It means they preach bullshit.

What society before us had AI, and how much more successful were they? Einstein didn’t need AI. Newton didn’t need AI. Oppenheimer didn’t need AI… The list goes on. Who does, other than the lazy and those who can’t think for themselves?

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn’t perform equally because you choose not to, and you’re fired.

So yeah… it’s crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

It’s a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic “peer pressure” technique. “Everyone’s doing it. You don’t want to be the only one who isn’t.”

They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They’re trying to promote its use because it doesn’t have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there’s so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don’t look at much new stuff anymore because of it.

You’ll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.

For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)

They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it’s just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.

The difference being we don’t actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it’s like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that “not using AI” would be like “not using electricity”. There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered “behind” the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I’m just asking the “wrong” questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I’m also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright “minefield” around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we’ve lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for “more compute”.

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be “falling behind”.

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I’m staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It’ll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I’m sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can’t define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.

People who say that don’t mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.

It really is that simple.

And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define “AI”. They can’t, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.

If you’re actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s

It’s widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.

If like you can’t drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.

It’s very similar to learning how to use a computer in 1995. I’m just old enough to remember meeting these people.

There is this thing, which, supposedly, can help you do your job better, it’s being pushed by management, and it is sometimes expensive, often confusing, and obsoletes the skills you spent years to acquire.

Fast-forward 30 years, and it’s very, very, very difficult to find people to talk to who still argue computing doesn’t belong in the workplace, and that using a computer isn’t essential for virtually all work.

The reason it is difficult to find these people, is because they were left behind.

I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.

Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were “left behind” because now almost all documentation is written digitally.