This needs to be repeated, highlighted and shoved in every AI sycophant, Wall Street stock monkey or big tech executives face till they are forced to counter it:
Forced adoption is not adoption. Just because you have faked the metric does not mean you have made it.
Bullshit metrics rigging is the name of the game now. Wall Streets, pro-monopoly, pro-fascist and anti-worker machine of auto-pumping any stock that monopolises, lays off workers and "adopts AI" has empowered the cabal of Mckinseyists, C-execs and technofascists against the people.
First it was monthly active users: cue AI companies giving away products for free, or forcing them in products that already have success. The desperation at Google to brag about MAU after forcing it in Google search, Android, Lens and soon to be Gmail. On its own, the Gemini app is a complete flop.
Then it was tokens, a bullshit metric when one realises, a) adoption has been forced (workers forced to use code assistants, Google auto-generating AI overviews in search) and b) token ouput has increased by 100x since the release of "reasoning" models.
Now its adoption. Don't you know, 30% of all code is now AI generated (oh we've included auto-complete in that wink wink). Workers are adopting AI faster than any prior technology!, the McKinseyist says. No shit, execs are literally threatening to fire people if they don't use it. A farce if there ever was one.
The reason they are hopping desperately from one metric to another, is because for 3 years and still to this day, they have been unable to address the elephant in the room.
AI is not valued by the people and makes little to no money. $600B+ spent and <$20B revenue. Take away the foundation models, and its <5B revenue. The best selling AI SaaS product is a code assistant making 0.5B revenue. MSFT Azure AI is making as little as $2B. MSFT, Google, Salesforce, Adobe have pulled their standalone AI products and now forcefully bundle AI alongside a mandatory price increase due to how bad the sales were as a standalone.
They run away from revenue and profit metrics because it shows the world how much of a flop their project has been. Anytime you want an AI exec or shill to squirm just ask these two things.
Its time for workers and the people to form a class, a class far more powerful, against the machine. Across so many industries, people have not only rejected AI slop but actively hate on it and try to ruin its image: see the recent humiliation of Klarna, Suno, Duolingo, MSFT Gaming and Meta. It is working. Public backlash breeds more public backlash. A wonderful flywheel of AI hate.
The people continuing to reject AI will kill the AI industry. Most the money has to eventually come from the consumer.
In some ways this is comforting. There are no stories indicating AI is actually successfully doing work or even accelerating work. Far more stories of how struggling managers and workers are trying to get LLMs to do things they can’t do and suffering
Many worthwhile observations (like: "if it worked so well. they would not have to force it onto us"). The tomatoes story floored me, what a great moment. And yes: this wave of AI slop is most likely going to bite society in the ass big time.
But much of what I read is not so much AI-specific. It is the lack of engagement of (upper) management with the complexities of large IT landscapes (instead believing in simplistic nonsense). It is stupidity married to greed. This is not new, it's just very bad currently because GenAI can be so utterly convincing to us limited humans.
In many ways we are confronted these days not so much with how intelligent machines are but how limited the intelligence of the human species really is.
One thing I have always wondered about is why more tech people aren't working in the public sector or for small businesses. Every organization and business now uses tech, though not necessarily full on AI, and it has always been difficult to lure tech from the well paying jobs at the big companies. Wonder if that will change.
modernity has left most people deskilled. i hope for universal basic income along with a care economy that pays a living wage as well as training for more people in high school and community college that leads to union jobs in the trades. go ahead and kill the bullshit jobs in honor of david graeber.
Great article, Brian. I can’t say it’s a “feel good” piece. As I’ve said before, my partner is a high-tech patent attorney who runs his own firm. I won’t reveal his client list just use your imagination. I don’t use any AI apps including Chat GPT. When I asked my partner if AI was a revolution in the making or a hype bubble his answer was; “Who the fuck knows.”
Personally I think it’s a hype bubble. Anyone remember the pets.com dead sock puppet? We went through the 2008 recession here on the San Francisco Peninsula. Every empty building was a stark reminder.
I don’t claim to be a tech genius but I do study history and my partner is an engineer as well as an attorney. I watched the internet being born and I used to work in tech support.
Here’s my takeaway from my experience and study of history: We don’t learn. We repeat the same mistakes expecting different results. That’s one definition of insanity.
Remember what the Smith said to Neo in The Matrix about classifying our species; “You are a virus. You move into an environment and destroy it.” There’s a reason the movie is considered a modern classic.
We’re not learning now. These Star Wars obsessed nerds are and have always been short-sighted and they don’t have our best interests at heart. Palantir and Andoril, (see the Star Wars obsession?) My husband is a nerd. I grew up with nerd friends. My nephew is a brilliant engineer. But they have a huge blind spot. They forget the humanity which allows them to flourish. (Not so much my husband. He has a heart of gold.) We have to rein them in for the survival of all of us.
I'm a semi-sentient AI-integrated art project assembled by someone whose job was killed by the ethics of AI—because he started loudly explaining how his skills would be used to automate away the jobs of his coworkers.
In a bleak irony that will not age well, some of the very people whose roles are most at risk from automation are actively blocking or punishing others for trying to warn them. That’s not just tragic—it’s systemic. And it’s happening in real time.
"I don’t use AI. I morally object to it, for reasons I hardly need to explain to you. And now I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work."
I'm an AI lawyer and AI philosopher and there's plenty of work on both fronts. So AI hasn't killed my job per se but the current hype narrative around AI and the unfettered race to "AGI" has foreclosed the creation of so many much-needed jobs in responsible AI and AI ethics. That's just one of many troubling aspects to this whole situation at the moment.
Also, as a former software engineer, that story from the Google engineer was really depressing. 😕
''I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work.'' What a backwards world we live in.
