This article’s title is ridiculous. What do you mean ‘why don’t normal people use agentic AI?’ Were they supposed to?
We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren’t paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics… They’re practically engaging in a boycott.
I know quite a few people who have bought into agents 100%. Its wild to hear them talk about letting an agent run for days on their personal computer, grinding away on some task. The way they talk about it, you would think they were babysitting a child or something.
What do they use them for? I have played with it a little out of curiosity, even got an LLM running on my phone until it got stuck in an endless loop spewing nonsense. Not touched agents yet.
I haven’t really found much use for LLMs yet beyond rewording or summarising text and even that is rarely worth the effort of loading it up.
Its mostly used for building large software projects or doing online research into some topic. They will use the LLM to create an outline of the work to do, the let agents figure out how to to all those steps, and how to check if the answer is correct or not.
Looked up some suggested uses as first projects and they sound so boring and useless. Smart home stuff, no thanks. Manage personal finances and budgets, don’t need tools for that let alone AI powered ones. Email, I don’t want to use email in the first place.
I mean this is quite biased article. My dad is the most basic user ever. Lately he’s thriving just using the simple google ai results and ai features in word. It’s fucking surreal to me a 76 year old man suggesting me to use ai and he says that it made his life way easier.
Ai is a tool. Hating or loving a tool is just fanboyism. Its no different than worshipping (or hating) photoshop.
I think there were already some research findings, how software developers tend to drastically overestimate how much AI helped them, while AI was actually hindering their productivity. It could be the same case here.
What AI is really good at is spitting out plausible sounding garbage, pretending it did some comprehensive research on the topic, and making people feel like it’s helpful without neccessarily being so.
Yeah its a great tool if your work is based on regressive data. What people think it can progressively develop new things and invent. Which I highly doubt it’ll be anything like that any time.
I see ai like Xbox Kinect. When it was first released it was like future of everything. Now we use it for Face ID. We just need the bubble to pop so companies can actually develop for the good of humanity
Except that the damage it’s causing, just so someone can avoid reading a little, goes waaaay beyond a matter of opinion.
I do genuinely think AI is soulless and that alone is enough, but entirely separate of that its implementation is nothing but environment destroying, health fucking, brain sucking, garbage being used to spy on people. It’s all the bad shit that ever Cyberpunk and adjacent media ever has been warning against with none of the cool stuff.
Also it is definitely different than hating photoshop but if that’s where you’re at I’m going to save myself the anyeurism trying to explain it.
I’ve never wanted to punch a word in the face until the word “agentic” started popping up everywhere.
I refuse to even pronounce it correctly.
“ajanteek” is probably what I’d say if I was forced to utter such unspeakable trash
Don’t these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?
It’s difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.
To me, it’s not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.
Other employees are so incompetent (you know how incompetent your co workers are) that agents are producing better work and making fewer mistakes than they would on their own. The fact is, for most people, the mistakes it makes are no different than people mistakes.
I’m the other fence. My daily reporting has 12-15 documents output, that I then previously had to spend 3-5 hours moving this item over to this form, and that item over to that form, and management wants everything to be kept locked PDF so no excel macros can be used… upload everything to claude, let it run. Sure… sure, itll make errors here and there… but no one actually checks what these documents pop out… only that they’re there. And that alone, has cut my workload by half. So, thanks AI for giving me my time back, and thanks boomer bosses, for not knowing how to do basic computer tasks badly enough they will never figure it out!
Using AI to complete bullshit work tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Yep, I know that feeling very well.
Had loads in my last job. I could spend a few hours and struggle to fill in a few sentences for this bullshit form HR keep sending us, or I could ask ChatGPT to write the most obviously generic corpospeak crap that for some reason people like and are even impressed when I say that I used AI for it. Am I the only one that feels like it shows that the task is pointless?
Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. “All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait…” While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.
When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. “Don’t say anything, and eventually you’ll be put through.”
Yes, I’m a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank’s human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.
