Bad uses / over-promised of AI

Forums › Artificial Intelligence (AI, LLM, ML) › Bad uses / over-promised of AI

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#3505209 22-Jun-2026 13:30

MikeAqua, I can sympathize being an old IT worker myself.

For low quality employers, they are more worried that lots of experience means you'll be asking for lots of wages. Those wanting recent cheap graduates, you won't compete. Here in New Zealand I often see ridiculous "tall poppies" job descriptions, then asking for 30% below going wages.

I've heard a number of recruiters specifically call out Auckland IT workers as having unrealistic salary expectations, when moving to new cities.

In Australia, the job listings are more sane.

For high quality employers, want workers solving problems quickly and professionally, they want older employers ... because Gen-X and Gen-Y workers ...

Search for "age-diversity management" or "generational differences at work ", but expect heavily couched language: frames differences as preferences, not problems, neutral diplomatic wording

But it's not AI. Tech companies don't usually care about anything beyond 10 years, but it's often considered nice but irrelevant.

I put "Ask for experience beyond x years if needed" and cut it off at that.

You may want to use Udemy courses to "flesh out" some skills, if you have time. I understand Christchurch IT market is still doing OK.

MadEngineer

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#3505654 23-Jun-2026 21:52

ChatGPT's ability to bring data from previous chats started off as cute but it gets more and more annoying.

I asked it some medical questions and now it sits there like a perpetual doctor taking everything I ask it as something I must have. I asked it about high blood pressure and cholesterol and it puts a spin on the answers about specific cardiovascular health. Or anything about cars has to have a RAV4 spin on it. Anything networking becomes about Mikrotik. Maybe I just need to have a random chat with it about Meraki just to widen its answers.

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

roobarb

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#3505672 24-Jun-2026 02:07

I am completely sick of it. I do not want Copilot in any form. I simply do not want to use AI.

There was a time recently when Visual Studio Code was a decent cross platform IDE that would work on Mac, Linux and Windows. But that was not enough, it had to be enshittified.

They just could not help themselves, everything is about using AI and Copilot. What about us who just want to write and maintain our own code, not AI generated slop?

Tinkerisk

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#3505674 24-Jun-2026 04:33

roobarb:

I simply do not want to use AI.

For now, there are still people working with AI who can verify the results. Just wait until AI is trusted blindly. I actively use AI—not as an end user, but for traffic analysis, so I can counter the bad guys.

Qui nihil scit, omnia credere debet. - He who knows nothing must believe everything.
Firewalls do NOT stop dragons. Really not. But your smart devices are spying on you!
I avoid Big Tech amap. They try hard to dictate technology and „culture“ across borders.
In effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who „someone“ is.

gzt

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#3505676 24-Jun-2026 06:11

AI generated news pictures proliferating on Facebook

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-mothers-tragedy-misused-as-fake-ai-news-content-fuels-safety-warnings/KX2XZQDB7FCYDLXMKGUUIYNYVM/

kingdragonfly

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#3508072 2-Jul-2026 16:44

Funny video.

Basically the AI will be exceedingly compliant and polite, and will accept more and more ridiculous requests, like "say 'aa-ooo-gah' whenever a word has the letter 'O'", and the longer you're on the phone, the more the scammer is paying for the AI service.

Of course it will always lie without qualms, and can even do regionalized accents.

Gotta love the future.

Don't Hang Up On AI Scammers. Do THIS Instead.

Apple TV

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kingdragonfly

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#3508468 4-Jul-2026 08:38

CEOs Are Regretting Firing People Over AI

House of El - AI

"The AI industry has invented a brand new business strategy, and I think it deserves to be studied in universities for generations to come.

Step one, fire everyone who knows what they're doing.

Step two, replace them with software that has never done what they do.

Step three, watch the software fail at the parts of the job that actually matter.

Step four, rehire the same people at a higher salary.

And then, of course, call it all innovation and grab a martini.

