information available, the only companies making a profit from AI are the ones selling the shovels (the hardware to run it).
I dont know if you being right or wrong changes the predictable commercial future.
If you are wrong then the prevailing narrative holds, these companies are subsidising costa to an unprecedented level and a revenue correction is inevitable.
If you’re right, the actual (today) cost of tokens is not utterly horrendous compared to pricing… but that raises the question: what in the name of god do we need all the planned but not yet online datacentres for?
I can only think that it is to train and serve frontier models at an increased token cost that is not predicated on capacity based quantisation, and surely that will make the token costs horrendous because all that investment has to create a return somewhere, so a revenue correction will follow.
Best case scenario; the revenue correction arises after efficient open source models are capable of sustaining most commercial activity. Then the world does not need the datacentre buildout that’s propping up nvidia etc., (i kinda hope thats already the case). Frontier level models will stroll (have strolled?) on past the point of diminishing returns and will become commercial black holes…
All the datacenter build are more about squeezing supply imo. They build them so their competitors can’t, and in this case, that also includes retail.
At the rate that it’s being used, a business could recoup their cost in a year if we still had the old hardware prices. OpenAI literally bought wafers and are just sitting on them, I don’t get why there isn’t a lawsuit already.
Same for all the danger talk and copyright lawsuits. Sam Altman loves that he only has to pay a few hundred million for a monopoly, they have 1 billion a month in revenue [edited, I was counting all users and not just paying users], it’s a drop in the bucket.
And sure, open models won’t disappear from the internet, but their use in a business context is tied to these lawsuits. We are heading towards half of our economy being forced into subscription services. Most of the lawsuit money goes straight to shareholders instead of the actual content creators too (the book one being a notable exception tho). It drives me nuts.
Hoping for your best case too tho. Fingers crossed.
It’s seven trillion dollars. That is gonna need a lot of return on investment not to crack the economy like an egg.
yeah, i wish we were getting fast trains instead.
What are the sources for those numbers? They seem wildly inflated.
In absolute numbers, this corresponds to 6 billion people, up from 5.8 billion in 2024
https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-internet-use/
Saying 2/3s of all people with Internet access are using AI seems insane. As a general rule of thumb, I think it’s a pretty good idea to immediately discount any self-reported usage numbers from publicly-traded tech companies as they’ve been found to lie again and again.
Yea, I edited my comment. It was a shit source. I still stand by it being widespread though.
A lot of it is “widespread” because people are forced to use it at work. Hence, the hate.
My mom is not gonna be using that stuff. No one in their right mind will spend millions on a computer to run it at home. An affordable computer can’t run it. We don’t want to give our data to the people who can afford computers big enough to run it because they use our data against us. So it’s a stand-off. Either get us computers like before or fuck off with your intelligence pile of junk in my opinion.
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