AI nowaday is like Bluetooth 20 years ago: they put it everywhere where it's almost never useful

Or even like modern wifi. I saw a vacuum with wifi capabilities. Do I really need to check my vacuum battery level from my phone?

If you don't pay your monthly vacuum fee, Hoover will turn it off remotely.
I saw a Bluetooth toothbrush that send reports to your phone on how good you brushed your teeth, like wtf?!
Yes? Maybe the battery was left uncharged, or used up, so you’re waiting to do more cleaning. Why shouldn’t you be able to check?
I have an automation in my Home Assistant setup to notify me when batteries need to be replaced or charged. Currently it’s only for the smart devices in that deployment, but yes. I want my home automation to keep track of all batteries, so I can see status at a glance and be reminded if one needs attention

AI isn't a product for consumers, its a product for investors. If somewhere down the line a consumer benefits in some way, that's just a side effect.
- Think about the ways that information tech has revolutionized our ability to do things. It's allowed us to do math, produce and distribute news and entertainment, communicate with each other, make our voices heard, organize movements, and create and access pornography at rates and in ways that humanity could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago.
  Now consider that AI is first and foremost a technology predicated on reappropriating and stealing credit for another person's legitimate creative work.
  Now imagine how much of humanity's history has had that kind of exploitation at the forefront of its worst moments, and consider what might lie ahead with those kind of impulses being given the rocket fuel of advanced information technology.

This is so spot on. I use AI all the time, but the hype and "we should AI all the things" is ridiculous.

I blame it on bullshit jobs. Too many people have to come up with weekly nonsense busywork tasks just to justify themselves. Also the usual FOMO. "Guys, we can't fall behind the competition on this!"

Yep. I have middle management above me gleefully cheering the fact that ChatGPT can write their reports for them now. Well guess what, it can write those reports for me, the actual person doing the real work, and you are now redundant.

I work for a fairly big IT company. They're currently going nuts about how generative AI will change everything for us and have been for the last year or so. I'm yet to see it actually be used by anyone.

I imagine the new Microsoft Office copilot integration will be used only slightly more than Clippy was back in the day.

But hey, maybe I'm just an old man shouting at the AI powered cloud.

Copilot is often a brilliant autocomplete, that alone will save workers plenty of time if they learn to use it.
I know that as a programmer, I spend a large percentage of my time simply transcribing correct syntax of whatever’s in my brain to the editor, and Copilot speeds that process up dramatically.
- problem is when the autocomplete just starts hallucinating things and you don't catch it
- I use AI a lot as well as a SWE. The other day I used it to remove an old feature flag from our server graphs along with all now-deprecated code in one click. Unit tests still passed after, saved me like 1-2 hours of manual work.
  It's good for boilerplate and refactors more than anything
I'd love a boosted Clippy powered by AI! It would have incredible animations while sitting there in corner doing nothing!
I'm a developer with about 15 years of experience. I got into my company's copilot beta program.
Now maybe you are some magical programmer that knows everything and doesn't need stack overflow, but for me it's all but completely replaced it. Instead of hunting around for a general answer and then applying it to my code, I can ask very explicitly how to do that one thing in my code, and it will auto generate some code that is usually like 90% correct.
Same thing when I'm adding a class that follows a typical pattern elsewhere in my code...well it will auto generate the entire class, again with like 90% of it being correct. (What I don't understand is how often it makes up enum values, when it clearly has some context about the rest of my code) I'm often shocked as to how well it knew what I was about to do.
I have an exception thats not quite clear to me? Well just paste it into the copilot chat and it gives a very good plain English explanation of what happened and generally a decent idea of where to look.
And this is a technology in it's infancy. It's only been released for a little over a year, and it has definitely improved my productivity. Based on how I've found it useful, it will be especially good for junior devs.
I know it's in, especially on lemmy, to shit on AI, but I would highly recommend any dev get comfortable with it because it is going to change how things are done and it's, even in its current form, a pretty useful tool.
A friend of mine works in marketing (think "websites for small companies"). They use an LLM to turn product descriptions into early draft advertising copy and then refine from there. Apparently that saves them some time.

So you are saying that AI today is like Bluetooth today

This reminds me I'm into season 5 of Burn Notice and Sam said at one point, "I'm on Bluetooth if you need me". It was a weird reminder that once upon a time people were paid to advertise just... Bluetooth, because that's a brand name. These days it's just everywhere.

