this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
168 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

6835 readers
351 users here now

News community around technology, social media platforms, information technology and governmental policy surrounding it.

What doesn't fit here?

The core of the story has to be technology focused.


Post guidelines

Title formatPost title should mirror the news source title. If you don't like the title of article, look for an alternative source instead of editorializing it.
URL formatPost URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
[Opinion] prefixOpinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title. Opinion articles refer to articles that their publisher doesn't explictly endorse.
Country prefixCountry prefix can be added to the title with a separator (|, :, etc.) if the news is from a local publisher who doesn't clearly mention the country.


Rules

1. English onlyTitle and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original linkPost URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communicationAll communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. InclusivityEveryone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacksAny kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangentsStay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may applyIf something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.


Companion communities

!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip


Icon attribution | Banner attribution


If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 32 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm an old fart - I got my degree in CS in 1985, and I've been paying attention to the predictions and advancements in AI for a very long time. I have at least as much issue with the way people think and talk about it as the author, but probably less of an issue with it being called AI. Remember that for decades, the informal working definition of AI was "A computer doing anything that usually requires a human." So for ages, they said we'd have AI if a computer could read a page of printed text out loud in English. That seemed almost unattainable when it was first talked about, but now it's so trivial that no one would consider it AI.

People have tried to make definitions that are crisper than that, but few if any of those definitions requires anything we'd call "thinking." The frustrating thing is that the general public talks all the time about AI as if it's conscious . Even when we're talking about its flaws, we use words like "hallucinating," which is something only thinking beings can do.

To me, LLMs are the worst things because to so many people they seem like the are (or could be) thinking entities. They respond to questions in a lifelike manner and can construct (extrapolate?) somewhat novel responses. But they're also the least useful to us as a society. I'm much more interested in the Machine Learning applications for distilling gobs of data to develop new medicines or identify critical items in images that humans don't have the mental bandwidth for. But LLMs get all the press.

[–] krunklom@lemmy.zip 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No arguments to what you wrote.

I'd add that llms are increasingly the only way I can find useful technical information on anything anymore.

Of course this is solving a problem that shouldn't fucking exist in the first place, and I still need to take that information back to a search engine to verify it and do actual research, which may be the point.

......

Search is so. Fucking. Broken.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 10 points 8 months ago

I honestly never look at the AI results because they're so flawed so often. I don't have an awful lot of problems finding answers to things with a standard search and then scrolling past any sources that are often crap. Worth noting, by the way, that search results, especially Google's, were way more accurate several years ago, before there were so many sponsored results and they had agendas to push. So technologically, it's a fixable situation, it's just the enshitificaiton problem.

[–] 87Six@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not that I'm taking a dig, but what are you looking for that only Ai can find it?

[–] krunklom@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's less about only being able to find it with ai but more about being able nail down definitions and understand the relationships between concepts well enough to know what to actually search for online.

This applies to anything remotely technical. Search results produce hot fucking garbage and the only way to find what you're looking for these days is to know exactly what you're looking for before you search. And even then it's a crapshoot whether you'll surface anything useful.

[–] 87Six@lemmy.zip 1 points 8 months ago

Ahh I see what you mean. Yes, I run into that as well. Usually my first try is to search technical forums directly as opposed to google but AI can do the job as well.