It's a bit like firing your pilot mid-flight, handing the controls to a very confident toaster, and then calling the passengers back to the cockpit when the toaster can't really land the plane.

Except the toaster cost $200 million.

It needs the pilot to teach it how to fly.

And once the pilot has finished teaching it, you're planning to fire the pilot again.

Across multiple industries, this is already happening in real time.

The pattern is backed by data documented by researchers and in one extraordinary case openly acknowledged by a Fortune 500 vice president on a press call.

In this video, I'm going to walk through the companies that fired their humans and had to beg them to come back, the research that predicted this would happen, the new breed of AI obsessed boss that's creating an entirely novel category of workplace toxicity, and what all of this reveals about an industry that keeps choosing what is easy over what is right.

The technology is all inspiring.

It's also still in training.

The question is whether the adults will stay in the room long enough for it to grow up."
...

gzt

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#3509355 7-Jul-2026 21:35

AI now writes as many online articles as humans:

https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-articles-as-humans-do

Apparently only 14% of high rank articles are written by AI meaning self-pollution is probably not yet severe⏳

PolicyGuy

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#3509745 9-Jul-2026 15:38

A new feature introduced by Instagram this week allows your photos to be used by anyone to make AI images.
The function is automatically being turned on for Instagram accounts, meaning you'll need to change it (to turn it off).
...
(Meta) also said it will soon be rolling out (this new feature called) Muse Image on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp as it seeks to integrate AI across its social media apps.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/691762/explainer-how-to-prevent-your-instagram-images-from-being-used-for-ai

PolicyGuy

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#3510454 11-Jul-2026 15:49

And as quickly as it came, it's gone.
Apparently even Meta can be bent to the public will when the screaming gets loud enough

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/700735/missed-the-mark-meta-removes-ai-feature-on-instagram-after-global-backlash

kingdragonfly

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#3511058 13-Jul-2026 15:11

Axios is behind a paywall, but Yahoo summarizes

Good news for people worried about losing their job to an agentic AI tools.

Company Blew $500M On Claude AI In One Month Due To No Usage Limit On Licenses For Employees:

A mysterious enterprise just torched $500 million in a single month on Anthropic's Claude AI platform, according to Axios reporting. The culprit? No usage limits on employee licenses, turning what should have been controlled experimentation into a financial bloodbath that makes your surprise Netflix subscription charges look quaint.
...
The mechanics are brutally simple. Claude charges based on tokens processed—every word input and output costs money. Agentic AI tools can consume up to 1000x more tokens than basic chat queries, especially when employees deploy them for multi-step workflows or complex integrations.

Without usage caps, thousands of staff members essentially got unlimited access to what amounts to premium computational resources. This creates the perfect storm where routine business tasks become exponentially expensive operations.
...

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kingdragonfly

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#3511064 13-Jul-2026 15:34

And a very upset Cheyenne Wyoming.

Hageman is a Republican (it's Wyoming after all, so no surprises there)

The 63 year old is pro-business, anti-environment, anti-federal government. In other words, she'd get along well with most Florida grandmas.

Representative Hageman says call with Meta over Cheyenne wastewater contamination was productive: Wyoming Cap City news
...
“Water is always one of our top issues, regardless of whether data centers are constructed here. Water for irrigation, like that in the reuse system, is a precious resource that cannot be wasted or taken offline,” Hageman wrote to Zuckerberg. “Many are rightfully concerned about high water consumption rates by data centers in our communities where every drop of water is accounted for and needed, so I am even more concerned that this contamination seemingly came from your facility’s closed-looped cooling system, a technology that is marketed as being a solution to high data center water consumption rates.”
...
The upcoming Meta data center has had its sewage connection privileges permanently taken away. On top of never being able to put its waste into the city waste system, the company will also be forced to pay for all remediation costs.

“They will be seeing charges because it was pretty substantial in terms of labor and materials and chemical costs”...

