this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Fuck AI
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Alright I don’t like the direction of AI same as the next person, but this is a pretty fucking wild stance. There are multiple valid applications of AI that I’ve implemented myself: LTV estimation, document summary / search / categorization, fraud detection, clustering and scoring, video and audio recommendations... "Using AI” is not the problem, "AI charlatan-ing" is. Or in this guy’s case, "wholesale anti-AI stanning". Shoehorning AI into everything is admittedly a waste, but to write off the entirety of a very broad category (AI) is just silly.
I don't think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn't understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn't trust an AI summary for anything important.
Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in "population of london", i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don't want a guessing machine to tell me.
Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it's hard to take any of it seriously.
I guess this really depends on the solution you’re working with.
I’ve built a voting system that relays the same query to multiple online and offline LLMs and uses a consensus to complete a task. I chunk a task into smaller more manageable components, and pass those through the system. So one abstract, complex single query becomes a series of simpler asks with a higher chance of success. Is this system perfect? No, but I am not relying on a single LLM to complete it. Deficiencies in one LLM are usually made up for in at least one other LLM, so the system works pretty well. I’ve also reduced the possible kinds of queries down to a much more limited subset, so testing and evaluation of results is easier / possible. This system needs to evaluate the topic and sensitivity of millions of websites. This isn’t something I can do manually, in any reasonable amount of time. A human will be reviewing websites we flag under very specific conditions, but this cuts down on a lot of manual review work.
When I said search, I meant offline document search. Like "find all software patents related to fly-by-wire aircraft embedded control systems” from a folder of patents. Something like elastic search would usually work well here too, but then I can dive further and get it to reason about results surfaced from the first query. I absolutely agree that AI powered search is a shitshow.