> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people.
Cannot state how off-putting this was as someone participating in this team activity. The talks I appreciated the most were the ones where people didn't have slides at all and talked off the cuff.
The confusion is this doesn't diminish the utility of AI as a tool by people that do care one bit. It only affects the people whose work is indistinguishable from low effort AI nonsense, while the others will get ever more conspicuously "authentic".
But yeah sometimes when I just need to deliver some asset to a customer I use AI to create it and lightly edit it, the result is ok but it's not great.
I share the disdain for AI built presentations, especially Claude has a signature look that is so tiring. I remember this phase when Office 2016 (?) came out and featured this "smart" diagram editor that let you create these cringe arrows, flowcharts etc. with bullet points, some people really got hooked on that and used it everywhere, the result was as cringeworthy as the AI presentations are. Eventually people lost interest and things got back to normal. AI might be different though.
That said I also generate presentation decks for my products with Claude using an HTML based workflow with proper print CSS using Weasyprint, where I use my own corporate identity and design practices from the web, the result looks really professional and pleasing (to me), customers also like it a lot. It doesn't really look like AI either as it's just good HTML and CSS with a print stylesheet. So there are ways of using it to make things better, but it also brings out the lazy side of people that don't care so much.
But now that one no longer needs to actually perform the mechanical deck building, how about spending that gained efficiency on ensuring quality of the output? Play it back at least once. Use that time savings to prep to deliver a killer talk.
As someone whose job heavily involves giving presentations and writing documents / spreadsheets, I am under tremendous pressure now to simply "output more stuff." AI has increased the amount of "stuff" co-workers are spewing out, and that's apparently what's being measured. I don't know if any of this "stuff" is being read, but my management seems only interested in volume of bits. So, slop it is.
Occasionally, I'm sure this stuff is getting read by a real human, and I apologize in advance if it's you. But incentives are unfortunately totally aligned towards producing mountains of slop.
> ...my management seems only interested in volume of bits
Whenever I hear this come up, my first question is "how are you matching that to revenue?" and you can see gears churning...
I think the early automobile had a huge share of haters as well?
My line of work: I deal with enterprise SaaS companies and I can see first hand that engineers are very slow moving with AI, very cautious, and still believe they need to review small PRs.
Do not, under any circumstances ever ask a question other than "gee golly sir, you sure are smart, how do I grow up to be like you".
It read the slide notes for the at the end of each "slide". He was asked to give the presentation himself and couldn't do it.
Is seeing that much AI crap being thrown at their product lineup actually appealing to anyone?
Just one person’s experience, but it wasn’t a positive one.
Oh, mercy. Do not read your slide deck to me. I can read it faster than you can read it out loud. While I'm doing that, say something that isn't on the slide.
I usually put almost no prose-type text on my presentations. Figures, captions for figures, equations, variable definitions, small code snippets, those are ok.
The only time I’d put prose on there is if it is a “main idea,” then I’ll do the thing where I read it word-for-word from the slide. But that’s got to be used sparingly enough that it sticks out as a weird moment that the audience is supposed to remember.
Thankfully, I got some good pointers and coaching from having worked at Apple and having done a number of WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) talks.
Before, at a certain FANG you definitely know, you had management making presentations they very obviously had never seen before, made by people who weren't at product meetings and so were extremely shallow about any project and had basic facts wrong ... and of course management can't answer questions about the slides.
I 100% get the complaint. But what does it have to do with AI?
In this team? Pre-AI, maybe 10% of the slides would be questionable. Post-AI? 90% of the slides were just "meh", broken animations (they never previewed it), and "uh, let me read that slide".
We're all managers now. So everyone can be that lazy.
I occasionally hang out with normal (non-tech) people. They're either agnostic to it or they love it. None hates it, unless they have some reason to think they're going to lose their job.
HN is that one place where I routinely hear negative sentiments about LLMs.
These topics attract different people, but same people can hold the two views that aren't necessarily in conflict - I am forced to use LLMs at work, and within the industry there is no alternative. I also derive a lot of benefit using it for personal projects. I would also be very wary of monetizing any of these personal projects due to being completely blind as to how/where the code used to train the models came from.. and I am surprised how slow the legal system has been to address this issue, it's the wild west at the moment.
I tried suggesting to one group who hated it that they could go to a nearby "PauseAI" protest, the reaction was mostly "Bah, they only want to pause it, not to end it!"
Everyone got the "use this or we will kill you" speech from management, while finding its actual usefulness (they aren't coders and weren't using it for code!) to be questionable vs the hype.
Further a lot of people got the "you better AI-max or-else" ultimatums in Q1 only to get the "you idiots why are you using so much AI this costs money" by Q2/Q3 whiplash.
https://blog.karliner.net/posts/chatgpt-and-the-velcro-test/
admittedly a bit old now, but...
Even if someone wants to deny this counts as "innovation", it sure isn't copying.
LLMs do not do math well and most of their calculations are quite false.
Copilot can’t even count to 20.
It does beg the question, though: what is creativity?
So much of many ostensibly "critical" thinkers were deluded by axiomatic prognostications that AI would never be able to pass some certain threshold of capability, and then move the goalposts on what AI will "never" be able to do once those thresholds are surpassed.
How can the author of this blog so confidently claim that a currently existing invention could never have been invented by AI in a counterfactual universe? Such a claim is fundamentally unfalsifiable, but is the bread and butter of the larger industry of "AI capabilities denialism" which acts as a salve against anxiety over AI's genuine capabilities. However living in a false reality eventually catches up with you.
We're starting to approach four digits of LLM-made mathematical papers, cybersecurity being almost entirely taken over by AI redteaming, initial forays into physics, biotech and pretty much every field... and we're going to use some dude prompting GPT-4 about Velcro to form the basis of an opinion? Even back then, using the word "never" was intellectually questionable at best.
The mantra of AI not innovating is getting pretty tired at this point. It's simply wrong as a matter of fact. If the goalpost has shifted so much that solving millenium prize problems is not "innovating", then the goal is no longer on the same continent.
Yes. For many days after the DeepSeek R1/V3 release in Jan/Feb 2025.
One of the big issues with silicon valley (or how I see it) is the lack of ability to look out side and ask why something is the way it is, before trying to slap technology on it.
The smell of money which distorts people's reality to carry on doing something that looks and sounds like a disaster, is too strong.
We're talking about adults here, let's not infantilize and remove agency from them. It's not reasonable to treat as an accident the repeated disruption of regulated industries with the "old laws don't apply because I added computers" playbook. Bad behavior absolutely demands repentance and punishment. To say otherwise is a massive moral hazard that guarantees more harm, failing to counter the "smell of money" with reasonable caution.
> smell of money
Seems like an obvious causal pathway to me.
But sure, let's talk about Humanity.
You may be right that AI needs it's linux moment, if that is to mean that it is quietly running in the background and nobody actually knows anything about it, the world is just magically better for them.
That isn't the future that is currently being sold though, and I don't see AI going in that direction.
AI has a lot of people who hate it, but it is neither wholly unpopular nor useless. ChatGPT has over 1.2 billions WAUs. There are millions of people who spend hours watching AI generated media. Demand for AI is universal in white-collar professions, as it automates a large portion of previously human-bottlenecked work. Pretty much every email I get now I assume comes from an API key, as the task of copywriting was abandoned readily once chatbots could do it for us faster and better.
Sure AI has a notable unpopularity among a certain subset of erudite, well-educated near-elite liberal types, but this is far from the global majority who are driving demand for the AI boom.
This tech is a certified failure and needs to be regulated out of existence (or pigeonholed into very specific niche use cases). The election confirms this.
AI was a mistake.