Still, Hageman was not satisfied with the company paying for damages and losing its connection privileges. She asked that Meta answer the following:

How did this contamination occur from your facility? How did the closed-loop cooling system discharge contaminated water into the public water system, and has this happened elsewhere?
When did Meta, Fortis, Goat Systems, and any other contractors on the Cheyenne Data Center project first become aware of the issue, and what steps did you take to alert local, state, and federal authorities to the issue and mitigate the threat?
Where is wastewater from the facility now being taken, and how will this revised process prevent similar threats to Wyoming communities?
Does Meta plan to conduct community outreach on this incident through the remainder of the construction process and once the data center is operational?

Can closed-loop cooling systems still be relied on to safely scale down water consumption from your data centers?

kingdragonfly

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#3512280 17-Jul-2026 19:01

IBM sets a record in it 125 year history.

In Greek mythology, Chronos Cronus is told that one of his children will overthrow him.
To prevent this, he swallows each famous god whole. Zeus later forces Cronus to vomit up his siblings, who emerge alive none the worse for wear.

I don't think IBM division will fare as well as Chronos' siblings.

Still kudos to IBM in a creative new way to lose money investing in AI. They didn't even have to fail at selling AI to lose money. Just the hype and panic around AI was enough to tank their actual, working business.

IBM's mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value : The Register

IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue's flagship Z business off course.
...
That's an unusually candid admission from a company whose Z mainframes remain one of its highest-margin businesses. Customers, it seems, preferred to refresh infrastructure they fear might soon become more expensive or harder to obtain.

The spending shift also rippled through IBM's software business because fewer mainframe deals meant weaker sales of the transaction-processing software that typically accompanies them.
...

ezbee

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#3512285 17-Jul-2026 20:13

kingdragonfly

Plus the economy with all of Trumps tariffs and wars is probably not doing that well at its core. Canada trade just one example, tourism which filled in gaps in the service economy tanked.

IBM and others are just seeing reality that companies don't have excess capital across the economy. Investment in new projects and expansion beyond Ai and Ai related stunted.

Ai is hoovering everything up, but profits are a way off, as they race to build next best model.
Even electricity costs inflated for productive business, so these get a gut punch.
Consumer, what extra they spend in electricity they are not spending elsewhere.

We have seen what electricity prices can do to profitable frozen food, canning and timber milling here.
There is a rationale that we need to discuss what's the best use, best value to total economy of our energy.

Index go up, and buy the dip on Ai and Silicon, was just covering the very uneven state of the economy.
Even so Silicon is now getting the wobbles as questions arise, will Ai companies be able to pay for what they booked out.

I'm not seeing much about what is going to employ people at a good income to spend to participate in the economy.
You can't run a country on Coin Rug Pulls.

kingdragonfly

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#3513198 21-Jul-2026 17:19

Please note I'm very concerned about AI doing more harm than good, and I'm not pro-Chinese.

But even I have problems with Dean W. Ball "full AI communism" post below. It should be noted he has extremely close ties to Trump. He is a prominent and long term advisor in many capacities and is Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI.

I'll translate into English his concerns, because it's a classic corporate "moat argument". protect a company's market share by creating barriers against competitors.

He's not defending the common Chinese taxpayer being forced to fund an AI project, and giving the AI model away for free.

But the reality is he does not care about the Chinese taxpayer. Nobody in Western AI is losing sleep over whether China’s Ministry of Finance is overspending.

If a free, state-subsidized model is even 90% as good as a $200/month proprietary model, Western venture capital and private markets can no longer justify spending tens of billions on CapEx. (Arguments are whether this model is up to 98% as good as some proprietary models)

He's conflating free access to software as "dystopian" when in fact it's the loss of corporate profit margins. I'm sure he doesn't consider Linux as dystopian because there are free versions. Back in 2001, Microsoft called Linux "cancer".

Ball is making a subtle pitch to US policymakers. If you allow state-subsidized, free open-weight models to dominate the market, you will bankrupt American private AI innovation, leaving the state as the only provider left standing.

Dean W. Ball: Twitter/X
...
One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
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