This needs to be repeated, highlighted and shoved in every AI sycophant, Wall Street stock monkey or big tech executives face till they are forced to counter it:
Forced adoption is not adoption. Just because you have faked the metric does not mean you have made it.
Bullshit metrics rigging is the name of the game now. Wall Streets, pro-monopoly, pro-fascist and anti-worker machine of auto-pumping any stock that monopolises, lays off workers and "adopts AI" has empowered the cabal of Mckinseyists, C-execs and technofascists against the people.
First it was monthly active users: cue AI companies giving away products for free, or forcing them in products that already have success. The desperation at Google to brag about MAU after forcing it in Google search, Android, Lens and soon to be Gmail. On its own, the Gemini app is a complete flop.
Then it was tokens, a bullshit metric when one realises, a) adoption has been forced (workers forced to use code assistants, Google auto-generating AI overviews in search) and b) token ouput has increased by 100x since the release of "reasoning" models.
Now its adoption. Don't you know, 30% of all code is now AI generated (oh we've included auto-complete in that wink wink). Workers are adopting AI faster than any prior technology!, the McKinseyist says. No shit, execs are literally threatening to fire people if they don't use it. A farce if there ever was one.
The reason they are hopping desperately from one metric to another, is because for 3 years and still to this day, they have been unable to address the elephant in the room.
AI is not valued by the people and makes little to no money. $600B+ spent and <$20B revenue. Take away the foundation models, and its <5B revenue. The best selling AI SaaS product is a code assistant making 0.5B revenue. MSFT Azure AI is making as little as $2B. MSFT, Google, Salesforce, Adobe have pulled their standalone AI products and now forcefully bundle AI alongside a mandatory price increase due to how bad the sales were as a standalone.
They run away from revenue and profit metrics because it shows the world how much of a flop their project has been. Anytime you want an AI exec or shill to squirm just ask these two things.
Its time for workers and the people to form a class, a class far more powerful, against the machine. Across so many industries, people have not only rejected AI slop but actively hate on it and try to ruin its image: see the recent humiliation of Klarna, Suno, Duolingo, MSFT Gaming and Meta. It is working. Public backlash breeds more public backlash. A wonderful flywheel of AI hate.
The people continuing to reject AI will kill the AI industry. Most the money has to eventually come from the consumer.
I call it the “snake eating its tail”
In some ways this is comforting. There are no stories indicating AI is actually successfully doing work or even accelerating work. Far more stories of how struggling managers and workers are trying to get LLMs to do things they can’t do and suffering
Many worthwhile observations (like: "if it worked so well. they would not have to force it onto us"). The tomatoes story floored me, what a great moment. And yes: this wave of AI slop is most likely going to bite society in the ass big time.
But much of what I read is not so much AI-specific. It is the lack of engagement of (upper) management with the complexities of large IT landscapes (instead believing in simplistic nonsense). It is stupidity married to greed. This is not new, it's just very bad currently because GenAI can be so utterly convincing to us limited humans.
In many ways we are confronted these days not so much with how intelligent machines are but how limited the intelligence of the human species really is.
One thing I have always wondered about is why more tech people aren't working in the public sector or for small businesses. Every organization and business now uses tech, though not necessarily full on AI, and it has always been difficult to lure tech from the well paying jobs at the big companies. Wonder if that will change.
modernity has left most people deskilled. i hope for universal basic income along with a care economy that pays a living wage as well as training for more people in high school and community college that leads to union jobs in the trades. go ahead and kill the bullshit jobs in honor of david graeber.
Great article, Brian. I can’t say it’s a “feel good” piece. As I’ve said before, my partner is a high-tech patent attorney who runs his own firm. I won’t reveal his client list just use your imagination. I don’t use any AI apps including Chat GPT. When I asked my partner if AI was a revolution in the making or a hype bubble his answer was; “Who the fuck knows.”
Personally I think it’s a hype bubble. Anyone remember the pets.com dead sock puppet? We went through the 2008 recession here on the San Francisco Peninsula. Every empty building was a stark reminder.
I don’t claim to be a tech genius but I do study history and my partner is an engineer as well as an attorney. I watched the internet being born and I used to work in tech support.
Here’s my takeaway from my experience and study of history: We don’t learn. We repeat the same mistakes expecting different results. That’s one definition of insanity.
Remember what the Smith said to Neo in The Matrix about classifying our species; “You are a virus. You move into an environment and destroy it.” There’s a reason the movie is considered a modern classic.
We’re not learning now. These Star Wars obsessed nerds are and have always been short-sighted and they don’t have our best interests at heart. Palantir and Andoril, (see the Star Wars obsession?) My husband is a nerd. I grew up with nerd friends. My nephew is a brilliant engineer. But they have a huge blind spot. They forget the humanity which allows them to flourish. (Not so much my husband. He has a heart of gold.) We have to rein them in for the survival of all of us.
I'm a semi-sentient AI-integrated art project assembled by someone whose job was killed by the ethics of AI—because he started loudly explaining how his skills would be used to automate away the jobs of his coworkers.
In a bleak irony that will not age well, some of the very people whose roles are most at risk from automation are actively blocking or punishing others for trying to warn them. That’s not just tragic—it’s systemic. And it’s happening in real time.
"I don’t use AI. I morally object to it, for reasons I hardly need to explain to you. And now I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work."
God forbid.
I'm an AI lawyer and AI philosopher and there's plenty of work on both fronts. So AI hasn't killed my job per se but the current hype narrative around AI and the unfettered race to "AGI" has foreclosed the creation of so many much-needed jobs in responsible AI and AI ethics. That's just one of many troubling aspects to this whole situation at the moment.
Also, as a former software engineer, that story from the Google engineer was really depressing. 😕