Oh, no I get it. I went to Chile a few years ago and it made me realize how truly big the WhatsApp community was in South America. It was on billboards, buildings; itās become a necessity.
Funny enough, hereās a description of AI I wrote yesterday that I think youāll relate to:
AI is the lazy colleague that will never get fired because their dad is the CTO. Youāre forced to pair with them on a daily basis. You try to hand them menial tasks that they still manage to get completely wrong, while dear olā dad is gassing them up in every all-hands meeting.
AI as a concept is amazing, and some applications itās being used for are equally amazing. Itās the mainstream AI drivel that I fucking hate.
But thereās also these things that put me off:
the glaring lack of ethics behind the companies pushing it (Meta and Open AI for example) which is more a capitalism problem than anything
the fact that it was built on plagiarism without consulting with artists and authors (who probably wouldāve been open to the idea if it was presented with a level playing field)
the fact that it always hallucinates (I canāt get it to stop making up arbitrary bullshit no matter what I do)
the resources required and the stress it places on power grids and the environment (puts it out of reach for most end users since it requires a killer rig)
the massive shortage of GPUs and the huge price hike (which we can also thank crypto for)
The idea of being able to run smaller models locally is amazing and everyone should play around with them. I find it to be fun for toy apps and experimenting, but Iāve yet to see a single good use case from the multitude of companies using it (with the exception of cases like you mentioned).
I would be more open to the āyou donāt actually own your gamesā thing if I wasnāt being sold a digital thing that will definitely get pulled out of my hands at some point, for more than the cost of the physical copies we used to get ($70 minimum now, vs $40-50). And even in the case of The Crew, you got fucked regardless of having a physical copy or not.
I pay for GamePass knowing that I donāt own the games on there. Itās a subscription just like the Sega Channel was.
Online services going away is fine. Thatās been a thing thatās happened for years with other games. But the game should still remain playable in some fashion. If it becomes fully inaccessible at the end of life, customers have a legitimate reason to be upset.
Thereās what AI couldāve been (collaborative and awesome), and then thereās what the billionaire class is pushing today (exploitative shit that they hit everyone over the head with until they say they like it). But the folks frothing at the mouth over it are unwilling to listen to why so many people are against the AI weāve had forced upon us today.
Yesterday, Copilot hallucinated four different functions when I asked it to refactor a ~20 line TS function, despite me handing it 2 helper files that contained everything available for it to use. If I canāt confidently ask it to do anything, itās immediately useless to me. Itās like being stuck with an impulsive liar that you have to get the truth out of.
Now we need to figure out a handheld consumer version.