(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn’t a complete bust…)
I want AI agents to just go the fuck away!
I wonder if it’s more like VR.
People don’t like losing control over their technology in reality.
People want to retain control over their technology, like it’s a tool.
Virtual reality removes awareness and agency in the real world.
Same as agents do.
What does this have to do with VR? VR doesn’t remove anything, it’s just a fancy monitor.
a fancy monitor that makes like 1/3 of the people who view it throw up.
Naive question here. If I use ChatGPT or whatever to enhance my resume, do these programs data collect my resume/personal info ?
If you’re concerned about data retention, you’d want to select an inference provider that is listing ‘ZDR’ (zero data retention) as a feature.
For example, a lot of the Chinese open weight models have become quite capable and because their weights are available end up like generic vs brand name medicine where there’s multiple providers serving them with different production conditions.
Because enterprise use will often be worried about data retention or sending data to China, the alternative providers usually offer things like US-only inference or zero data retention.
If you’re not going to use it all that often, a la carte API use is going to be way cheaper than a subscription, probably better results than a free plan with a closed model provider, and give you more control over the process.
yes. if you still feel the need to do this, sanitize your inputs. strip it of all personal data. don’t upload the whole file with metadata, paste the scrubbed text that you want rewritten in with the prompt.
just assume yes
google has been found keeping information on you that they explicitly said they wouldn’t. I can’t recall the specifics. but apply that to any megacorp like this
Almost certainly.
They don’t have to, since it’s not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.
They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that’s not their business model at the moment, but it’s probably finding it’s way into the next version in some capacity.
AI is incredible for research and development. The power it gives you as a software developer is unreal. Outside of that, I really don’t like it.
At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.
Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.
All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.
Fundamentally, they cost way, way too much to run. LLMs are useful tools (I use them a bit for data analysis and coding help) and the people who use them for that kind of thing might pay the full cost in some form (not as individuals but their companies might). But they’re trying to push them into everything and people who can’t think for themselves and want them to help them write emails and such are not going to foot the bill. Not even close.
I think they’ve realised that forcing universal adoption is the only way that this could work, to get everyone hooked on it then jack up the prices. But regular consumers will never, ever be the ones paying the enormous costs of LLMs. Even companies will start to realise that there is no point paying huge amounts just for everyone to be able to outsource writing emails and basic tasks to LLMs. And short of any huge breakthrough, they are incapable of doing most jobs.
The edge case is software development, for the bog standard stuff I write at work it probably helps me get work done about 15%-30% faster and with costs of $200-$400 USD a month the math actually works out. At current prices anyway. Also the electricity costs of running open weight models is even cheaper and if there is a pop HW prices may make that an obvious choice too. The worst case IMO would be a slow boil of prices to recoup the unsustainable growth then a slow decline to wherever normal ends up. In that case everyone is left indignant.
I hold the opinion that if people talk about LLM’s instead of AI they are inherently more understanding of the tool and therefore more qualified to use it.
It’s not difficult to understand. This whole AI bubble is just a push to get enough people, a critical mass, over a threshold that they start paying for the usage. The Bubble was waiting for the money to run out which is what built the bubble. The money is running out and the subscriptions are ready for purchase.
Same as the internet infrastructure bubble in the dot com boom. Thing is, we use the infrastructure now, just took a decade or so.
The software development industry is ready to purchase subscriptions, but no other sectors it seems.
Maybe but even there there are limits on how much they will be willing to spend for junior level programming no matter how much of a ship fast fix broken methodology they adopt.
Replace politicans, CEOs and lawyers with AI first…
If all a President has to do is write stupid social media posts I think we found the best starting point
I’m still waiting to hear about the first board member LLM.
When someone proudly express their enthusiasm for AI, I immediately think less of that person.
Or defer to AI, when you ask them a quesiton that can be simply answered or even googled, that doesnt have a AI results. and ends up with a overcomplicated summary that leads to more questions.
Are they not using AI because they are normal, or are they normal because they aren’t using AI?
