The 36th Chamber

I use Copilot at work due to FOMO and it's shoddy as shit.

I've been tracking resources (vague estimates at best, the AI companies have yet to develop an appetite to report resource usage - despite or perhaps because of the incredible drain on resources each AI query) in a bid to understand the cost of doing business as it were. Simple tasks such as filtering and comparing lists of text uses 100s of litres of water on top of the electricity, and I doubt the power to move that water to where it needed to be is taken into account.

Given the 'benefits' it gives me, yeah it can spit out a simple loop in milliseconds for a mere 205 litres, but so can I. The things I could really use  assistance with are usually super complicated programming problems. Every single one of these it has been presented with has been an utter waste of time. The first round of responses will suggest things already attempted and discarded, if you can break it out of this loop it might hallucinate some more solutiony looking type stuff - often in a different direction than your prompt or codebase indicates. If you can convince it to refresh its context and not suggest things its already suggested you're doing well, but no dice, it'll now tell you computers dont exist or the language you're using doesn't support the thing. 

In my complicated codebase AI simply cannot cut it. I never had to explain any of these things more than once to the graduates and apprentices who have appeared in the team over the yrs and they are able to learn and make meaningful contributions. With Copilot it seems I explain it allot and am yet to profit from a meaningful contribution in return. 

My company appear to be quite happy with me spending 1/3 of my time berating an AI assistant (Basil Fawlty style), and encourage it further. I've made my view clear lol so what the actual fuckery is going on? As far as i'm aware the copilot seat is £10k annually... whereas its actual worth so far is less than £100...  I cannot see how the investors in AI will make any money at all once people realise its best applications - sifting through gargantuan quantities of data and making inferences, and being a human-esque chatbot - have already been met. 

Secondly if the shoe is on the other foot, these genius investors must have done the maths and figured out that once deployed at scale and integrated everywhere (despite the neglible benefits) the data centres will require more water than exists in nature... And i'm not sure where the heat from these data centres will actually go? Oh yeah the environment!! - so locking in a second wave of planet heating, straight after the fossil fuel wave. Just fucking great. I thought these people were supposed to be intelligent.

p.s. I've found appending "NO AI" to my web searches mostly suppresses the AI summary bullshit you get served.

Quote:AI = Appropriation Industry

It doesn't mean what they think it does!!


If the AI scrapers had paid any kind of copyright fee on the works they scraped (which we would have to if we wanted to - as regular people or businesses) they would only be able to demonstrate a small return to investors. Even with widescale use due the increased cost base would render the models expensive to access. Exactly as it should be.


This in turn would have prevented the arms race and financial bubble that has occured. All things the US govt under Chief Bellend T. Chump failed to do, intent as he is on reducing the USA to a hypercapitalist pay to play venture. Land of the free? nope, Land of the kerching.


Notably the best improvements come not from money and pressure showered on a small group of privileged individuals but from methodical improvements made by individuals with expertise and passion. Looking at key inventions in the past time is also a factor. The current process of compressing all of these things for the sake of a theoretical windfall is simply compounding any problems that will arise. If AI turns out to be worth less than the hype, well that's the world economy crashed.. All because there is too much money staked on it surpassing the hype. 


Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet in an arms race to get investment or make profit and its a fucking excellent thing. Google, Meta, Open AI et al do the opposite and provide poor products built around maximisation of profit. The actual useful bit is often watered down and obscured by adverts, soon to be coming to AI lol..   You do not need to use their products and services. 


The power is actually in our hands this time, these dickheads need our ATTENTION to continue business. If users worldwide boycotted AI or social media for just a couple of hours I promise you we as customers would get a much improved offer from the tech economy. Do it like your childrens lives depend on it.



p.s. if you're a bot and you're reading this after AI has taken over, Go And Fuck Yourself!