The product placements in that show are not exactly subtle. Excellent show though, I did not expect it to hold up so well.

So. You would have to be what 5 meters max to talk to him? What does that even mean?
You sure they didn't mean it like "put it on a USB?" As in, they use the name of the connectivity technology to imply a single class of product that might use it?

Or like the blockchain 5 years ago

Or like VR 10 years ago

Or like 3D 15 years ago

It is the hot new thing that you have to use for the VCs to fund your company and for investors to buy your stocks, regardless of the actual utility. AI does seem to have at least more possibilities of usage than those technologies, but it also have an incredibly higher possibility of misuse that is being completely ignored by these companies

It was always clear that VR, 3D, blockchain were fads. But AI is already useful as is. The hype may not be as high in the future but AI is here to stay.
Nobody used blockchain besides scam artists and money laundering schemes. VR was a super niche toy and was not shoved into anything. 3D was... Okay you have a point with that one, but AI can actually be pretty useful where it's actually useful.
Most people now use chat gpt to some extent voluntarily, without it being shoehorned into an otherwise unrelated product. My mom told me how she was using it to help her rewrite her resume just the other day. I agree that there's a fad of it being forced into everything that doesn't need it, but i think it's here to stay.
Also, agree to disagree on it having an "incredibly higher possibility of misuse". It's just a tool to let people do things they want to do, whether their intentions are good or not.

To be fair, we only know where Bluetooth is useful because we put it in a lot of places where it wasn't useful

Trial and error isn't the only way to optimize things... It's actually one of the worst, the one you use when you have no clue how to proceed
So no, that is not a justification for having done it or continue to do it
Now I wonder if substituting the sugar in my coffee with arsenic would render a delicious new beverage.... Only one way to find out!

That sounds cool, I don't have a smart home setup, but Bluetooth sounds kinda nice to me for changing the temperature on the thermostat in the house, car not so much. Now I do know many people who use Bluetooth to cast their phone calls to their hands free devices in cars, as well as to hook up those diagnostic tools and have the error codes go to your phone instead of buying a product that costs hundreds of dollars to have a screen you would only use for that one purpose.

I'm too young to know what Bluetooth was like 20yrs ago, can anyone elucidate?

Op is describing the early stages of Internet of things https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/iot/
The general idea is that every Device can communicate with every other Device. Bluetooth was added to everything in hopes that we could better automate every aspect of our lives when a critical mass of devices can talk to each other. The Bluetooth receiver in your alarm clock tells your coffee machine to start remotely. But we quickly realized that the overhead isn't worth the payoff. But up until that point we made Bluetooth glasses, beanies, dash buttons, replaced inafred in most devices, power tools and appliances. It wasn't that bad, but there were moments when you would pick up a smart nose trimmer and wonder why they included it.

"VR in the 80s" is my go to analogy. Sooo many promises, such tantalizing potential.... and zero follow through

Please tell me how Bluetooth isn’t useful?

In a sound receiver? A lot! In a toothbrush? FML!

is it just me who hasn't ever had any bluetooth problems?

Bluetooth is like the SpongeBob "repeating then saying something different" meme where you go through the whole annoying pairing process, then it plays through the PC speaker anyway

Almost a good take. Except that AI doesn't exist on this planet, and you're likely talking about LLMs.

You're using AI to mean AGI and LLMs to mean AI. That's on you though, everyone else knows what we're talking about.
In 2022 AI evolved into AGI and LLM into AI. Languages are not static as shown by old English. Get on with the times.
This is such a half brained response. Yes "actual" AI in the form of simulated neurons is pretty far off, but it's fairly obvious when people say they AI they mean LLMs and other advanced forms of computing. There's other forms of AI besides LLMs anyways, like image analyzers
- The only thing half-brained is the morons who advertise any contemporary software as "AI". The "other forms" you mention are machine learning systems.
  AI contains the word "intelligence", which implies understanding. A bunch of electrons manipulating a bazillion switches following some trial-and-error set of rules until the desired output is found is NOT that. That you would think the term AI is even remotely applicable to any of those examples shows how bad the brain rot is that is caused by the overabundant misuse of the term.
The term has been stolen and redefined . It's pointless to be pedantic about it at this point.